A few minutes of downtime between activities or appointments may seem trivial, but they soon add up to hours, and to entire books read; there’s great possibilities in spare moments! You’ll be amazed at how many books you can knock off in a month by reading an hour a day. Instead of doing your typical time-wasting smartphone scan at those times, you’ll read. If you’re looking to increase your physical and mental library and read more books this year, maybe they’ll work for you too. When I posted a collage of my favorite of those 120 reads on Instagram, a lot of guys asked me what my secret was for digesting that many tomes in 12 months. As with most habits that can greatly impact your life, this will never feel urgent, but it is important.
Join (or start!) a book club
Perhaps it feels counterintuitive, but by giving yourself permission to call it quits, you’ll make space for books you’d enjoy FindMSInteractive much more—and there’s no better way to feed your reading motivation than that. Bogel often asks people what’s deterring them from reading, and the answer is that they’re stuck in the middle of a book they don’t want to finish. Ask the prolific readers you encounter for recommendations or to tell you about the last great book they read. “Sometimes you don’t have the time to sit and read,” she adds.
Combine your habits
"Set a reading timer for five minutes per day. Read anything, but it has to be on paper," she says. On her online book group, Zang, 23, sees many other readers go through a similar transition. If you’re speed reading Dickens or Austen (yes, there’s a place for Jane Austen in a man’s library), you’re going to miss out on prose that should be relished.
- From the right e-reader to a book subscription, here are my favorite ways (some free, some vibe-setting) to read a lot
- I created a public reading list where you can see all of my book recommendations across a wide range of categories.
- I’m hoping to attend this upcoming event, where novelist Frieda McFadden will speak about her newest book, Dear Debbie.
- As you read more, you can also follow along with Read With Jenna’s Streaking With Jenna, a 2023 initiative inviting readers to keep a reading streak going throughout the year.
Set a daily goal
To me, it feels like going to going figuring out what kind of food you want to eat for dinner. For author Emma Straub, the question of what to read next is one of reading’s great joys. Booktoker Zang calls the beginning of the book the "beginning borings." She challenges herself to make it through until she feels invested — or she doesn’t. But it’s worth finding the niches that get you excited, at least to get into the habit. "A lot of people who don’t read or want to read see reading as something that needs to be intellectually stimulating — and it doesn’t," Zang says. Think about the parts of your routine that are now automatic.
You could also resolve to get through 10 or 25 or 100 pages per day, or set a goal of reading one book per week or a certain number per year. I thrive when I have specific benchmarks to work toward, so I aim to read 50 pages a day. Embark on a quest to read every book featured on this year’s New York Times hardcover nonfiction best sellers list, for example, or to read something published each year from the time you were born. “We sometimes tell ourselves stories about our reading lives that aren’t necessarily true. Short works like these aren’t as daunting as longer tomes and can motivate you to find a reading routine that will work best for you, Moreno says. “You don’t have to be like, ‘I’m going to read War and Peace,’” says Chasity Moreno, who works in the New York Public Library’s Reader Services department.
Follow them, and you might be reading more books in a month and year than ever before. To answer that ever-pressing question, we spoke to authors, bookstagrammers and TODAY’s Book Lover in Chief, Jenna Bush Hager herself, for tips. Before she was 19, Shelby Zang didn’t consider herself a reader. First, with fiction, there’s a lot of nuance in the story that can be lost if you skim it.
Put your phone away
Uncover a suitable space for reading to make it feel more like joy than a job. Consider these tips, based on my back-and-forth experience and a trickle of data, if you long to read more this year. I’ve fallen in love with reading again (and a few books, too), and you can too. I’d either buy books that sat untouched on my nightstand for ages or get discouraged by a book I didn’t connect with, letting months go by without picking up another. Her superpower is matching people up with the perfect book.
Or, if books feel like too much, you can turn to short-story collections or long-form journalism. And when you do, think of it less like a to-do list and more like a treasure trove. Consider signing up for newsletters with book recommendations and glancing at book lists that interest you to keep that list growing. Reading will come far more naturally if you focus on what you enjoy and close the cover on what you don’t. And if you pick a book you don’t enjoy, try not to be hard on yourself.
Why should you read more?
I also don’t speed read fiction. For example, Alistair MacIntyre’s After Virtue is super hard to understand when you’re reading it at a snail’s pace; it’d be impossible to comprehend if you sped through it. They make extensive use of headings, bolded first sentences, and bulleted lists. For that reason, I don’t like speed reading. While it is possible, with lots of practice, to increase reading speed while maintaining decent comprehension, there’s inevitably going to be some comprehension loss the faster you go. As mentioned above, when people ask me how I read so many books, they often assume I’m speed reading.
Libby is an online book database that connects to your local library’s catalogue, allowing you to download books directly to your smartphone or e-reader. If you’re an avid audiobook listener, Audible also offers a monthly subscription. I love the feel of a crisp new hardcover, but I don’t love dropping the $30 at traditional retailers. One of my favorite corners of Instagram is #Bookstagram, where readers post aesthetically pleasing photos of their favorite books.