Reading things can be good and fun and great, but only if you read what you want to read, what you’re interested in. This might sound easy, but it’s not, or you would have done it already. So these are the rules I follow to read all the books I want to read in a year. They’re all important, so scroll through, find a heading that speaks to you, and read it.

How to find what you like

When people say they don’t read much because they don’t like reading, they’re being silly. In this day and age we all read all the time; you can’t not like reading. What they really mean is that they don’t like what they’re reading. But that doesn’t have to be the case. There are things out there for everyone. You just need to know what you like and how to find it.

If you know what you like in life, this part is easy. What you like will not change just because you are reading a book. What do you like? There’s a book for that. Read it. Books were doing what apps do for centuries. ‘There’s a book for that’. Are you a shop assistant who plays football on the weekend? There are books for you. Are you a games developer who gardens in their spare time? There are books for you.

The books you like might not be organized how you expect. Don’t be put off. First, think fiction or non-fiction? If you’re looking to learn something, about anything, you’re looking for non-fiction. If you’re looking for a story for entertainment, you’re looking for fiction. These are not hard and fast rules, but until you know what you like, they’re good enough.

Next, think about what you like generally. If you’re a game developer, maybe you like the escapism, look in the sci-fi or fantasy sections. If you like the structure you can impose or the technical challenges, look at the auto-biography sections or in the classics section. I could do this kind of categorization all day, Tweet at me if you want help.

Once you know your section, you need to get the book. If you’re new to the section, pick one that’s highly rated with lots of reviews. Find your local book store, buy it, and crack on. Here’s a trick, check how many pages there are, work out what 10% of that is (multiply by 0.1), and read that many pages. If you get that far and you don’t like it. Stop. Go back to the shop, and try again.

Put shit down

There are more books to read than there are stars in the sky! Well, that’s not quite true, but there are a lot of books. If you don’t like the one you are reading, stop. There are more. There are better books waiting for you. There are a few easy ways to know if you should keep going:

• You didn’t notice you reached 10% until you passed it.
• You started to feel feelings.
• You want to know what happens next.
• It’s giving you ideas.
• You’re realizing you were wrong about the earth being flat.

Until you know what you like, if none of these things happen, put it down. Donate it to charity, sell it, or use it as décor so your friends know you can read. Whatever you want. But now you know, and that counts as one. 1 book down.

Yes. If you read part of a a book but didn’t like it so stopped reading it, you finished with that book. Tally it up, leave a review and look for something new. It might be worth buying more than one book at a time, especially early on.

More might well be merrier.

If you’re only reading one book at a time, it had better be a good one. If you’ve gotten past the 10% mark, you should know whether or not you like it. If you don’t, put it down. But let’s assume you do. That’s great, but as we said in the beginning, we spend so much time reading every day, on social media, on cereal boxes, on Netflix, that it’s okay to get tired. It’s also okay to get tired of reading a book, even if you’re enjoying it, move on to another, you can always come back to it later.

I usually have a fiction book and a non-fiction book going at any given time. I find some non-fiction books really interesting, but I can’t read them quickly. I pick it up when I feel like it, read a chapter, and give myself time to think about it. But I don’t stop reading, I just grab my fiction book the next day and read that instead. Unless it’s really really good and you can’t put it down, don’t feel like you can only read one at a time. You wouldn’t have the same food every day for a week so maybe you shouldn’t have the same book.

Engage!

Authors are people too. Mostly. I’m not sure about Kazuo Ishiguro. But being a person in 2022 means you’re online. Authors have Twitter or Facebook or Instagram too. Maybe they have a YouTube channel or their own website. Go and find out. Send them a message, tell them you like their book, let them know you’re reading it. Whatever. More often than not an author will have a place where you can chat, so go say hi. If they’re not there, other fans will be. People you can talk to about the book, ask what they thought, give your opinions, discuss how you might use what you learnt from it. Whatever tickles your fancy ✨

Book clubs are great, but only really if everyone enjoys the book. Comment sections or discussion forums are book clubs per book, except sometimes the author comes! Look through YouTube or Goodreads, odds are if the book your reading is good, there will be interviews with the author somewhere. Find out a bit about them; why they wrote the book, what they’re doing next, maybe they’re doing a signing soon?

Timing is something.

It’s not everything. But it’s something. They say when you’re building habits that one of the most important things is consistency. I don’t know if that’s true, I don’t build habits, I read books. But I do read books at more or less the same time every day. There are exceptions when I read more often in a given day, but the time is set aside.

For me, this is before I go to sleep. Whether I get into bed at 9 pm, or 10 pm or 11 pm, I always read at least a chapter before I go to sleep. More often than not, because I put shit down, I end up reading more than one chapter because I want to know what happens. And sometimes I fall asleep with it on my face and have to work out where I got to the next day.

Reading is good for you. I’ll do a whole other post about that at some point but trust me, however much sleep you miss because you read a chapter or two, it’s not wasted. If anything, you’re better off.

Do the maths, set a goal.

Don’t panic. It’s not hard maths. It just helps you get into a groove and understand how you read so that you can meet your goal:

1. Pick up a book. As long as its not a picture book it really doesn’t matter which one but ideally you should like it.
2. Look at a clock, write down the time, and start to read.
3. Read for as long as you like, enjoy yourself, can I get you a tea?
4. When you’re done or take a break, look at the clock again and write down the time.
5. Work out how long you were reading for and look at how many pages you read.
6. Divide the number of pages you read by the number of minutes it took you to read them. This will give you your ppm (pages per minute) number. If you read for longer than an hour, you can do the same to find your pph (pages per hour) number.

Now you can set your goals. Just knowing these numbers is useful, it will help you make a better guess at how much you can read before you go to sleep and how much reading you can get in on the train. If you are, or you become, a hardcore reader, there are some cool tricks you can do with these numbers to optimise your reading habits. But that’s another blog post.

To set your goal, we do a bit more maths. This is a really rough estimate, and we’re going to underestimate a little bit to be nice to ourselves. A novel is considered long if it is 400 pages or more so we’ll use 400 pages for this example. If your pph number is 50 and you plan to read a book for an hour every night before you sleep, then it will take you 400/50 (pages/pph) hours to read a book. That’s 8 hours. Great, so you could read a long book in just over a week. How many books a year? There are 365 days in a year; if you take 8 days to read a book, then you can read 45 and a half books a year.

That’s 45 books that are considered long, not taking into account holidays where you can read more, power outages where you can read more and not accounting for the shit you put down. Excellent. After a couple of months you can do these checks again, and maybe you’ll find you’ve gotten quicker.

The trick here is learning from what you’re doing. Observe how you are doing things at the moment, and iterate, make a change so that you can re-observe, learn, and improve.

Don’t give me excuses

People have said to me:

• ‘I don’t have the time.’
• ‘I’m too busy.’
• ‘I get distracted too easily.’
• ‘The world has gone insane I can’t focus on books for goodness sake!?!’

These are excuses—even the last one. Reading books is good for you and its great fun. If you don’t have time, or you’re too busy, just read before bed. Just half an hour, just 15 minutes, you’ll be better off for it. If you get distracted easily, you’re reading the wrong book. Find a better one. If you can’t focus on a book because the world has gone insane, go read ‘When all is said’ by Anne Griffin, that’ll make you feel better.