I read about seventy books a year. That sounds like a lot, but I know people who read twice that, and I know people who work in publishing and barely read ten. The number itself doesn’t matter much. What matters is that reading is a regular part of my life, as routine as eating dinner or going for a walk. It wasn’t always this way. There were years in my twenties when I’d start a dozen books and finish maybe two. I had the desire to read but couldn’t seem to build the practice around it. So I want to talk honestly about what changed, and what I’ve learned from watching other people go through the same process.

The internet is full of advice about reading more. Much of it, frankly, is useless. “Set a goal of 52 books a year!” Great, now reading feels like a performance metric. “Always carry a book with you!” Sure, but carrying a book doesn’t mean you’ll open it. “Read instead of scrolling your phone!” Technically correct, practically unhelpful, because the reason you’re scrolling your phone in the first place is that it’s easier and more immediately rewarding than reading a book. Telling someone to choose the harder option without addressing why the harder option feels harder is like telling someone with insomnia to “just go to sleep.”

I’m going to try to be more specific and more honest than the usual advice. Some of what I’m about to say will sound obvious. Some of it will sound counterintuitive. All of it comes from my own experience and from conversations with readers whose habits I admire.

Quit Books Ruthlessly

This is the single most important piece of advice I can give, and it’s the one most people resist. If you’re fifty pages into a book and it’s not working for you, stop reading it. Put it down. Pick up something else. Life is short, your reading time is limited, and there are more good books in the world than you could read in ten lifetimes. Don’t waste your hours on a book that bores you out of a misplaced sense of obligation.

I spent years finishing books I didn’t enjoy because I thought I “should.” Because they were classics, or because someone whose opinion I respected had recommended them, or because I’d already invested time and didn’t want to “waste” it. This is the sunk cost fallacy applied to reading, and it’s one of the most effective ways to kill a reading habit. Every tedious book you force yourself to finish is a book-shaped negative experience that makes you slightly less likely to pick up the next one.

I give a book about fifty pages now. If it hasn’t engaged me by then, I move on. Sometimes I come back to abandoned books months or years later and they click in a way they didn’t the first time. Sometimes I never come back, and that’s fine too. The permission to quit transformed my reading life more than any other single change.

A caveat: this advice applies to reading for pleasure and personal enrichment. If you’re reading for work, or for a class, or because you’ve committed to reviewing a book, different rules apply. But most of the reading most people do is voluntary, and voluntary reading should be enjoyable. If it’s not, something has gone wrong, and the most likely culprit is the specific book, not reading itself.

Read What You Actually Want to Read

This sounds so obvious it shouldn’t need saying, but I think a lot of non-readers and lapsed readers are reading (or trying to read) the wrong books. They’re reading what they think they should read rather than what genuinely interests them. They’ve internalized some idea about what “real” reading looks like, and it usually involves literary fiction or serious non-fiction, and it usually excludes the kinds of books they might actually enjoy.

I have a friend who spent years feeling guilty about her reading habits because she preferred mystery novels to literary fiction. She’d buy the Booker Prize longlist every year, read fifty pages of each one, feel inadequate, and go back to scrolling Twitter. When I finally convinced her to stop apologizing for her tastes and just read the mystery novels she actually wanted to read, she went from reading three books a year to reading thirty. She’s happy. She’s engaged. She’s reading. That’s what matters.

I work at a publishing house (ScrollWorks Media) that publishes literary fiction and thoughtful non-fiction, so I obviously think those books are worth reading. But I also think that any reading is better than no reading, and that reading habits built on genuine enthusiasm are sturdier than reading habits built on aspiration. If you love true crime, read true crime. If you love romance novels, read romance novels. If you love books about military history, or gardening, or celebrity memoirs, read those. The important thing is to build the habit. Once the habit is strong, you can expand your range if you want to. But the habit comes first.

Protect Your Reading Time Like a Meeting

Here’s a question: if you had a meeting scheduled for 9 PM every night, would you skip it? Probably not. You’d feel obligated to show up because someone else was expecting you. But if you tell yourself you’re going to read at 9 PM every night, you’ll skip it regularly because the only person you’re letting down is yourself, and you’re very forgiving with yourself.

The most reliable readers I know treat their reading time with the same seriousness they’d give any other commitment. They have a specific time, a specific place, and they show up consistently. It might be thirty minutes before bed. It might be during a lunch break. It might be on the train during a commute. The exact time doesn’t matter. The consistency does.

