How to Read More Books This Year: A Practical Guide

I need to tell you something that might sound strange in a guide about reading more books: the number of books you read this year matters less than you think.

I spent two years chasing "52 books a year." I hit it once — fifty-three, realistically — and I remember almost none of them. They blurred together into a haze of half-absorbed plots and characters whose names I'd already forgotten by the time I logged the next title in Goodreads. The year I read fifteen books, slowly, with real attention? I can still tell you the sentence in Gilead where I had to put the book down and sit with what Marilynne Robinson had just done to me. That's the year my reading life actually started.

So this guide is a little contradictory. I want to help you read more, but I want to be honest: reading more only matters if you're reading in a way that means something to you. The strategies below work. They'll put more books in your hands and more pages behind you. But the real shift isn't about volume. It's about making reading so natural, so easy, so woven into your day that it stops feeling like a element you're trying to do and becomes a thing you simply are.

Skip the apps that gamify reading with badges and streaks. They turn books into chores. Books should never be chores.

For your reading lineup: Best Fantasy Books of 2026 and Best Audiobook Services Compared: Audible vs Libro.fm vs Others.

Step 1: Set a Goal That Actually Works

The most typical reading goal is likewise the most counterproductive: "I want to browse more." It's vague, unmeasurable, and gives you nothing to perform toward. Second most common is only slightly better: "I want to scan 52 books this year." That's measurable, but for most people, it's also unrealistic — and an unrealistic goal is worse than no goal at all, because it creates failure and guilt rather than momentum.

I think the whole "books per year" framework is broken, honestly. But if goals help you — and for some folks they genuinely do — a useful one has three qualities. It's specific adequate to track. It's modest sufficient to achieve. And it's flexible enough to survive the inevitable weeks when life gets complicated.

Start lower than you think you should. If you skim five books last year, set a goal of twelve — one a month. If you study none, aim for six. The point isn't to impress anyone. Build a streak that feels good to maintain. You can always raise the target later, and the psychological boost of exceeding a modest goal is far more motivating than the weight of falling short of an ambitious one.

Consider tracking pages or minutes instead of books. A 200-page novel and an 800-page epic aren't the same commitment, but both count as "one book." If you're reading something long and dense — or several — a pages-per-day or minutes-per-day target is more honest and more encouraging. Twenty pages a day sounds unambitious until you realize it adds up to roughly 7,300 pages a year, which is somewhere between twenty and forty books depending on length. And twenty pages, absorb with real attention, is a meaningful amount of reading.

Build in grace periods. Life will interrupt your reading. Illness, travel, function deadlines, family obligations, the simple human need to occasionally do nothing — all of these are real, and a reading goal that doesn't account for them is a reading goal that will make you feel bad for being human. Plan for forty-eight reading weeks instead of fifty-two, and expect certain weeks to be zero-page weeks. That's fine. Systems recover. You'll come back to the book.

Step 2: Find Your Reading Time

This connects to Reading Challenge Ideas That Actually Make You Read More.

"I don't have time to digest" is the objection almost everyone raises, and it's almost consistently more perception than reality. Most users have more available reading time than they think — it's merely occupied by things that feel automatic rather than chosen.

Audit your current time use. For one week, pay attention to how you spend the gaps in your day. Twenty minutes before sleep. Commute time. Lunch breaks. Waiting rooms. Time spent scrolling social media after you meant to put the phone down. None of these windows individually feels like ample time to read, but collectively they represent hours — and those hours are the foundation of a reading habit.

Anchor reading to an existing routine. The most reliable way to construct a new habit is to attach it to a habit you already have. Read during your morning coffee — here's a guide to creating a reading ritual with coffee that pairs nicely with this idea. Read during lunch. Read on the train. Read for fifteen minutes before bed instead of scrolling. Existing routines provide the trigger; reading fills the slot. You aren't finding new time. You're repurposing time that beforehand exists.

Protect at least one reading block. Having small reading windows throughout the day is great for accumulating pages, but having one dedicated block — even a concise one — is what makes reading feel like a practice rather than an afterthought. For many readers, this is the fifteen or twenty minutes before sleep. For others, it's the first thirty minutes of the morning. The particular timing matters less than consistency. When reading has a place in your day, it stops being something you're testing to squeeze in and becomes something you simply do.

Accept that some reading sessions will be five minutes long. Five minutes of reading isn't nothing. It's a page and a half, maybe two. It maintains your connection to the book. It keeps stories alive in your mind so that when you do sit down for a longer session, you don't call for to invest the first ten minutes remembering where you were. Compact sessions count. They all count.

