The Year You Became a ReaderIt's time to step out of the matrix and start reading again.

The macro strategy behind all the following micro strategies is to increase your overall minutes of eyeballs on page.

It’s easy to try to overcompensate and say, “OK, I vow to read a hundred books this year!”

Don’t force yourself to finish more books as fast as you can. You’ll end up slogging through something you’re not enjoying just for the sake of adding it to your stack of completions.

You’ll say, “I’ve already come this far, I gotta finish it.”

Let it go. Let it go. You can’t win at reading by making it a grueling chore.

Instead, if you aim to simply increase your time spent reading you will certainly achieve the goal of reading and finishing more books but more importantly have a great time doing it.

You can keep track of your reading time in a few ways:

• Set a timer
• Commit a block of time on your calendar
• Or, use an e-reader (Kobo and Kindle keep track of reading time for you)

IMPORTANT: Don’t forget to “warm in,” as I call it. When you first sit down to read your mind may wander for ten to fifteen minutes or so, particularly if you are switching over from social media or a cognitively demanding task. This is normal.

Give yourself enough time to warm into what you’re reading before giving up and throwing the book at the wall.

When the nascent reader first sets out upon his journey it’s easy to quickly get stymied by looking for books in all the wrong places:

• “What’s the current best-seller?”
• “I only want to read about today’s relevant issues.”
• “I don’t like fiction because it’s not real.”
• “What’s that book my friends are all talking about?”
• “What’s hot on social media?”
• “I don’t like self-help books.”
• “How do I cure my reading FOMO as fast as possible?”
• “I want to read what will make me sound smart at parties.”

Hold your horses.

If you’re just coming into your new life of the mind fresh from reading nothing-at-all you don’t even know what you like yet.

Start simply with the thing that most excites and engages you right away.

If you know you like science facts, pick up a casual, easy-to-read book by a science popularizer (there’s plenty of them). If you’re addicted to arguing about politics online, try a political book (there’s plenty of them). If you like true crime podcasts then open wide because there’s a virtually unlimited supply of true crime books for you to dig into (with all the gory details you don’t get on TV and podcasts for the sake of good taste).

Take some time out at your public library. Grab a stack of books with interesting cover blurbs and sample them at your leisure. This is an easy, low stakes way of finding something you like.

The Amazon algorithm is also good at pointing you toward other books you will like based on past reading history. Also, authors are good at referencing other books in their writing.

Soon your reading garden will be heavily pollinated with stuff you’re interested in. Start there.

By all means, don’t start in the deep end with Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy just because you think you should or because that’s what smart people would pick.

Don’t limit yourself. Sample exotic delicacies at the buffet. You’ll be amazed at how you can surprise yourself when you expand your horizons.

Read multiple books at once, so you can sort them by context.

I’ll write that again. You have my permission to read multiple books at once. You’re not cheating on your main book by seeing another one on the side. This is actually a master strategy for increasing your overall minutes of eyeballs on page.

You need to start thinking about reading by context rather than by requirement.

Requirement: “Oh, I have to read this book because it’s a popular series now and all my friends are talking about it, but it’s crap. I hate reading. What’s happening on Instagram?”

Context: “I’m at the airport right now, and I can’t focus on Middle-Earth, but I can definitely dip into this gritty true crime drama.”

Basically, you don’t want to attempt to read something if you are in the wrong physical or mental context to properly enjoy it. This is about pleasure not homework.

You might be thinking, “If I read multiple books I’ll never finish anything.” Nonsense. If you start to read by context rather than requirement you’ll find yourself burning through more books than you can get your hands on.

E-readers have made this easier than ever. You’re no longer required to sit only with the one book you managed to fit in your bag or pocket. You can carry your library around with you.

Context also helps with the “warming in” process I mentioned above. In your current roster you’d do well to have a mix of easy books and one or two challenging ones.

Strategy: leverage an easy book as a way of “warming into” a reading session. When your mind is properly primed you can then switch over to the more difficult content.

Bottom line, don’t bring Henry James to your lunch break.

In a single month you might read a couple of printed books in bed or on the john, a few e-books on your lunch breaks, and an audiobook while walking or jogging. Easy.

As your inner reader-yogi says, wherever you go there your books are. Namaste.

As I said above, overall books completed is not a good metric to strive for when first starting out on your journey.

However, if you find that the strategies above are working well for you then you can take on the stretch goal of becoming a centurion: the much-vaunted ranking of someone who reads a hundred books in one year.

This is an arbitrary round-number challenge. (Is a hundred books somehow better than 87 or 99? No.) But it’s a straightforward goal to shoot for and doesn’t require that you time your reading sessions. Just read a crazy amount (about two books a week) and see how far you can go.

If you are already a seasoned reader, are you ready for the centurion challenge?