I read from about 9:30 to 10:30 PM most nights. I sit in the same chair. I don’t have my phone nearby. It’s become so automatic that I feel physically odd on the rare nights when I don’t do it, like I’ve skipped brushing my teeth. That automaticity is the goal. You want reading to be something your body does without your conscious mind having to decide to do it.

Building this kind of automaticity takes about three to four weeks of consistent practice. The first week will feel forced. The second week will feel slightly less forced. By the third week, you’ll start to notice a mild craving for your reading time. By the fourth week, it’s a habit. Your brain has wired itself to expect a book at that time and in that place, and skipping it feels wrong rather than tempting.

The Phone Problem

Let’s talk about the elephant in every room where reading is discussed. Your phone is the primary obstacle to sustained reading, and pretending otherwise is naive. I don’t say this with any moral superiority. I’m as susceptible to the pull of my phone as anyone. The difference is that I’ve arranged my environment to reduce that pull during my reading time.

I leave my phone in another room when I sit down to read. Not on the other side of the couch. Not face-down on the coffee table. In another room, preferably one that requires me to get up and walk to reach it. This sounds extreme, but the research on this is pretty clear: the mere visible presence of a smartphone reduces cognitive capacity, even when the phone is turned off. Having it nearby is a constant low-level distraction that degrades the quality of your attention.

If leaving your phone in another room feels impossible, that’s actually useful information. It tells you something about the strength of the habit you’re competing against. Reading a book requires sustained attention, the ability to hold a complex thread of thought in your mind for extended periods. Social media and phone apps are specifically designed to fragment attention, to deliver small hits of novelty and dopamine in rapid succession. These two modes of engagement are directly opposed. You can’t train your brain for both simultaneously.

I’m not anti-phone or anti-internet. I spend plenty of time on my phone during other parts of the day. But during reading time, the phone goes away. This single change probably doubled the amount I read. When I used to “read” with my phone on the armrest, I’d check it every few minutes without even realizing I was doing it. Each interruption required my brain to re-enter the book’s world, and that re-entry cost a few seconds of comprehension and momentum each time. Over an hour of reading, those interruptions added up to significant lost time and a much shallower reading experience.

Physical Books Have an Advantage

I know this is a controversial opinion in the age of e-readers and audiobooks, and I want to be clear: any format that gets you reading is the right format for you. If you read exclusively on Kindle and you’re happy with that, fantastic. If audiobooks work for your lifestyle, great. I listen to audiobooks during long drives and while cooking, and I value them.

That said, for building a reading habit specifically, physical books have a practical advantage that I don’t think gets enough attention. A physical book is a single-purpose object. When you pick it up, there’s only one thing you can do with it: read it. It can’t notify you. It can’t redirect your attention. It can’t tempt you with a different app. It’s just there, being a book, patiently waiting for you to engage with it.

E-readers are close to this ideal, but tablets and phones are not. If you’re reading on an iPad, you’re one swipe away from email, social media, news, games, and a thousand other distractions. Some people have the discipline to ignore those temptations. I’m not one of them. If you’re trying to build a reading habit and you’re struggling, switching to physical books is worth trying. The object itself becomes a cue for the behavior you’re trying to establish.

There’s also something about the physical presence of a book in your living space that supports the habit. A book on your nightstand is a visible reminder. A stack of books on the coffee table is an invitation. When your current read is sitting there, spine up, with a bookmark poking out, it’s gently nagging you to come back to it. An e-book on a device is invisible until you actively choose to open it, which means it has to compete for your attention rather than passively attracting it.

Read Multiple Books at Once

Some people find this idea horrifying. Won’t the books get confused in your head? Won’t you lose track of plotlines? In my experience, no. Your brain is perfectly capable of maintaining multiple narrative threads, just as it’s capable of following multiple TV shows simultaneously without confusing them.

The practical advantage of having multiple books going at the same time is that you always have something to match your mood. If you’re tired and want something light, you’ve got that option ready. If you’re alert and want something challenging, you’ve got that too. If you’re only reading one book and you’re not in the mood for it on a given evening, the temptation is to not read at all. With two or three books going, there’s almost always one that appeals.

I typically have three books going at any given time: one fiction, one non-fiction, and one that’s lighter or shorter (an essay collection, a book of poetry, a graphic novel). I move between them depending on my energy level and mood. Some nights I read fifty pages of a novel in one sitting. Other nights I read a single essay and call it good. The variety keeps reading feeling like a pleasure rather than a task.

If you’re new to reading multiple books, start with two: something you’re excited about and something for when you’re not in the mood for the first one. The “backup book” eliminates the most common excuse for not reading: “I didn’t feel like reading my current book.” Well, you have another one. Read that instead.