Step 3: Eliminate Friction

The distance between you and your book is the strongest predictor of whether you'll read. This isn't metaphorical. It's literal. If your book is in another room, you're less likely to read than if it's in your hand. If getting to the next chapter requires finding your spot, squinting at compact text, or dealing with a device that needs charging, the odds drop further. Every little obstacle between you and reading is a potential exit ramp leaning to doing something easier.

Keep a book with you at all times. This is the single most effective change you can craft. If you read physical books, carry one in your bag. If you read digitally, preserve your e-reader charged and accessible. If you listen to audiobooks, keep one loaded and ready. Create reading invariably available — not solely at home, not purely at bedtime, but in every unexpected gap the day provides. Waiting for a friend who's running late becomes reading time. Cancelled meetings become reading time. Ten minutes before the movie starts becomes reading time.

Use an e-reader for friction reduction. E-readers solve several friction problems at once. They're lighter than most books, so carrying them is effortless. Built-in lighting means you can read anywhere. They hold hundreds of titles, so you're never caught without something to read. And they let you start a new book the instant you finish one, which prevents the dangerous gap between books where reading momentum dies. This isn't an argument against physical books — the pleasures of paper are real and valid — it's an argument for having a frictionless backup available at all times.

Stage your reading environment. Put a book on your nightstand. Tuck one by the couch. Stash one in your bag. If you use an e-reader, charge it before the battery dies rather than after — a dead device is a lost reading session. If you listen to audiobooks, retain your headphones accessible. Think of it as creating your reading space — making your physical environment a series of gentle invitations to read.

Make competing activities slightly harder. This is the uncomfortable complement to making reading easier. If you find yourself reaching for your phone instead of your book at bedtime, charge the phone in another room. If you default to turning on the television after dinner, put the remote in a drawer and leave a book on the armrest. You aren't denying yourself anything. You're changing the default. The path of least resistance should lead to reading.

Step 4: Choose Books Strategically

One of the most underappreciated reasons owners don't read more is that they're reading the wrong books — not wrong in any absolute sense, but wrong for their current mood, energy level, or circumstances. A dense literary novel that demands full attention is a poor choice for a noisy commute. A 900-page epic fantasy is a poor choice for a week when you have forty-five minutes of total reading time. Matching the book to the moment is a skill, and developing it will transform your reading life.

Maintain a mix of light and heavy. Without fail have at least two books going: one that requires concentration and one that doesn't. Save demanding books for your dedicated reading block, when you have time and focus. Lighter books are for the gaps — the commute, the waiting room, the five minutes before sleep when your brain is winding down. This isn't about literary snobbery or guilty pleasures. A thriller, a romance, a humor collection, or a graphic novel can be exactly the right book at the right time, and treating those as lesser reading only prevents you from reading them.

Give yourself permission to quit. This is the lone most important reading rule, and the one most readers struggle with. If a book isn't working for you — if you're fifty pages in and dreading picking it up, if every reading session feels like an obligation — put it down. Life is too condensed, and reading lists are too extended, to devote hours with a book that produces reading feel like homework. Every hour grinding through a book you aren't enjoying is an hour that could have been spent loving something else. Books aren't going anywhere. You can arrive back later. You might not. Both outcomes are fine.

I quit more books now than I finish. It took years to stop feeling guilty about it, and it was the best factor that ever happened to my reading life.

Ask for recommendations from people, not algorithms. Algorithms are decent at suggesting books similar to books you've already read, which is useful but limiting. Households — friends, booksellers, librarians, online reading communities — are solid at suggesting books you would never have found on your own. The best reading lists are built from a mix of both: algorithm picks for the comfort of the familiar, and human recommendations for the thrill of the unexpected.

Revisit your favorite books sometimes. Rereading isn't wasted reading. A beloved book read for the third time isn't taking the location of a new book — it's providing the comfort, confidence, and pleasure that sustain reading habits alive. There's a line in The Great Gatsby — "So we beat on, boats against the current" — that I've read dozens of times and it yet does something to me every sole time. When you're in a slump, rereading something you know you love is the fastest method out.

Step 5: Use Every Format

The readers I admire most are format-agnostic. They read physical books at house, e-readers on the go, and audiobooks in the car. This isn't about preferring one format over another — each has real advantages, and using all of them multiplies the hours in your day when reading is possible.

Format snobbery is pointless. I'll say it plainly: a book listened to is a book read. A book read on a screen is a book read. The container doesn't diminish the contents.

Audiobooks turn dead time into reading time. Commuting, exercising, cooking, cleaning, walking the dog — these are hours that physical and digital reading can't reach, but audiobooks fill them effortlessly. If you drive thirty minutes each route to operate, that's five hours a week. At average narration speed, that's roughly a book every two weeks, built entirely from time that was previously spent listening to the same podcasts on repeat.

