We all wish we knew how to read more books. But who has the time? And when you try find a little help online, you get really unhelpful advice like “Just spend more time reading”.
We can’t all add hours to our lives. So this post will show you how I go about getting the most out of the time I do have.
Using these habits, I grew from struggling to read one book a month to comfortably reading more than 100 books per year.
(And here’s a bonus: I retain far more of what I read than ever before.)
What are my book reading habit? Let’s take a look.
How To Read More: Book Habit #1
Build a Booklist
One of the best book-moves I ever made was creating a book wishlist. I keep these on Amazon as that is where I buy most of my books.
Actually, I have several:
- One for fiction books that I am just generally interested in
- One for non-fiction books I am generally interested in
- And one for books that will help me grow my businesses
Then I try to evenly cycle between the three.
How does this help me read over 100 books per year?
I don’t waste time deciding what to read next. I always have the next book bought and in hand before I finish the one before it. The only downtime I have between books is spent consolidating any notes I have taken.
Then it’s right onto the next book on the list.
How do you find books to read?
Start with seed books
When I first started working on the goal of reading 100+ books per month, I decided to pick a few books based on the things that interest me the most or matter the most to my life.
It’s been a few years so I don’t remember exactly what books I started with, but I believe the categories were:
- Psychology
- Philosophy
- Investing
- Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
The books I chose were my seed books. From there, I looked through book recommendations on Amazon, Goodreads, and recommendations made by my favorite bloggers.
But be sure to…
Listen to your writers
An often overlooked source of recommendations are the writers themselves. Often in a book, a writer will briefly mention some quote “from the fabulous book suchandsuch”.
I try to take note of these mentions. These tend to lead me to awesome (but often esoteric) reads.
Also, when I find a book that I especially loved, I look up that author and add their other books to my lists.
Focus on domain knowledge
One last point here: When I’m looking for books with the goal of learning something (rather than entertainment) I focus on increasing my domain knowledge.
That is, I will take time to plan out a specific curriculum with the goal of mastering that specific topic.
For example, when I wanted to learn about investing for my business, I did not just read every book I could find on investing. I knew that there was a specific kind (non-speculative investing) that I wanted to use in my businesses. So I sought out the most respected people in that niche and started with any books they might have written and/or recommended.
My seed book for this section was The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Why this one? Because everybody recommended or cited this book. It clearly had a huge impact on the domain I was trying to master.
From there, I looked for other books that were recommended alongside The Intelligent Investor. I also looked for any books that were written by people who had recommended The Intelligent Investor.
How long should my booklist be?
It could be as short as one (just so it’s long enough to make sure you don’t have to wait for shipping) or it could be whatever length feels comfortable.
Just don’t let it get so long you feel overwhelmed.
I usually have around 70 or 80 on mine. But again, I find those leads naturally. I don’t force it. Sometimes this will shrink by half or more.
How To Read More: Book Habit #2
Listen to Stories, Physically Read Non-Stories
Audible is your best friend. Seriously, I have saved so much money by using audible. (See below how I get the most out of my audible subscription).
Be careful here: When I say to listen to stories, I do not mean “Listen to fiction”.
Stories can and do include nonfiction as well. For example, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is not fiction (ok, a lot of it is… history burn!) but it is a story. So I listened to it on Audible.
The Simple Path to Wealth is not a story. It is a (the best, in my opinion) how-to guide for gaining financial independence. So I physically read it.
Why do I do it this way? Several reasons:
- I usually want to take notes on non-stories. So I don’t want to be driving and listening to it on Audible and find myself thinking dang I wish I could write that down.
- Stories tend to take longer to read. My mind wanders. I daydream. BUT if I have someone else reading it to me, I find it much easier to focus.
- I am far more likely to want to flip back and reread sections or chapters in non-story books. Non-stories are filled with facts and data that you want to reference over and over again.
Also, stories are not meant to give you concrete facts. They are meant to give you a sense, a feeling, a moral that you must integrate into yourself. When you listen to these stories, your brain will latch on to sense more firmly than if you read it off a page.
This is because of some whacky brain science, but my ridiculously oversimplified version is this:
When you read from a page, the words must go into your eyes, travel to the back of your brain, be deciphered into something recognizable, sent to the auditory centers so you can ‘think’ the sounds of the words, then to your memory centers for storage. (And this ignores all the processing power that goes into interpreting syntax, tonal modulation, ambiguous phrasing, homonyms… you get the picture).
When you hear the story, the words go into your ear, then into the memory centers. The cognitive effort is reduced. The tonal modulation, syntax, homonyms, and ambiguous phrasing are all worked out for you by the audiobook reader.
