Read More Books This Year

This article has been making the blog rounds, with a deliciously simple idea to motivate you to read more books this year: aim for 10% of a book every day.

The article points out that Kindles and other e-devices make it so easy to track your progress, that 10% is a manageable chunk (you can split it into two 5% sessions if you want to) and that many books, when you factor in the index and end matter, aren’t even 100% long anyway.

These are all good points, and its an interesting idea. But it’s a little simplistic for my taste; some books are very long or very short, or have varying interest levels for me. Recently, I read a briskly paced mystery that I was very into and which I polished off in under two days. Also recently, I read a short-ish non-fiction book which was only 60% content (there were a lot of notes) and should have been a quick read, but I was taking notes on it so it took me much longer to read. I also generally have a book of poems or short stories on the go, and those seem to be most enjoyable for me if read in short chunks. Not all material needs to be plowed through at maximum speed!

In my best year, I read around 100 books; that took a nosedive the year I met the Beloved, and while it has climbed again, it’s still not at my single-person levels. I don’t think it has to be. I don’t think that quantity is more important to me than quality anymore, and I include ‘quality of life’ in the quality equation too—time spent with the Beloved, NOT doing reading, is most definitely worthwhile time to me!

But I don’t want another 40-book year either. So what have I been doing to maximize my reading time? Here are three tips that have helped me finish more books:

1) Set a target for the day. It doesn’t have to be 10%, but a target, as a concept, is a useful one. I find many books I read lend themselves to this. I have a few books which feature a daily or weekly essay format, where you are meant to read one a day and finish it in a month or a year and so forth. I also try to read at least a little from a poetry collection every day. It may take me awhile to finish it at that pace, but it’s so little time per day that when I do finish one, it’s almost like a freebie.

2) Use your device’s sync feature. When I still had a Kobo, I seldom used the sync feature because the Kobo iOS app is so dreadful. This meant that I compartmentalized my books. I had some on the reader, some in iBooks on my phone and iPad, and so on. Now that I am back in the Kindle world, I have found it’s more efficient to focus on one or two books at a time and read them everywhere. An hour on the couch with my e-ink device is great, but those stolen moments of being able to pull out my phone and knock off a few pages on the bus or in line somewhere really add up!

3) Vary your reading by time of day. I typically have different types of books on the go at once, and standardizing my reading by time of day helps me make progress on all of them. At home and during personal downtime (on the bus, for instance) I read my novel of the moment. If I read while I am at work, I choose a French book (I am a French teacher, so I keep a French book on the go at all times for professional development.) And at night, I typically spend an hour or so with a business or personal development book, as my productive task of the evening before I move onto my fun stuff. Since I am a pretty fast reader, I still polish off a respectable amount of fiction. This way, I can make sure I fit in some other stuff too.

What are your tips to read better or faster or smarter? Comment below and pass them on!