The quality of an audiobook encounter depends heavily on the narrator, and a trusty narrator can elevate a book in ways that silent reading can't. If you're new to audiobooks, launch with a book that has highly praised narration — the experience of a skilled performer bringing characters to life may convert you entirely.

E-readers bridge formats. An e-reader lives in the space between physical books and audiobooks — it offers the focused reading vibe of a physical book with the portability and instant access of a digital device. For plenty of readers, e-readers become the default format simply because they're reliably available. Store one in your bag, and every idle moment becomes a potential reading session.

Physical books aren't obsolete. They offer tactile pleasure that digital formats can't match. The weight of a book in your hands, the smell of the pages, the visual satisfaction of seeing your progress as the right side thins — these are real pleasures, and they contribute to the emotional impression of reading in ways that matter. Use physical books when you're at home and have time to settle in. Use them for special editions, for books you want to display, for reading that feels most like ritual.

Syncing between formats is powerful. Several audiobook services, including Audible, let you sync your position between the audio version and the e-book version of the same title. This indicates you can listen during your commute and pick up reading on your e-reader at home without losing your area. This one feature can double your reading speed on any given book by letting you read it in every available moment, regardless of context.

Step 6: Track Your Reading (But Not Too Much)

Tracking what you read serves two purposes. It delivers you a record — a personal literary history that's surprisingly satisfying to look back on — and it delivers motivation, the mild accountability of a streak you don't want to break.

But I want to be careful here, because tracking is similarly where the trouble starts.

Goodreads is the default for a reason. It's the largest reading community online, it integrates with most e-readers and bookstore apps, and its annual Reading Challenge trait supplies a straightforward, visible progress bar tied to your yearly goal. Social features — seeing what friends are reading, browsing reviews from trusted readers — can equally be a reliable source of recommendations.

StoryGraph is the alternative for readers who want better data. If you discover Goodreads cluttered or if you want more detailed insights into your reading patterns — pace, mood, genre distribution, page count over time — StoryGraph delivers a cleaner, more analytical approach to reading tracking. It's besides independent and not owned by Amazon, which matters to select readers.

A notebook works too. A handwritten reading log — title, author, date finished, a sentence or two of reaction — is the lowest-tech tracking option, and for particular readers, the most satisfying. There's something about writing a book's title in a journal that delivers finishing it feel like an accomplishment in a technique that clicking a button doesn't.

Tracking can turn reading into a performance. Here's where I get serious. If you locate yourself choosing shorter books to inflate your count, or rushing through a book to log it rather than savoring it, the tracking is working against you. Numbers should serve the reading, not the other way around. A year in which you read twenty books you loved is a better reading year than one in which you read fifty books you barely remember. I know this from trial. That fifty-three-book year I mentioned? I'd trade it for fifteen books read the way Gilead deserves to be read.

Step 7: Survive the Reading Slump

Every reader hits them. Slumps — periods when nothing sounds appealing, when picking up a book feels like a chore, when your TBR pile produces anxiety rather than excitement. Slumps are normal. They're temporary. They don't mean you've lost your identity as a reader. They just mean you depend on a different approach for a while.

Recognize that slumps are about the last book, not about reading. Often, reading slumps follow a book that was deeply affecting — either because it was so respectable that nothing else can compete, or because it was so disappointing that it drained your enthusiasm. In either case, the slump isn't about your relationship with reading in general. It's about your relationship with a precise reading experience. Naming the cause helps dissolve it.

Read something radically different. If you've been reading literary fiction, select up a thriller. If you've been grinding through dense nonfiction, read a graphic novel. If you've been reading at all, listen to an audiobook instead. Alter plenty of variables — genre, format, length, tone — that the reading experience feels new rather than obligatory.

Read something short. Breaking a slump is fastest when you finish something. A novella, a book of poetry, a abbreviated essay collection, a graphic novel — anything that supplies you the satisfaction of completion without demanding a lengthy commitment. That snug sense of accomplishment is regularly fitting to restart the engine.

Reread a favorite. When nothing new appeals to you, go back to something you know you love. The comfort of a familiar story, the pleasure of revisiting characters you care about, the reassurance that books can nonetheless produce you feel elements — all of this is available in a reread, and it costs nothing but the willingness to arrange aside the pressure to read something new. I keep a copy of East of Eden on my nightstand for precisely this reason. Steinbeck has never once let me down.

