How to Read 100 Books this Year (or hit any reading goal)

Got a burning desire to read more books this year? Here’s how, reader.

Feb 20, 2024

Got a burning desire to read more books this year? Here’s how, reader.

One of the things about me is I read.

I read and I read and I read and then I don’t stop reading. Somewhere, somebody who knows me has made a joke about how my house will be burning down as the first verified extraterrestrials are landing and an armed rodent is making off with my favorite new pricey leather clutch and I will be reading.

These days, I naturally read more than 100 books a year without setting a goal to do so. That said, I didn’t start out at that number. That’s why this post is focused on exactly how to read 100 books this year, or how to read more books this year than you did last year, if for some unknown reason this is your true desire.

PS: Do you not like how-to posts? It’s ok, because this isn’t a regular one. This is a how-to post with SNARK.

Here we go…

1. Set a goal for exactly how much you want to read this year.

I once wrote a book on productivity. People liked it. Sarah Blakely, the billionaire founder of Spanx, has read it three times, according to Instagram. There is a lot of stuff in that book I don’t live by any longer, but here is one universal truth: if you don’t know where you wanna go, you ain’t gonna know when you get there.

(If you are the reader right now questioning why we should want to go anywhere, as opposed to just vaguely wafting in the wind until life feels amenable, I see you. That said, given this post is entitled How to Read 100 Books a Year, we can assume most people are here because they do have something they want to actively set their mind to do, i.e. read more books!)

I’m not going to bore you with all the peculiar and debated tenants of effective goal-setting, but know this: specificity can help. Get a number. Or a range. Something I can work with, people!

2. Break down your annual goal into monthly averages.

You don’t hit a big goal by doing it all at once. (Unless it’s getting hit by lighting. If your goal is to get hit by lighting, and you achieve it, it will happen all at once.) When it comes to reading a set number of books, you’ve got to break down that goal.

According to my kids’ homework, to read 100 books a year you need to read 2 books a week, or a little more than 8 books a month. If you stick to this average, you’ve got your annual goal covered. Some months you won’t hit this, but other months (like ones when you go on vacation and spend a lot of time on the tarmac waiting for the FAA to send out a tweet saying they are definitely, truly, pinkie-promise going to put the bolts on your plane this time), you will exceed this.

Hurrah!

3. Figure out how long your goal will take.

I am a pretty fast reader and I know that I read about 200 words a minute, give or take. Business or health books that require highlighting or note-taking can be slower, and novels can be quicker. If an average book is 60,000 words, I can read one book in a little over four hours. So I would need about 8 hours a week to read 2 books.

Now, you do your math.

Get a book. Count the words on a full page. Then, read 5-10 full pages of that book using a timer. Math it! That’s how many words you can read a minute. You can also do this with a Kindle, although the instructions escape me. Is this exact science? No, Linda. Is it good enough? Prolly, Bob.

4. Read multiple books at once.

Have you seen the memes about how all our dopamine-dinging devices have left many of us unable to get through even one page of a real, live book?

Even those of us who don’t have ADHD have worse attention spans than we used to. If you’re actively trying to read more books this year, one way to ameliorate this is to make sure you are always reading multiple books at once.

I do this, and it helps me when I get mildly bored of one story (but not bored enough to put it down for good). It also helps allows me to always have a book for my mood. If I have 5 minutes waiting in line for fungal cream, it’s easier for me to read a memoir or novel than to get through another page in some dense book on small business accounting, for example. If I’m reading in bed late at night, I prefer non-fiction to help me fall asleep. I choose different types of books at different occasions, and that means I always have a book that will work in a given scenario.

You can do the same, reader!

5. Audiobooks are your friend.

Audiobooks are a fantastic way to “read” more. And by “read” I really mean read.

Full stop.

Let’s say you do the math and figure out you need to spend about 10 hours a week reading to hit your reading goal this year. If you’re employing strategy #3 (Read Multiple Books at Once), you could then plan for 4 of those 10 hours to be done via audiobook. On long commutes, when exercising, when washing dishes, you can pop in your earbuds and listen along.

Tips: Engaging stories or simple non-fiction are great for audiobook, but I find dense non-fiction tough going. Similarly, any book you will want to take notes on is a sucky idea. Finally, search for lists of good audiobooks when considering which books to read-read, and which to listen-read. A fabulous narrator is what you’re after.

6. Turn the goal into a habit.

As I talk about in Design Your Day, the holy grail of goal-setting is when the goal becomes a habit. In my case, I don’t set goals to read 100 books anymore because now it’s just a thing I’m gonna do. Like watching Real Housewives and washing my face with special non-soap thrice a day, it’s gonna happen. If I did write a list of annual goals this year, reading 100 books wouldn’t be on it.

This principle works for the larger goal (how many books you want to read) but it also works for the actions you take to achieve that goal.

So, in the example of the audiobook listening, if you have decided that you should be listening to 4 hours a week of audiobooks, then try hard to make that a natural habit as fast as possible. And you do that with regular rinsing and repeating. As soon as it becomes something automatic, then you don’t have to think about it. A habit. Ta-da!

Final thoughts

The elephant in the room is why you’d want to read 100 books at all. As opposed to sitting around breathing, or going on walks, or cleaning the underside of the big metal thing above the stove that looks entirely too imposing to just be there as I try to calmly stir my oatmeal.

And the answer is that I can’t tell you.

But what I can tell you is that you’ve got to be careful with goals.

Goals are tricky little addictive things, and they’re easy to obsess over and slowly increase over time until all of a sudden you’re spending a whole lot of time doing something you don’t want to be doing in the first place. I’ve done that. Like the year I set a goal to read 200 books, jamming 15-pointed font garbage down my throat on December 23rd to tick things off.