If you have a bias against listening to audiobooks, consider this last point:
Books are unnatural. Stories and information were handed down through spoken tradition far longer than physical books have existed. Physical books are wonderful and I have way too many of them, but they are not the most efficient form of reading.
Audiobooks are a technological way to return to our roots.
There is one exception to this rule:
Bedtime stories.
I always read fiction before bed. I try to read older or slower fiction (modern fiction tends to be too exciting and I have trouble falling asleep).
So physically read the classics before bed. Things that are heavily descriptive have worked best for me (Dickens; Bleak House) or books with a beautiful voice (Steinbeck;Travels With Charley).
(Bonus tip: If you have trouble sleeping,The Brothers Karamazov has worked wonders for me. I’ve been ‘reading’ it for five years now and I never get much more than a page read at a time before I fall asleep. I only break it out when the insomnia is at its worst, and it never fails.)
How To Read More: Book Habit #3
Fit reading into your schedule (Don’t change your schedule for reading)
Alright, I know.
Everybody tells you to set aside one hour everyday to sit down and read.
But who can do that? Bill Gates can. Woo. Good for him.
For the rest of us mortals, we have to fit our reading in wherever we can.
Some of the best advice I’ve got in this regard came from Stephen King. In his book On Writing (Highly recommended for any King fan, writing fan, reading fan, or even movie fan) King says that we need to train ourselves to read in small sips.
He carries a book with him everywhere and finds time to read throughout his day (waiting in line or for a movie to start or whatever).
This has been made even easier for us with the invention of ebooks and smartphone and bluetooth earphones.
I’ve taken this advice to heart. I now get more reading done during these odd times, than any intentional reading I try to do.
Most of my reading time…
I get most of my reading done while I’m commuting to work, doing chores, or taking a shower.
Here’s my set up:
For my commute, I play audiobooks through my car speakers. My car doesn’t have Bluetooth so I use one of these cables to plug into the stereo system. (Here’s one if you have an iPhone).
For chores, I pop these in my ears. Way cheaper than airpods and (for audiobooks at least) the sound is better (I have a hard time hearing some audiobooks on our airpods). They have the added bonus that you can use just one for the other because they independently connect to your Bluetooth. I didn’t think much of that feature when I bought them, but that is now the number one reason I don’t use something else.
I also have these. They are meant to stay in your ears while running, so these are better for heavy chores with lots of bending. These are my gardening earbuds. These aren’t as good for audiobooking, but they 100% stay in my ears even when sprinting.
And finally, for the shower. I have one of these hanging in the shower. It’s waterproof, sounds good and has a battery that usually lasts me a couple of weeks.
The best part is that I can start and stop the book with the buttons on the speaker (I don’t take my phone into the bathroom, it gets too humid).
There are more expensive versions out there (I paid $30) for it, but with audiobooks you just don’t need all the bells and whistles.
As for analog reading, I take a book with me wherever I might get the chance to sneak a read. I also keep an ebook loaded on my phone for surprise reading moments.
And finally, I do try to sit down and actually (like in an honest-to-God armchair) read each day. Between work and my daughter and a thousand other things, I generally manage about 20-40 uninterrupted minutes.
How To Read More: Book Habit #4
Make the most of your audiobooks
Once you get yourself good earbuds and a good waterproof speaker, you can crank up the speed.
Audiobooks are recorded at an intentionally low reading rate (usually around 150 words per minute).
They do this because it is the statistical average speaking speed for adults.
But! When you listen to radio, podcasts, newscasters, or actors in movies, they tend to talk faster.
Many people just start listening to audiobooks and never play around with the speed setting, but it has been my experience that just about everyone can crank up the playback speed.
Try it. Set the speed to 3x (or 300%). Listen for a minute or so.
It was probably too fast. I know it is for me.
But now dial it back to 2x (200%) speed. Suddenly it sounds like you’re listening to normal everyday speech.
In fact if you dial it back to the default (1x or 100%) speed, it sounds painfully slow.
It’s all relative.
Using those earbuds, I can comfortably (meaning that it sounds perfectly natural to me) listen at 2x speed to most narrators. (Some are better than others, but I rarely need to go below 1.5x)
Now let’s do a little math
How many books can you read in a year?
First some data:
- The average audiobook is 10 hours long Source
- The average American work commute is 54 minutes (27 minutes each way) Source
- The average American spends 23 hours per month on chores (Let’s round it down and call it 45 minutes per day) Source
- The average American watches 4 hours of TV per day
Let’s say you have made your book list. You’ve got good earbuds. You’re ready to go.
Pop in those earbuds and listen on your commute. At 54 minutes per day, you finished one book every 11 days.
