Picture the scene: it is New Year’s Eve 2020. We are due at a friend’s house to start the NYE festivities, and I am in my bedroom, frantically… reading.
I had set myself a goal of reading 52 books that year and finished my 52nd book with about four hours left of December 31st. But a hard deadline is a hard deadline, and I was determined not to fall at the final hurdle.
Like doing Couch to 5k if you want to get started with running, doing a reading challenge was my way of pulling myself out of a seven-year reading drought.
I loved books as a child - maxing out my library allowances, reading Harry Potter with a torch under the covers, cramming endless paperbacks of Celia Rees and the Babysitters Club and Jacqueline Wilson onto my bookshelves and under my bunk bed - then my after-school job at Sixth Form was as a library assistant. I was basically Rory Gilmore if Stars Hollow was a Yorkshire seaside town, and she went to a regular school.
So given all these bookish boxes that I ticked, it made sense that I would do English Literature at university… which subsequently ruined reading for me for over half a decade. By the end of the degree, we were meant to be finishing two 400ish page novels a week (generally in the genre of “written by middle-aged/old white men”), plus any supplementary reading for essays.
Reading went from being a lovely activity I did for fun to a weekly set of challenges to muscle through, with an awful essay period at the end.
After graduation, I still loved the idea of books - I liked wandering around in bookshops, admiring the covers, and I’d ask for books for Christmas - but I never read them. I would carry an increasingly dog-eared paperback around with me for weeks on end, listlessly reading the same pages over and over again on the tube.
It’s a sign of how little reading I did that in the almost five years I lived in London, I never joined a library.
Flash-forward to this year, when my reading challenge aim was 100 books.
I hit that goal on November 30th 🎉
December is just for freestyle reading bab-eh!
But just in case the idea of reading 100 books makes you feel very overwhelmed, it’s taken me 3 years to go from 52 to 100. I think this is the equivalent of graduating very sensibly from Couch to 5k, to a 10k to a half marathon. Growth doesn’t have to be fast to be good.
So if you too have fallen out of love with reading, or were never a big reader to begin with, here are some tips to bring more books into your life…
Read books you like
If you are starting from a position of reading no books at all, or just picking up a poolside thriller on holiday, do not use any list of “Books everyone should read before they die” or “Greatest books of all time” as a jumping-off point. I know it’s very satisfying to have a list of things to tick off and some guidance on what to do next, but there’ll be time for that later.
You need to start a reading habit from a position of enjoyment - not staring at your unopened James Joyce novel every day and feeling sad.
You also don’t have to be reading the Booker shortlist to be reading. A book is a book - you’re still building that reading muscle, whether it’s by Zadie Smith or Richard Osman. Similarly, you don’t have to read books about productivity and business and being a boss, even if those ads for Blinkist make it seem like they’re the only books that matter.
If you like crime dramas, read crime novels. If you love celebrity gossip, read some celebrity memoirs. If you read a couple of books last year and found one that you really liked, Google “Books like [that book]” and people on the internet will likely have some great recommendations.
Or if you’ve got pals with similar tastes to you, ask them what they’ve been enjoying lately (but if they’re the kind of friend you know you couldn’t go to the cinema with, because you wouldn’t agree on what film to see, maybe don’t ask them). I also know that there are a few BookTokers or BookTubers who like similar books to me, so I’ll watch their videos for ideas too.
I’ve also popped a few vibe-based recommendations at the end of this post.
And embrace not finishing books. If you’ve got a quarter of the way through and you’re not actively looking forward to getting further into it, just stop.
Set A Reading Goal
If you really want to read more books, having a goal is very motivating, but for goodness sake, make it manageable. One hundred books is not a realistic expectation to set for yourself if you read one book last year.
I like to break it down by timeframes. Think about how many books you could read in a month or a week and multiply it to fill the year.
However, even though I’ve found them useful, reading challenges can make you read in quite a restricted way - avoiding long books, finishing books even though you didn’t enjoy them, racing through books and not really taking them in.
Reading is meant to be fun and relaxing - it was the number one most restful activity in The Art of Rest by Claudia Hammond - so be mindful if you feel like a goal is making you muscle through things, like me with my Third Year reading list.
Track your reading
Even if you’ve not got a specific goal in mind, it’s satisfying to have a list of all the books you’ve read, and also somewhere to track all the books you want to read. I use an app (Storygraph), but you could also make a tracker in Notion or Excel, or just write it down somewhere.
Have a few books on the go
I generally have a non-fiction (fact) book I read in the mornings and a fiction (story) book to read at night. I also normally have an audiobook on the go, which tends to be autobiographies being read by the author or a fun non-fiction book (I can’t take in fiction as an audiobook).
Listening to audiobooks definitely counts as reading, by the way.
[If you have a Spotify Premium account, you get 15 hours of audiobook listening included with your membership each month (but beware, if you’ve got a family or duo plan, only the “Account Manager” gets access to that - something Dom and I learnt the hard way. Audiobooks also aren’t included in Spotify Premium for Students.)]
Make time for reading…
This is very easy for me to say as a freelancer with no caring responsibilities, but if you genuinely want to read more, you do need to make more time for it. That could look like:
Having a book by your bed, and reading for a little while when you wake up, instead of immediately looking at your phone
Reading a chapter on your lunch break
Listening to an audiobook whilst you’re walking the dog or on a commute
Taking yourself to a coffee shop once a week to read
Going to bed twenty minutes earlier to get cosy and read
And I’m not going to shame you for how high your screen time is (I ignore my limits for TikTok and Instagram every day), but if you know that you’re on social media for an hour a day, maybe, maybe some of that scrolling time could be switched to reading…
… And make it feel easy
It’s so easy to reach for your phone if you’re bored, so make it just as easy to reach for a book.
I was very anti-Kindle for a long time - I even wrote an essay about why I thought e-readers were bad for literature - but having a Kindle, especially if you travel a lot, has made reading much easier. It’s always in my bag; I can carry it around my house like a phone; there’s always a choice of books available if I’m not vibing with the one I’m currently reading.
But you can also get the same effect by keeping a physical book in your bag, on your bedside table, in the bathroom - any place that you could otherwise be scrolling.
I’ve popped a little list of my favourite books of the year (so far) below, but I’d love to know what books you’ve enjoyed recently. Jólabókaflóð is almost upon us after all.
Some Recommendations
Here is a selection of fun books that could get you excited about reading again (or be a great gift).
Fiction
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
It’s David Copperfield but better (sorry Dickens), and set in opioid crisis America
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
If the cheat codes ‘motherlode’ and ‘rosebud’ means anything to you, you’ll love this book. Even if you didn’t - it’s a banger
Outlawed by Anna North by Anna North
Crime, herbology and gender nonconformity in the Wild West
I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai
Great for fans of both true crime podcasts and waspy American boarding school dramas
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
You’ll like this if you love SNL or 30 Rock
The List by Yomi Adegoke
Do you live for internet drama? Are your WhatsApp conversations full of screenshots of other people’s posts? This one’s for you
Babel by R.F. Kuang
Did you love His Dark Materials? Then you’ll also probably love this. Also, side recommendation - re-read His Dark Materials as an adult (I wept profusely)
Non-Fiction
Strong Female Character by Fern Brady
Fern has had a funny and weird and emotional life - listen as an audiobook, you won’t regret it
Girly Drinks: A World History of Women & Alcohol by Mallory O’Meara
One of those books that makes you look at the world in a completely different way