Book Time #28: The Right Amount of Reading
It’s been a while since I shared some of my recent work. Here’s what I’ve been up to:
More People Are Losing Global Entry, But Often Don’t Know Why
When air travel falters, how many travelers even have the train available as backup?
New York's Congestion Pricing Is Working. Five Charts Show How
More to come in 2026!
I’m not a New Years Resolutions person. I don’t like waiting until January to do something I think I ought to do. But I am making an exception this year. I want to read more. This got me thinking about what the “right” amount of reading is for me and the purpose of setting goals in general.
I started tracking the number of pages I read each year in 2020. That year I read 20,122 pages from 55 books (I finished 50 of them). In each successive year I have read fewer pages than the year before. Last year I read 14,323 pages. That’s a 29% drop from 2020. I would like to reverse this trend.
When I think about goals I have set for myself in the past, I usually picked an arbitrary round number that sounded good to me. For example I once set a goal of doing 10,000 pushups in a year. All that did was give me a shoulder injury and lifelong loathing of push ups. I suspect this is how a lot of people set goals.
But the older I get the more I think about why I’m setting a goal, what I want to get out of it, and how best to accomplish that. In other words, I actually think about it.
So I examined what I was really after. And I concluded my desire to read more is actually a manifestation of my discontent with how much time I spend on activities I regret. I have gotten pretty good at eliminating doomscrolling from my life but I still find myself losing hours and minutes to futzing around on my phone with other mindless tasks. I suspect with greater discipline I can squeeze an extra thousand or two pages a year by reducing those unwanted activities.
Now, I don’t aspire to re-create 2020’s reading productivity because 2020 was, well, 2020. I had way too much time to sit at home and read. In a way, 2020 demonstrated the upper bounds of my reading. And it taught me 20,000 pages is probably too many for a typical year.
I returned to a more reasonable level of about 17,000 pages per year in 2021 through 2023. In 2024 I got a new job, moved, and dropped below 15,000 pages for the first time. Last year I moved again. It seems the process of moving knocks about 2,000 pages from my annual total. Applying for a co-op reduces my reading by a further 1,000 pages.
For this year, I initially wanted to be ambitious and target 17,000 pages for my 2026 reading goal. That works out to about 325 pages a week. While doable, I’m going to aim lower. I just want to read more than I did last year. Therefore, my target is 14,323 pages, or an average of 275 pages per week. To help accomplish this, I’m going to make a concerted effort putting my phone away before I start reading.
This reading goal is in addition to my China goal: to read 10 books on China this year. I have already finished one, Two Kinds of Time by Graham Peck. I loved it. More to come on that in future editions.
So those are my reading goals for the year: 14,323 pages and ten books on China. If you have set any reading goals for yourself I’d love to hear about them! Just reply to this email. And, as always, any/all cats-with-books photos welcome.
Happy reading!