I’ve always been a reader. In primary school, I’d tear through 60-odd books in a month when the annual Read-A-Thon rolled around (they were mostly Babysitters Club books, but still). Then as a teen, I discovered the quiet beauty that could be found in great novels, taking solace in those pages as hormones and high school made the real world awful.
In my 20s, though, my pace started to wobble. I was still getting through 15 or 20 books a year, but less consistently. Partly this was because I had to make time for an exciting new hobby called binge drinking. But I was also increasingly distracted by the bottomless pit that was my iPhone. It always went the same way: I’d be on a roll with reading until I hit a book that just wasn’t that interesting. I’d gradually stop reaching for it at night as doomscrolling on Reddit became a more appealing prospect, then I’d look up and realise it had been a month since I’d turned a page.
And so in the dying days of 2018, I made the only new year resolution I’ve ever successfully kept: I pledged to start reading a book a week. I was about to turn 30 and it just seemed like a good, adult thing to do.
To make that happen, a few things had to change. To break my bad habit of reverting to picking up my phone, I had to implement a policy of ruthlessness. If I wasn’t enjoying a book, I tossed it aside quickly and picked up something else.
The next tactic came from financial necessity but ended up being a gamechanger. Too broke at that juncture in my life to buy 52 new books, I joined the library and began reserving anything that looked good with wild abandon. But I couldn’t control when those reserves came in – sometimes I’d request a book and get it the very next day. At others I’d join a long queue of readers vying for the same new release and be surprised a month or two later when it was finally ready for pickup. So I found myself with an ever-growing stack of library books next to my bed, each due back in three weeks, compelling me to try to keep up.
Getting my books from the library also made it easier to discard the ones I wasn’t enjoying. When you’ve paid $34.99 for a novel, there’s a sort of financial imperative to finish it and get your money’s worth. Borrowing them removed that guilt and allowed me to ditch the duds without remorse.
Lastly, I made myself accountable. Today, posting anything on social media immediately makes me ill with shame. But at the time I had no such qualms and announced my resolution to my Instagram followers, then began posting a short review of every week’s book as I finished them.
Making time to read was the easiest part. I curled up in bed with a book for 30 minutes before going to sleep every night – putting my phone away and out of reach first – and then for another hour or two on Saturday mornings. That was it.
It worked. I read 52 books that year and I’ve kept the habit up in the years that followed, the routine now firmly established. These days my annual number bobs up and down based on how thick the books I reach for are, but generally lands somewhere around 50. Admittedly, last year I got through only 41 – I’d recently met my partner and sacrificed some of that Saturday reading time for his company. It felt like a fair trade for true love.
Nearly six years on from the initial resolution, some things have changed while others have stayed the same. It’s become harder to find truly excellent books, as I tore through so many of the greatest hits in those early years. I now do most of my reading on an ebook reader, which has the advantage of allowing me to read in the dark while my boyfriend sleeps. But I still mercilessly toss aside the books that bore me. I’ve started and abandoned a further 47 books since 2019, some after only a few pages in, others at over the halfway point – whatever the moment was where I realised I wasn’t enjoying it. I live by a simple rule: if I don’t feel excited to hop in bed every night and read my book, I move on to the next. My nightly reading time has become my favourite part of every day and I don’t want to waste it trying to push through something mid.
There’s probably a lesson to be learned here, too, about what sort of resolutions stick. Mine was time-bound and clearly defined, rather than a vague pledge to “lose weight” or “spend less”. And it wasn’t a punishment but a form of enrichment, a life change I could get excited about instead of one to endure. I haven’t managed to make another resolution like it yet – but I’m happy to share the formula.
