How to read more books

People who read a great deal are rarely doing anything clever. They have removed two specific frictions — the book is always available at the moments they have, and they stop reading books that are not working. Everything else in this category is decoration on those two facts.

Diagnose the actual barrier first

There are three, and they need different answers, which is why generic advice fails so many people.

Access. You want to read but there is nothing to hand you actually want. This is the barrier a library card or a subscription fixes, and the only one either of them fixes.

Time. You have books and no gaps to read them in. This is not solved by buying more books, and it is where audio does its real work, because it converts hours that were never available for reading into hours that are.

Momentum. You are three chapters into something you are not enjoying and have not opened it in two weeks. This is the most common barrier by a distance and costs nothing to fix.

Give yourself permission to abandon

The single largest behavioral difference between people who read a lot and people who do not is how quickly they put a book down. A book you are grinding through does not just fail to entertain you — it occupies the slot, and the slot is the scarce resource. Two months stuck at page ninety is two months of not reading anything.

Fifty pages is a common rule and a good one. If it has not started by then, it is unlikely to, and the book has not wronged you. There is no scoreboard on which unfinished books count against you.

Use the gaps you already have

Almost nobody finds an hour. Almost everybody has four ten-minute gaps: a queue, a commute, a wait, the fifteen minutes before sleep. Forty minutes a day is roughly a book a month at ordinary reading speed, which is more than most people manage while intending to read properly on a weekend.

The condition is that the book has to be there. A phone with a reading app on it removes the excuse entirely, and if that feels like a compromise, it is worth noticing that the alternative in those particular ten minutes is not a hardback — it is a feed.

Audio extends the same idea into hours that were never readable at all. Cooking, cleaning, driving, walking and exercising add up faster than people expect once counted honestly, which is the exercise on listening while you work. Whether that counts as reading is a question worth taking seriously rather than dismissing, and reading versus listening goes through what each format is genuinely better at.

Stop counting titles

A yearly book target is the most popular piece of advice in this category and quietly corrupts your choices. Once a number is at stake, short books beat long ones, easy beats demanding, and finishing beats enjoying. People hit fifty books and read less well than the year they read twenty.

Time is the better measure. Thirty minutes a day is a target you can keep on a bad week and it does not care whether the book is four hundred pages or nine hundred.

Does a subscription actually help?

Only against the access barrier, and only if that is genuinely yours. If your problem is that you finish a book at eleven at night and have nothing queued, then yes — instant availability removes a real gap, and that is what these services are for. If your problem is time or momentum, a subscription adds a monthly charge to an unchanged reading habit, and three months later you cancel it.

The free version of the same fix is a library card, which removes the access barrier at no cost. How to borrow from your library is the setup, and for a lot of readers that is the end of the problem. We earn nothing from it and it is still the first thing to try.

Where a paid subscription genuinely wins is impatience: no holds, no queue, the next book available immediately. If you know that about yourself, the arithmetic is on whether Kindle Unlimited is worth it and whether Audible is worth it, both of which come out negative for a fair number of people and say so.