How to Read More Books a Year: Habits, Time and Speed

The surest way to read more books is to read for a fixed number of minutes every day, choose books you actually want to read, and give up quickly on the ones you do not. Time matters far more than speed: twenty minutes a day at an ordinary reading pace adds up to roughly two dozen books a year. Audiobooks, ebooks on your phone and a little skimming all count, and each can fill gaps that paper cannot.

How many books can you read in a year?

A good meta-analysis gives us the speed side of the sum. Brysbaert (2019) pooled 190 studies and found that adults read English silently at about 238 words per minute for non-fiction and about 260 for fiction. Book length is the other side. Lengths vary widely, so the table assumes round, approximate figures: a non-fiction book of about 60,000 words and a novel of about 80,000. Your books may be shorter or much longer.

These are ceilings, not promises. They assume every minute is spent reading at your average pace and that you read every day of the year. Real life brings missed days, re-reading and denser books, so expect to land below them. Even at half the figures, ten to fifteen minutes a day gives most people far more books than they read now.

Five extra minutes a day adds more books than reading 10 percent faster. At 20 minutes and 238 WPM you finish about 29 non-fiction books a year; at 10 percent faster, about 32; at 25 minutes and your normal speed, about 36.

Build the habit: when and where to read

Reading more is mostly a scheduling problem. The minutes exist; they are spent on other things by default.

• Attach reading to something you already do. Ten pages with the morning coffee, on the train, at lunch or in the last twenty minutes before sleep. A fixed slot beats good intentions.
• Set a time target, not a page target."Twenty minutes" is achievable on a dense day; "fifty pages" is not, and missing it discourages you.
• Keep a book within reach. One on the bedside table, one in your bag or on your phone. The book that is nearby is the one that gets read.
• Make the competition harder. If the phone wins the evening, leave it to charge outside the bedroom and put the book where the phone used to be.
• Track lightly. A simple list of finished books, with the date, is motivating. Daily logs and streaks help some people and turn reading into a chore for others.

If you sit down to read and find your mind elsewhere, the problem is attention rather than time; see how to focus while reading.

Pick books you will finish

People who read a lot rarely do it by willpower. They choose books that pull them along.

• Follow interest, not obligation. A book you are curious about beats a book you feel you ought to read. You can come back to the worthy ones later.
• Mix lengths and difficulty. Alternate a demanding book with a lighter or shorter one. Momentum matters.
• Sample before you commit. Read the first chapter in a shop, a library or a free ebook preview. If it does not hold you, move on.
• Keep a queue. A short list of what to read next stops the gap between books from turning into a month.

Is it fine to stop reading a book halfway?

Yes. Finishing a book you are not enjoying or learning from is the most common way people stop reading altogether: the stalled book sits on the table for weeks and nothing replaces it. A practical rule is to give a book 50 pages, or about an hour, and then ask whether you want to continue. If not, put it down without guilt. For non-fiction, you can also read the chapters you need and skim the rest. Many non-fiction books make their main argument early and spend later chapters on examples.

Do audiobooks count as reading?

For the purpose of getting through more books, yes. In a study by Rogowsky, Calhoun and Tallal (2016), 91 adults took in a chapter of a non-fiction book as an audiobook, as on-screen text or both at once, and showed no significant difference in comprehension straight afterwards or two weeks later. Audiobooks also reach the hours when you cannot hold a book: commuting, walking, housework.

There is one caveat worth knowing. A study by Varao Sousa, Carriere and Smilek (2013) found that students' minds wandered more while listening to a passage than while reading it, and they remembered less. Listening is easy to do half-attentively. Use audiobooks for narrative and lighter non-fiction, and keep a printed or ebook copy for anything you need to study closely.

Reading books on your phone

Your phone is always with you, which makes it the easiest way to turn spare minutes into reading time. Five minutes in a queue, three times a day, is fifteen minutes. A few points make it work:

• Use an ebook app or a reader, not a browser full of tabs and notifications.
• Turn on do-not-disturb while you read.
• Choose a larger font and a dark or sepia theme for evenings.

For demanding non-fiction, paper may still be the better choice. A meta-analysis by Delgado and colleagues (2018) found that people understood informational texts somewhat better on paper than on screens, especially under time pressure, while for narrative texts there was no clear difference. More on this in reading on screen vs paper and speed reading on your phone.

Where faster reading helps, and where it does not

Reading faster sounds like the obvious route to more books, but the evidence limits what it can do. The 2016 review of speed reading by Rayner and colleagues concludes that large gains in speed come with a loss of comprehension. Realistic gains on careful reading are modest, and as the table above shows, modest gains change your yearly total less than a few extra minutes of reading time.

Where a faster pace genuinely helps:

• Easy, familiar material. Light fiction and books on subjects you know well can be read faster without losing much.
• Deciding what to read.Skimming a book's introduction, contents and conclusion tells you in minutes whether it deserves hours.
• Staying steady. A pacer at your comfortable speed reduces drifting and re-reading, which is often where the time goes.

Where it does not: dense non-fiction you want to remember, literature you read for the language, and anything in a second language. Those reward a slower pace. For the realistic route to reading faster, see how to read faster, and for what is normal, average reading speed.

How to practise: a 30-day reading plan

1. Day 1: measure. Take the reading speed test to see your words per minute and comprehension. Use the result in the table above to set a realistic goal for the year.
2. Days 1 to 7: 10 minutes a day. Pick one slot and one book you are keen on. Read for ten minutes, even on busy days. Stop mid-chapter if the timer ends.
3. Days 8 to 21: 20 minutes a day. Split it into two ten-minute slots if that is easier, for example morning and bedtime. Add an audiobook for your commute or walks if you have one.
4. Apply the 50-page rule to every book you start during the month.
5. Days 22 to 30: hold steady and review. Keep 20 minutes a day. On day 30, count the books and pages you finished and decide whether to keep the slot, lengthen it or move it.

At 20 minutes a day, most readers finish two books in a month, sometimes more with audiobooks on top. That is roughly two dozen a year without reading any faster than you do now.