How to Read a Book a Week Without Making It a Chore

A book a week sounds like a lot until you do the sums.

The actual maths

The average novel is roughly 90,000 words. Most people read somewhere between 200 and 300 words a minute. That is about five to seven and a half hours per book — under an hour a day.

You almost certainly already have that hour. It is just currently in your phone.

Where the hour comes from

• Twenty minutes at breakfast. No screens on the table.
• Twenty minutes at lunch, or on the bus, or in the car before you go into the house.
• Twenty minutes before sleep, phone in another room.

Three twenties beats one hour, because you never have to find a big free block.

The habits that make it stick

Always have the next book chosen. The gap between finishing and starting is where weeks disappear.

Keep a book in every bag. Not the same book. Whichever book.

Pick shorter books when life is loud. A 300-page contemporary romance in a busy week keeps the streak alive better than a heroic attempt at an epic fantasy.

Do not track everything. Logging pages helps some readers and ruins it for others. If your reading journal starts to feel like homework, close it.

What to do about slumps

A slump is usually a mismatch, not a lack of discipline. Change genre, change format, change length. Audiobooks count. Rereads count. Finishing nothing for a fortnight also counts as being a reader.

If you want a gentle nudge, the reading bingo challenge gives you a seasonal card of prompts, and the monthly book club gives you one book and one deadline — which for a lot of people is the whole trick.