How to Read More Books

A librarian I know keeps a private statistic: the average reader who tells her they have no time for books is, by their own account, watching about ninety minutes of television a day. She is not scolding anybody. Her point is that the shortage is misdiagnosed. Ninety minutes a day is roughly seventy books a year at ordinary reading speed. Nobody with ninety spare minutes has a time problem. They have a friction problem, and friction has causes you can remove one at a time.

The largest cause is the rule most of us absorbed at fourteen: a book begun is a book owed. So we start something worthy, stall on page forty, and rather than abandon it we simply stop reading altogether, because the stalled book sits on the bedside table like an unpaid bill and starting a different one feels like cheating. Whole reading lives end this way — not in dislike of books but in loyalty to one bad match.

Serious readers almost universally abandon books, often at a rate that would shock a schoolteacher. Fifty pages is the common test. If it has not earned the next hour, it is returned to the shelf without ceremony, no judgement of the book and none of the reader. The result is not shallowness but the opposite: the hours freed go to books that actually hold, and holding is what produces the habit.

The second cause is placement. Reading loses every contest it is entered into with a phone, so the answer is to stop entering it. A book on the arm of the chair, in the bag, by the kettle, beside the bed while the phone charges in another room, will be read; a book on a shelf in another room will not. This is not willpower advice. It is a plea to make the desirable thing the nearest thing, because at eleven at night we all reach for whatever is closest.

The third is the myth of the long session. People imagine reading requires a clear evening, so they wait for one, and it does not come. Twenty minutes a day finishes a book roughly every fortnight. Ten pages before sleep is twenty books a year. The reading that actually accumulates in adult life is almost entirely made of scraps — the queue, the train, the ten minutes before a meeting that nobody else uses for anything.

The last piece is permission. Read the light thing. Read two at once, one demanding and one not, and let mood choose. Reread. Skim the middle. Listen to it. The imagined reader who finishes every serious book in order, taking notes, does not exist and never did, and the belief that they do has probably kept more people from reading than television ever managed.