200 working days divided by 11 = 18
You’ve read 18 books this year.
But wait, you listened at 2x speed.
Now you’ve read 36 books.
But you are listening while doing chores, right?
That’s another 27 books (54 books at 2x speed).
You’re up to 90 and you haven’t even given up those 4 hours of TV each night.
AND we haven’t added in all the reading you get done before bed or waiting in the doctor’s office or while taking a shower.
Reading 100+ books in a year isn’t anything special
But it has dramatically improved my life and my businesses. Most importantly, it has made me a better person.
Even if it helps you a tiny fraction of how it helped me, it will be worth it.
Books I Read In 2020
Keep in mind that I managed to read these in 2020, the worst of years. I have never worked harder or longer hours in my life than I did in 2020, and I still got through more than 100 books.
I know you can too.
(My favorites are in bold)
- Deep Work
- So You Want to Talk About Race
- Mythology
- Drood
- Creativity Inc
- Omnivore’s Dilemma
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces
- Proven Guilty – Dresden
- The Big Sleep
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
- Atomic Habits
- The Order of Time
- The Book of the Five Rings
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- Think and Grow Rich
- What is the Bible
- Sense of Style
- Enlightenment Now
- Sabriel
- Caffeine
- White Night
- The Narnia Series
- Song of Susannah
- The Art Of Thinking Clearly
- The Simple Path to Wealth
- Thinking in Bets
- In Defense of Food
- Genius
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- A Man For All Markets
- The Power of Habit
- The Body: A Guide for Occupants
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
- Silk Roads
- American Gods
- Your Money or Your Life
- Galileo’s Daughter
- Speak
- Algorithms to Live By
- Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing
- Conscious
- Happiness
- Half Acre Homestead
- The Alchemist (I read this every year)
- Tao of Pooh
- Flowers for Algernon
- H is for Hawk
- The Sixth Extinction
- Razor Girl
- I Will Teach You to be Rich
- Practical Demonkeeping
- The Serpent of Venice
- The Wealthy Barber
- Devil in the White City
- Business Adventures
- Sapiens
- Animal Farm
- E-Myth Revisited
- Tap Dancing to Work
- Essentialism
- The Art Of War
- The New One Minute Manager
- Guns, Gems, and Steel
- Emotional Intelligence
- The Millionaire Next Door
- Building A Story Brand
- The Blue Ocean Strategy
- The Handmaid’s Tale
- The Automatic Millionaire
- Slaughterhouse-Five
- Start With Why
- Learn by Living ( Probably my favorite book of the year. Eleanor Roosevelt is one of my favorite people ever.)
- Built to Last
- Rework
- The 4-Hour Work Week
- Shoe Dog
- Give and Take
- Alchemy
- The Charisma Myth
- Problogger
- Scrum
- 10% Entrepreneur
- Sacre Bleu
- Count of Monte Cristo
- The Martian Chronicles
- A Bite Sized History Of France
- The Truth
- The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time
- The Outline Of Science
- $100 Start Up
- Turn of the Screw
- Don Quixote
- Descartes’ Discourse on Method
- Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy
- A Mind for Numbers
- Virtual Freedom
- Sourcery
- Pieces of Light
- Something Wicked This Way Comes
- Diary of a Nobody
- Candide
- Fool
- Rest
- If You Ask Me
- The Goal
- Sioux Chef
- Quackery
Bonus: Graphic Novels I Read in 2020
The Amulet Series (I read these with my 8 year old daughter and we loved them).
Monet: Itinerant of Light (Learned so much about Monet from this beautiful book).
Double Bonus: My Supercharged Audible Account
Or: How I get my audiobooks for less than $6 each.
As of this writing, I have been a premium member of Audible for 4 years.
Audible Premium Plus costs $15 per month. (For that $15 you get one credit per month to exchange for an audiobook to keep forever).
In those 4 years, 121 of my reads have come from Audible.
But wait…
If you only get 1 audiobook per month for four years, I should only have had 48 reads. How did I get 121?
Here’s my secret:
Audible regularly has 2-for-1 deals.
I make sure to always have at least one credit in reserve for those 2-for-1 deals. You never know when they are going to be, so it’s always a nice surprise.
AND
Audible also has a bunch of audiobooks that you can just listen to for free as well. (I recently listened to The Martian completely free).
Over my 4 years of listening to Audible, I have averaged a cost of around $5.80 per audiobook.
Had I bought even the cheapest paperback copies for $9.99, I would have spent around $1,200!
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Looking for more reading ideas? Check out our Book Recommendations for the best of the books I’ve read.
Interested in learning more about how we turned our summer break into a successful home based business? Check out:
