When I tell people this, they often say something to the effect of “You must spend all your time reading!” While I know I must spend a lot of time reading (because there’s no other way to read 75+ books a year), it doesn’t feel like it to me, thanks to these reading habits:

Read Ten Minutes Every Day

If you make a big commitment to read for many hours every day, you are going to overwhelm yourself. Make a much smaller commitment: commit to reading for ten minutes every day. If you’re bored to tears by the end of that ten minutes, allow yourself to quit reading — but chances are, you won’t be. Ten minutes becomes an hour much more easily than you think.

Read Multiple Books At Once

All serious readers know that if you read one book at a time, you’ll get burnt out before you know it. Humans are variable — we are not always in the mood to read the same kind of book every day. If you force yourself to slog through a Chemistry book day after day, you’ll start to hate reading pretty quick.

Instead, have many books you are reading at any given time. For me, this looks like:

one or two personal development books

one book about civilization (theology, economics, politics, etc.)

one book about clinical psychology

one book about history

(For 2020, I’m considering throwing a fiction book into the mix as well.)

The mix of books you’re reading at any given time should be based on your own personal interests: What do you enjoy reading? What do you want to read more of? Read books like those.

Don’t Force Yourself To Finish Books You’re Not Enjoying

When I was a kid, I was a picky eater. When I ate my Kid’s Cuisine® child TV dinners, I always ate the brownie section out of the tray before eating the main meals.

My parents, fed up with the fact that the only thing I wanted to eat was the chicken nuggets and brownies from a TV dinner, told me one night I wasn’t allowed to get up from the table until I ate the (very small) portion of peas as well.

Instead of eating the peas, I threw an incredible fit. I pouted, I cried, I screamed. Finally, after several hours, I choked down those peas like they were cow bones and ran upstairs to cry as if eating peas was a traumatic experience.

Was I a little tyrant of a child? Possibly. The moral of this story, though, is not that I was a poorly behaved child, but that it was well into adulthood before I was willing to eat anything green. A couple of episodes of being forced to eat vegetables I did not want to eat early in my life made me see vegetables as a punishment, something one had to endure.

As soon as I became old enough to pick what I ate for myself, I stopped eating them altogether. I had to get old enough to worry about vitamins and coronary heart disease before I thought that maybe it might be good for me to eat a vegetable.

I think the public school system teaches many people a similar attitude about reading. Like eating vegetables, most children enjoy reading — until the school system forces them to read books they don’t want to read. Reading is transformed from a source of pleasure to a source of punishment, and students learn to hate reading. Once they become adults, they give it up altogether.

Nobody can force themselves to read 75 books a year. If you want to read 75 books a year, you’re going to have to enjoy it. And you’re only going to enjoy it if you’re not forcing yourself through it. So if you start reading a book only to find you’re not enjoying it anymore, don’t force yourself to finish it. Find something else you’ll enjoy more, and read that instead. Personally, I count books I give up on as having been "read." I don't want to force myself to finish a book just because I've already read half of it and want it to count toward my reading goal. So even if I only read 30 pages before deciding it's a scrap book, I count it toward my reading goal.

Don’t Plan Ahead

Some people like to go to stores and buy tons of books at once and tell themselves they’ll read them all eventually. Other people slowly accumulate stacks of books on their end table, saying

“I’ll read this, and then I’ll read this, and then I’ll read this…”

In my lived experience reading, though, this is not how it works. I’ve made lists of books to read, only to find upon finishing a book that I don’t really want to read any of the books I have queued up.

Sometimes after finishing a book, I feel sufficiently educated and don’t feel a need to read on a particular subject any further.

Sometimes after finishing a book, I just feel bored with that subject matter and want something new.

Sometimes, I am so excited by what I just read that I want to read everything else that author has ever written.

Additionally, you can’t know where your life is going to be in one or two weeks. It has happened that I’ve started books on a particular subject (such as a book about running) only to find that several weeks later, I’ve built a habit of powerlifting with a friend and am no longer interested in running. My reading plan might have more running books on it, but I’m no longer interested in it.

Invariably, my little “reading plans” never account for these things, so I very quickly gave up making them. Once I finish a book, I decide what will be most beneficial for me to learn at that moment. It’s a just-in-time delivery system for education.

I recommend you do the same. Make a list of books you think you might like to read in the future (this is what I use the Goodreads to-read list for) and then pick from that list when you’re ready for another book. Bonus: This method saves you money as well because you never purchase books you don't end up reading.

