The Journal

How to read more books: what actually works

May 24, 20264 min readbook-clubs

Most advice about reading more books misdiagnoses the problem. The problem is rarely motivation or interest. It is structural: reading competes with activities that require less activation energy, and the friction of picking up a book in a spare five minutes is higher than the friction of picking up a phone.

These are the methods that the evidence and experience consistently confirm actually work.

Carry a book everywhere#

The single most effective change most readers can make is to ensure that a book is always immediately available. On a phone, this means the Foxing app on your home screen -- not in a folder, on the front page -- so that opening a book in a spare moment requires one tap, not four. On a commute, this means keeping your current book in your bag rather than leaving it at home.

The research on behaviour change consistently finds that proximity is one of the most powerful determinants of behaviour. If a book is there, you read it. If it is not there, you check your phone.

Read multiple books simultaneously#

The advice to read one book at a time before starting another is counterproductive for most readers. Different books serve different moods and different contexts. A short story collection is a different reading experience from a long novel. A biography serves different moments than a work of philosophy. Having two or three books active at the same time -- one on your phone, one by your bed, one in your bag -- means there is always a book that fits the available time and mood.

The fear that you will lose track of what you have read in which book is almost always unfounded in practice. Novels are coherent narrative objects; picking one up after a few days is more like returning to a conversation than forgetting a fact.

Use dead time systematically#

The average person spends approximately 40 minutes per day waiting: in queues, on public transport, between meetings, in waiting rooms. At a moderate reading speed of 250 words per minute, 40 minutes of reading produces roughly 10,000 words -- about ten pages of a standard novel. Over a year, that is 3.6 million words, or roughly 40 full-length novels.

The key is not to create reading time but to convert time that is already dead. For short classics that reward exactly this kind of reading, those are the books that fit five-minute sessions without losing momentum.

Set a reading goal you can actually hit#

Ambitious reading goals -- "I will read 52 books this year" -- backfire for most people because they create a deficit that grows visible within weeks and becomes demotivating. A goal you can hit and build on is more effective than a goal that makes you feel behind.

A conservative starting goal: one book per month. Twelve books per year. At 20 minutes of daily reading, this is very achievable for any novel under 350 pages. Once you are consistently hitting twelve, you will naturally read more without needing to set a harder target.

Stop reading books you are not enjoying#

Life is long enough to read the books you love and short enough not to finish the ones you do not. The sunk-cost fallacy -- continuing a book because you have already started it -- is one of the biggest drains on reading momentum.

A useful heuristic attributed to the writer Nancy Pearl: subtract your age from 100. The result is the number of pages you should give a book before deciding to stop. At thirty, give a book 70 pages. At fifty, give it 50. At eighty, give it 20. The older you are, the more ruthlessly you should protect your remaining reading time.

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