How I read 53 books last year
And why the number is not really the point.
I want to be upfront about something before I say anything else: most of those books were read on holiday.
I read fifty-three books last year. I have a lot of feelings about that statement. One one hand, I’m proud. One the other, I’m aware that it somewhat undermines the premise of a blog called The Bookish Rambler, which is ostensibly about slow, intentional reading. Because there is nothing slow about the way I read when I am on a summer holiday. I read fast, greedily, and without pausing for breath. One book after another, staying up later than I should, sometimes reading an entire book in a single day because no-one was asking anything of me and the books were there and the light was good and I had a glass of wine and absolutely no reason to stop.
That is where a good portion of that number came from. Long summer evenings on a terrace somewhere in the Mediterranean. A fortnight with nothing on the agenda but eating, walking, and reading. The kind of concentrated, guiltless consumption of books that is only possible when ordinary life has been suspended.
The rest came from the usual places: in the bath on a cold winter night, on the daily commute, in the last thirty minutes before sleep that somehow turned into two hours and a finished book and no one to blame but myself and the author for writing an ending I could not put down.
The kind of concentrated, guiltless consumption of books that is only possible when ordinary life has been temporarily suspended.
I tell you all of this because I suspect that if you are reading this post, you are either curious how I did it or – and this is the part I want to talk about – wondering how you might do it too. And those are two quite different questions, with two quite different answers.
The question I want to ask back
I often come across people on BookTok or BookTube asking some variation on the same question: how do I read more quickly? And every time, I find myself thinking: to what end?
I understand the feeling underneath the question. I really do. There are so many extraordinary books in the world and we have a finite number of evenings to read them in. The awareness of how much is out there, and how little time there is, is one of the particular anxieties of being a reader. We all feel it.
But I want to gently push back on the instinct that the solution is to read faster. Because if you intentionally race through a book – skimming pages, setting timers, measuring progress in percentage points – are you not diminishing it? The detail that catches your breath. The sentence you have to read again because it hits home so deeply. The chapter you have to put down and sit with for a while before you can continue. These things take time and an awareness of how the words on the page are sitting with you. That can’t truly be experienced on a time crunch.
If you intentionally race through a book, are you not diminishing it?
I think what people are really asking, when they ask how to read faster, is: how do I read more books? And I think what they mean by that is: I want to feel like I am keeping up. Like I am reading enough. Like I am a good reader.
And I want to say, as clearly and warmly as I can: there is no keeping up. There is no enough. There is no such thing as being a good or bad reader in the quantitative sense. There is only the book in your hands, and what you take from it.
On reading challenges and the productivity trap
We live in a cultural moment that is, to put it charitably, quite keen on measuring things. Productivity culture has seeped into every corner of life, and reading has not been immune to this. Goodreads has a reading challenge – how many books will you read this year? BookTok shows people reading one hundred books in a year, two hundred books, sometimes, incomprehensibly, three hundred books. The comment sections beneath these videos are full of people feeling both impressed and quietly terrible about themselves.
I want to be clear: I am not criticising people who read one hundred books or more in a year. That is a genuinely extraordinary accomplishment and if that is what reading looks like for you – if you are a fast reader who absorbs and retains and enjoys that volume of books – then that is wonderful and you should keep going. I am also not saying that these people should stay offline and not post about their achievements. I personally enjoy these posts, and I often get some inspiration from them on what to read next. I just wish that those viewing these posts would not compare themselves. Different readers read differently, and there is no hierarchy.
The number of books we read in a year has become a metric by which we assess our worth as readers. Reading has become wrapped up in productivity culture. But reading is not a productive pursuit. By this I mean: when you read a book, you do not make anything. You consume. You receive. You sit inside something someone else made and you let it do whatever it does to you. This is not a lesser activity. It is, I would argue, one of the most important activities available to us. It helps us develop empathy and understanding of the world around us.
Reading is not a productive pursuit. By this I mean: when you read a book, you do not make anything. You consume. You receive. You sit inside something someone else made and you let it do whatever it does to you.
Reading is fundamentally different in kind from running a marathon or learning a language or building a business, and we should probably stop treating it as though it belongs in the same category of measurable self-improvement.
You do not have KPIs to hit. You do not have quotas to fill. Save those for the working week. Your reading life belongs to you, and it should look like whatever is actually pleasurable and sustainable for you – not whatever the algorithm is currently pushing.
So, how did I actually read fifty-three books?
By reading whenever I genuinely wanted to, and not when I didn’t. By going on holiday and reading to excess with no guilt whatsoever. By having three books on the go at once. By listening to audiobooks on my many long solo walks. By choosing books I actually wanted to read, not books I felt I should read because they were trending. By not forcing myself to finish books I wasn’t enjoying. By not holding myself to a strict, unmoveable target.
That last one matters. I did not set out to read fifty-three books last year. I set out to read, and fifty-three was what happened. Some years it will be more. Some years it will be less. This year, who knows – perhaps it will be thirty, perhaps it will be seventy. Either way, I know that I will have taken everything I can from each one.
There is a version of this post that gives you a list of tips. Read on your commute. Listen to audiobooks on walks. Keep your book on the coffee table where you can see it. These things are all true and all mildly useful, and if you want that post I will write it. But I do not think that is what most people actually need.
What most people actually need – what I needed, for a long time – is permission.
Permission to feel good about ten books in a year if ten books is what you had time for and you truly experienced each one.
Permission to read three books in a day on holiday and no books for a fortnight in November when work is relentless and evenings are disappearing. Permission to count the audiobooks you listen to on the way to work as real books, because they are. Permission to feel good about ten books in a year if ten books is what you had time for and you truly experienced each one.
A note on slow reading, and fast reading, and the life in between
I preach slow reading on this blog because it is what serves me most of the time. Because I have found that the books I read slowly – the ones I take my time with, let breathe between sessions, sit with rather than race through – are the ones that stay with me longest.
But I am also a fast reader. When a book truly grips me, I do not slow down. I stay up until 2am. I read standing up in the kitchen while making dinner because I cannot put it down long enough to sit.
Both of these modes are valid. Both of them are reading. The slow, deliberate kind and the breathless, greedy, can’t-stop kind are not opposites – they are expressions of the same thing: a book that has you completely.
The reading life is not a single speed. It is whatever the book asks of you and whatever you have to give it on that day. Sometimes that is twenty minutes before sleep. Sometimes it is a whole Sunday. Some years it is fifty-three books.
I read fifty-three books last year and I savoured every one of them.
live slow, read more.