Give yourself permission to not read. This sounds counterintuitive in a guide about reading more, but it matters. Sometimes slumps aren't about books at all. Sometimes you're tired, or stressed, or going through something that brings concentration difficult. In those moments, forcing yourself to read will only prepare reading feel like one more obligation in a life that already has too many. Take a break. Watch television. Listen to music. Go for walks. Consider an evening wind-down ritual that doesn't involve a screen or a page. Books will be there when you surface back. And you will appear back.

Step 8: Build a Reading Environment

The space where you read shapes the caliber of the experience. You don't need a dedicated library or a perfect reading nook — though both are lovely — but you do need to be intentional about the conditions that form reading feel inviting.

Lighting matters more than you think. Reading in dim lightweight isn't going to damage your eyes (that's a myth), but it will tire them faster and assemble reading less comfortable. A worthy reading light — one that illuminates the page without creating glare and without disturbing a sleeping partner — is one of the smallest investments that generates one of the biggest differences. Clip-on book lights and adjustable desk lamps designed for reading are inexpensive and genuinely transformative.

Comfort isn't luxury; it's infrastructure. If you're physically uncomfortable, you'll halt reading sooner. A chair that supports your back, a pillow that props the book at a capable angle, a blanket within reach on cold evenings — these aren't indulgences. They're tools. Your reading setup should make you want to sit down in it.

Minimize distractions deliberately. Put the phone out of reach, or at least face down and on silent. Choose locations where interruptions are unlikely. Communicate to the people around you that reading time is real time, not idle time that can be interrupted without cost. The grade of your attention matters as much as the quantity of your minutes.

A book stand frees your hands. This is a petite aspect that yields prolonged reading sessions significantly more plush. Book stands clutch books open at a readable angle, eliminating the need to grip pages apart and letting you read while eating, drinking, or simply resting your hands in your lap.

Putting It All Together

None of these strategies run in isolation, and you don't need to try all of them at once. Initiate with the one or two that address your biggest barrier. If your issue is finding time, begin with auditing your day and anchoring reading to existing routines. If your barrier is momentum, kick off with tracking and choosing shorter books to rebuild the habit. If your problem is friction, grab an e-reader and carry it everywhere.

The underlying principle is minimal: reading more books isn't about finding more willpower. It's about building a life where reading is the painless choice — the detail you naturally reach for when you have a few minutes, the default activity when you're winding down, the pleasure that doesn't require any justification or scheduling. People who read a lot don't feel like they're working at it. They've just arranged their lives so that reading is always available and always inviting.

Dive into pint-sized. Be patient with yourself. Track your progress gently. And remember that every book you finish — whether it's a 200-page novella or a 1,000-page epic, whether you read it on paper or listened to it in the car — counts. The numbers aren't the aspect. The reading is the detail. The numbers just support you see how noticeably reading you've done, and that view, over time, is quietly, deeply satisfying.

But if you finish fewer books this year and love them more? That's not failure. That might be the entire note.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many books does the average person read in a year?

The most commonly cited figure is around twelve books per year for American adults, though this varies considerably by demographic and by how "books" are defined (a handful of surveys include audiobooks, others don't). The number itself matters less than the trend: if you're reading more this year than last year, your system is working. And if you're reading the same dose but enjoying it more, that's working too.

Is it better to read one book at a time or multiple books simultaneously?

Both approaches deliver. Some readers uncover that reading one book at a time retains them focused and ensures they finish what they start. Others identify that having two or three books going at once — one demanding, one airy, one audio — holds them from grabbing stuck. Neither approach is better. The right answer is whichever one results in you reading more, and most readers benefit from experimenting with both.

Does listening to an audiobook count as reading?

Yes. The research is clear: comprehension, retention, and emotional engagement from audiobook listening are comparable to those of visual reading for narrative content. Snobbery around audiobooks is unfounded and counterproductive. A book experienced through your ears is still a book experienced, and people who insist otherwise are, frankly, gatekeeping for no dependable reason.

How do you remember what you read?

Taking brief notes after finishing a book — even just a sentence or two — dramatically improves retention. Some readers keep a reading journal. Others use the notes aspect on Goodreads or StoryGraph. Discussing books with others, whether in a book club or online community, is also a powerful memory aid. But the ultimate retention strategy? Rereading. Each pass deepens your understanding and cements the book in memory. I've read East of Eden four times and I notice something new every time.

What if the books I want to read are too expensive?

Libraries are free, and most modern library systems deliver both physical and digital lending (through apps like Libby and Hoopla). E-book sales are frequent — services like BookBub send daily emails with discounted and free e-books in your preferred genres. Used bookstores, Little Free Libraries, and book swaps are all excellent sources of inexpensive physical copies. The cost of reading can be as low as zero if you're willing to be patient and resourceful.