Find Your People

Reading is a solitary activity, but having people to talk to about what you’re reading makes it much more likely that you’ll keep doing it. This is why book clubs work (and we’ll have more to say about book clubs in a future post). But you don’t need a formal club. You just need one or two friends who read.

My reading life got significantly richer when I started regularly exchanging book recommendations with a small group of friends. We don’t agree on everything, which is actually better than agreeing. One friend reads almost exclusively science fiction and has pushed me toward books I never would have found on my own. Another is deep into contemporary literary fiction and keeps my reading current. A third reads mostly non-fiction, history and science, and provides a steady stream of recommendations from outside my usual orbit.

The social dimension does something subtle to your reading motivation. When you know someone is going to ask what you’ve been reading, you have a mild external accountability that supplements your internal motivation. It’s not pressure, exactly. It’s more like a gentle awareness that reading is a part of your social identity, something you do and talk about, rather than a private indulgence you’re trying to squeeze in between other obligations.

Lower the Bar, Then Keep Lowering It

If you’re currently reading zero books a year and you set a goal of reading fifty, you’re going to fail. This is obvious, but people do it all the time, usually in January. They buy a stack of books, feel ambitious for two weeks, realize they’re already behind pace, and give up.

Instead, set a goal so low it feels almost insulting. Read for ten minutes a day. That’s it. Ten minutes. If you read more, great. If you read exactly ten minutes and stop, that’s also great. You read today. You are a person who reads. Tomorrow you’ll do it again.

Ten minutes a day, at a moderate reading speed, works out to roughly fifteen to twenty books a year, depending on length. That’s a solid reading life. It’s more than most adults read. And it’s achievable because the daily commitment is so small that there’s almost no friction. You can always find ten minutes. You probably spend more than ten minutes waiting in lines during a given day.

The psychological trick here is that ten minutes often becomes thirty or forty minutes once you’re engaged. The hard part is starting. Once you’ve started, the book tends to pull you in. But even if it doesn’t, even if you close the book after exactly ten minutes every single day, you’ve succeeded. The habit is building. The identity is forming. You’re a reader.

What to Read When You’re Getting Started (or Getting Restarted)

If you’re building or rebuilding a reading habit, don’t start with Ulysses. Don’t start with Infinite Jest. Don’t start with whatever 800-page literary monument you feel like you’re supposed to have read by now. Start with something short, accessible, and likely to keep you turning pages.

I’d suggest starting with non-fiction if you’re not sure what you like. Specifically, narrative non-fiction on a topic that already interests you. If you’re into technology, pick up a well-reviewed book about the history of the internet. If you’re interested in food, find a book about the science of cooking. The advantage of non-fiction in this context is that you’re learning something while you read, which gives your brain a secondary motivation beyond the pure pleasure of reading.

For fiction, I’d recommend starting with contemporary novels rather than classics. Contemporary fiction tends to be more immediately accessible, with fewer barriers of language and cultural context. If you’re looking for a novel that’s literary but also compulsively readable, something like Elena Marsh’s Still Waters might work well. It’s the kind of book that’s beautifully written but also has the forward momentum to keep you reading past your ten-minute minimum.

Short story collections and essay collections are also excellent for habit-building. Each piece is its own self-contained reading experience, which means you get the satisfaction of completion regularly. Finishing something feels good, and that feeling reinforces the habit. A novel that takes you three weeks to finish only gives you that hit of completion once. A story collection gives it to you every day or two.

Be Patient With Yourself

One more thing. If you haven’t been reading regularly and you’re trying to start, your attention span for reading will be shorter than you expect. You might sit down with a book and find that your mind wanders after three pages. This is normal. It doesn’t mean you’re stupid or that you’ve lost the ability to concentrate. It means your brain has been trained by years of short-form digital content to expect constant novelty, and a book doesn’t provide that. Your brain is protesting the change in stimulation.

This improves with practice. After a week or two of consistent reading, you’ll find your attention span extending. After a month, you’ll be able to read for longer stretches without your mind wandering. After a few months, you’ll notice improvements in your ability to concentrate on other things as well: conversations, work tasks, anything that requires sustained focus. Reading is, among other things, a form of attention training, and the benefits extend well beyond the books themselves.

Don’t berate yourself for slow progress. Don’t compare your reading speed or volume to anyone else’s. Don’t turn reading into another source of guilt or inadequacy in a life that probably already has plenty of both. Just sit down, open a book, and read. If you can do that today, you can do it tomorrow. And the day after that. And eventually, without quite realizing when it happened, you’ll be a reader. Welcome.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.