Trade In A Time-Wasting Activity

This is the entry on this list nobody will want to hear: If you want to read 75 books a year, you need to trade in a time-wasting activity.

Look — I’m not all that hard-working. If I have to work more than five hours a day, I mope about as if I’ve been working 16 hours, not five (I know, I’m a real prize of a human). The only reason I’m able to read 75+ books a year (plus exercise, meditate, socialize, all that other stuff) is that there are a lot of things I don’t do:

I don’t use social media. At all.

I watch less than 7 hours of video content a month. I don’t own a TV.

I buy online so I don’t have to run errands.

I don’t play video games on any platform. I own nothing I can game on.

Since I don’t use social media, don’t play video games, don’t run errands, and don’t even have a car I could run those errands with, there’s really not much for me to do when I’m home alone. Part of the reason I read so much is that there’s just nothing else for me to do.

I’m not saying you have to delete all your social media and sell your TV (but if you’re considering it, I highly recommend it). All I’m saying is that if you want to read 75 books a year — indeed, if you want to make any kind of time-intensive change to your life — you need to give up a time-intensive time-wasting activity in return. If you’re going to read 75 books a year, the time spent reading has to come from somewhere.

What most people recommend here is to trade in social media time for reading. If you move your social media apps to the rear of your phone’s organizational system (or delete them off your phone altogether) and move the Kindle app to your phone’s home screen, you can easily trade in ten minutes of scrolling for ten minutes of reading. Since most people wish they spent less time on social media, this is a win-win.

Get Used To Ebooks

If you’re like most people, you probably prefer reading paper books to reading ebooks. I totally get it — paper books smell nice, and you can turn the pages, and they have pretty covers. We all love paper books.

But, if you intend to read 75 books a year, you’re probably not going to be able to do it without reading at least a few ebooks. Why?

Physical books are $12-$25 a pop. Do you have $1,500 to spend on books this year?

You can find affordable physical books at Half-Price Books and your local library, but now you’re limited by what’s in stock. This means books written recently are pretty much not going to be an option. Are you willing to spend $500 on books this year that are not even recent?

If you’re reading 75 books a year, you’re reading 1.5 books a week. Reading 1.5 books is itself a major time commitment — will you have the additional time it takes to run to the store twice a week to get more books?

You can avoid the time sink by purchasing physical books on Amazon or by purchasing many books at one time. But as we discussed earlier, you really shouldn’t plan ahead what you read too much, and bulk-purchasing books on Amazon or at Half-Price, and placing books on hold at your local library, involves a lot of prior planning.

There’s one more problem: If you’re serious about your new reading habit, you need to be able to read wherever you are. It would be really stupid for you to fail at your reading goal simply because you don’t have a book on hand. And if you’re reading many books at once, as you should be, you need to be able to read any of these books wherever you are. All of this means you are now beholden to carrying around multiple physical books wherever you are.

The good news is, there’s a solution which sidesteps these problems.

Enter Libby

Libby is an app for your phone which gives you access to an extensive library of ebooks and audiobooks for free.

All you have to do is go to your local library, sign up for a library card, and enter those card details into Libby. Once you’ve decided what to borrow from Libby, you can send print ebooks directly to your Kindle (either your Kindle app or on your Kindle reader) or listen to audiobooks directly within their app.

It doesn’t take any time, because you don’t have to go anywhere or wait for anything. It doesn’t take any money, because library cards are free. It doesn’t require you carry around anything, because the Kindle app is available for almost every device (but if you’re an overachiever, you can purchase an extremely affordable and lightweight Kindle reader).

Look, I get it — paper books are beautiful. Holding them reminds you of the joy of being engrossed in a book as a child. They look really good on your shelves. When people come over to your house, your books make you look smart. They smell like paper or something.

All of these aesthetic aspects of book ownership are really enjoyable. But they are also getting in your way. Don’t let the aesthetics of book ownership keep you from actually reading a damn book. Although it may seem like it, I'm not actually against physical books. Now that I've been reading for a few years, I'm considering building a personal library of physical books for myself. But if I refused to read ebooks in those first years of reading seriously, chances are my reading habit would have never gotten off the ground. If you want to build a library, do it - but build your reading habit first.

The Takeaway

There is no perfect set of habits that will transform you into a reader. The only thing that makes a reader is your decision to read. Even a little kid in a third world country with access to nothing but a few dilapidated books can become a reader if she is determined to do so.

But you’re not a little kid in a third world country, you’re (probably) an adult with (definite) access to the internet, and building these reading habits will make becoming a reader a hell of a lot easier.