How to read 52 books in a year

Fifty-two books in a year sounds like a book a week, and a book a week sounds like a lot. It is less than it sounds. For most people it comes to about fifty minutes of reading a day, roughly the length of one episode of whatever you are watching tonight. The minutes are not the hard part. The hard part is finding the same fifty every day for twelve months, and what you do the week you miss them.

The math, before anything else

Take an ordinary novel of 90,000 words. Adults read fiction silently at about 260 words a minute, and nonfiction a little slower, at about 238, according to a 2019 review of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert. We will use 250, somewhere between the two, because it keeps the sums clean: 90,000 words at 250 a minute is 360 minutes, which is six hours.

Six hours times 52 is 312 hours. Spread over 365 days, that is 51 minutes a day.

So the number to plan around is not 52. It is 51 minutes. The same sum for other goals:

Your books and your speed will differ from these. The next section is for that.

Find your own speed

The 250 is an average, and an average is no use to you. Time yourself. Set a timer for ten minutes, read a book you are enjoying at your normal pace, and count the pages you got through. Use the kind of book you actually read: a page in a hardcover holds fewer words than a page in a mass-market paperback.

Multiply by six and you have pages an hour. A reader at the average speed gets through roughly 50 in a typical paperback. If you land at 30 or at 70, you want to know that before you pick a target.

Then do the sum with your own book. A 300-page paperback at 50 pages an hour is six hours. At 30 pages an hour it is ten, and 52 of them is not fifty minutes a day anymore. It is eighty-five.

The goal is measured in books. Your life is measured in days. Plan in days.

Where the minutes come from

Nobody has fifty free minutes sitting in one piece. They have a few small ones, and most of those already belong to a phone. A few places to look:

• The first twenty minutes of the day, before the phone is in your hand. Leave the book where the phone usually is.
• Lunch. Fifteen to twenty minutes is enough to matter, and nobody schedules a meeting against a sandwich.
• The last fifteen to thirty before sleep. A paper book or an e-reader has nothing else on it to open.
• Commutes and errands, by ear. A 90,000-word novel is about ten hours of narration, at the usual pace of around 150 words a minute.

That last one deserves a warning. Audiobooks count, and they turn dead time into the cheapest minutes you own, but the same book takes about two thirds longer to hear than to read: ten hours instead of six. If you listen to a lot of them, raise the daily number to match.

One way to split the 51: twenty in the morning, fifteen at lunch, sixteen at night. Pick two slots and tie them to something that already happens, like coffee or the train. A slot with nothing attached to it is a good intention, and good intentions are what February is made of.

Short books are not cheating

If every book is 90,000 words, you need fifty-one minutes. Mix in short ones and the number falls. Fifty-two books averaging 60,000 words, about 200 pages, come to 208 hours, or 34 minutes a day.

Length varies more than people expect. These are round figures, at 250 words a minute:

Word counts vary by edition and by who is counting.

Middlemarch costs about as much as ten or eleven copies of Of Mice and Men. Reading it as one of your 52 is a perfectly good decision, as long as you plan the year around it and do not discover the cost in July. Our 52 prompts include both an “Under 200 pages” and an “Over 500 pages” for this reason.

Run your own numbers

Move the sliders. Everything below is the same arithmetic as above, with your numbers in it.

When you fall behind

You will. A bad week in March, a book that sits wrong, a month when work eats everything. A weekly target makes the gap visible, which is useful and a little cruel.

Do not try to catch up by reading more. That works for about four days. Do this instead.

Check once a month, on the first. Count the books you have finished against the pace for 52:

Starting late works the same way. Fifty-one minutes a day yields about 39 books from 1 April to the end of the year, so a late start means a smaller number at the same daily time, not more minutes.

Quitting is allowed

The librarian Nancy Pearl popularised a simple test: give a book fifty pages, and if it has not earned the rest, put it down. A book you dread costs more than its hours, because everything behind it stalls.

Whether an abandoned book counts toward the 52 is yours to decide. Decide before you start, write the rule down, and move on. What matters is that it stops blocking the next one. A short list of books you did not finish is worth keeping, too. It is a record of what you tried, and it saves you from buying the same one twice.

Keep the year where you can see it

The tracker that works is the one you walk past: a list on the fridge, a column in a spreadsheet, spines coloured in on a drawing of a shelf. It matters less which than that finishing a book feels like something.

We made a printable for this, and it is ours, so weigh it accordingly. It has a 52-spine bookshelf to colour in, four bingo cards, twelve monthly logs, review pages, a to-be-read list and a did-not-finish list, in US Letter and A4. The 52 prompts themselves are free on the challenge page, and you can run the whole year on a notebook.