How to read more

To read more books, you need a time of day that belongs to reading, and fewer things that pull you away from the book. These five ideas help with both. You can start any of them tonight.

1. Read at the same time every day. Pick something you already do every day, like riding the train or getting into bed. Read right then. Then you do not have to decide each evening whether to read. That is how a habit forms.
2. Put a book where your phone was. If the book is on your pillow and the phone is in another room, the book is the easy thing to pick up.
3. Take the book with you. Every day has spare minutes in a line or a waiting room. A paper book, a book on your phone and an audiobook all count.
4. Stop reading a book you do not like. A book you do not want to open stops all your reading. You do not have to finish it. Pick one you want to read.
5. Count minutes, not books. Books come in very different sizes. A minute is always a minute. Write down how long you read each day, and the finished books will follow.

Have you not read in years? Start with ten minutes a day and a short book you really want to read. When ten minutes feels easy, add five more. Why a few minutes every day add up is on the power of consistency.

Most adults read about 51 pages of nonfiction in an hour, or about 56 pages of a novel. Novels go a little faster because their words are shorter. These numbers come from a large review of studies on reading speed (Brysbaert, 2019).

That is for a page of about 278 words. A textbook has more words on a page, so you will read fewer of its pages in an hour. To find your own speed, take the reading speed test.

A book of 300 pages takes about 5h 50m to read at the average adult speed. That is less than one working day. A book still takes weeks to finish, because most of us read it a few minutes at a time.

At 20 minutes a day, that book takes about 18 days. At an hour a day, it takes about 6 days. The book is the same. Only your minutes a day changed.

No research sets a number of books you should read in a year. A good number is one that fits the minutes you have. One book a month takes about 12 minutes a day.

It can help to know what other people read, and it is less than you might think. In one survey, one in four American adults had read no book in the past year. In an earlier survey, the adult in the middle had read 5 books. So one book a month is far more than most people read.

You can read faster by skimming, but you will understand less. Skimming means running your eyes over a text to pick up the main points. No method has been shown to make people read much faster and still understand just as much. That is what a large review of the research on reading found (Rayner and colleagues, 2016).

What does make you a faster reader is reading more. Each time you meet a word, you read it a little quicker the next time. This takes years, and it comes by itself as you read. So you do not need a trick. You need more minutes.

Every number on this page comes from one of these sources, and we read all four in full. The pages an hour, the hours for a book and the books a year are our own sums, worked out from the averages in the first source.

1. Brysbaert (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language.
2. Rayner and colleagues (2016). So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
3. Pew Research Center (survey of October 2025) (read October 7, 2026). Americans still opt for print books over digital or audio versions; few are in book clubs.
4. Pew Research Center (survey of January and February 2021) (read October 7, 2026). Three-in-ten Americans now read e-books.