How to read more books, without a heroic plan

The way to read more books is to read a little every day, carry a book everywhere, quit the ones you are not enjoying, and keep the next one ready before you finish this one. That is all. No heroic plan required, and heroic plans are usually where reading goes to die.

Let us be honest about ourselves first, kindly.

The knight of the nightstand

Many of us keep a tower of books beside the bed. It is a noble tower. It contains the history of an empire we fully intend to understand, a novel everyone mentioned at a dinner, and a book about productivity with a bookmark on page eleven. Each night we lie beside this tower and look at our phones.

We are not lazy. We are idealists. We are waiting for the perfect conditions: a free weekend, a long holiday, a quiet mind, a comfortable chair by a window, rain. Reading, we believe, is a grand adventure that requires proper preparations.

It does not. Reading is ten minutes on a bus.

Read a little, every day

Small amounts add up faster than you would think. Here is some hypothetical arithmetic:

• Twenty pages a day for a year is 20 times 365, which is 7,300 pages.
• If a typical book were around 300 pages, that would be about 24 books.

Twenty pages is not a reading retreat. For many readers it is a lunch break or the time before sleep. Pick a time of day that already exists in your life, after the morning coffee, on the train, in bed, and attach your reading to it. A habit fastened to another habit holds better than one floating free.

Always carry a book

The great enemy of reading is not a lack of time. It is a lack of a book at the moment time appears. Waiting rooms, queues, delayed trains and the quarter-hour before a meeting are full of minutes that drift toward the phone because nothing else is to hand.

Carry a paperback, or keep an e-reader app on the phone itself, so that the phone becomes the book's ally rather than its rival.

Read what you want, not what you think you ought

Some of us read as if a strict examiner were standing at our shoulder. We choose books to improve ourselves and then avoid them for months. Meanwhile the book we would actually enjoy sits unread because it seems too frivolous.

Enjoyment is not a lesser motive. A book you look forward to gets read. A book you dread gets dusted.

Quit without guilt

You are allowed to stop reading a book. Give it a fair chance, perhaps fifty pages, and if it still feels like a duty, set it down. Every week you spend not finishing a book you dislike is a week you are not reading at all. The tower will forgive you.

Keep the next book ready

The gap between books is where many readers vanish. You finish something, feel pleased, and a month passes before you begin again. Before you reach the last chapter, choose the next book and put it where you will see it.

Audiobooks count

Listening to a book while walking, cooking or driving is reading by another road. Some readers worry it is cheating. It is not. The story still reaches you.

Read with other people

A friend reading the same book, or a small reading group, adds a gentle deadline and someone to talk to. Even saying aloud, "I am reading this," makes it more likely you will.

Four classics to start

If you want somewhere to begin, here are four well-known books, all old enough to be in the public domain in many countries, so free editions are easy to find.

• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. A short novel about a miser visited by ghosts on Christmas Eve. It can be read in an evening or two.
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. A boy, a map, pirates and a buried fortune. It moves quickly and is good company on a commute.
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. A collection of short detective stories, each one complete in a sitting. Ideal for reading in small pieces.
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. A sharp, funny novel about marriage, money and first impressions. Longer, but the dialogue carries you.

Notice that two of these are perfect for a reader with only ten minutes. That is not an accident.

What to do tonight

• Choose one book you actually want to read.
• Put it in your bag, or on the pillow.
• Read ten pages before you look at your phone.
• Tomorrow, do it again.

Then forgive yourself for the tower. Every reader has one. The difference is that some of us read from the bottom of it, a few pages at a time, and some of us only admire its height.