Musings

How (and Why) I Read a Lot of Books

Intended audience: people who a) like reading, b) wish they knew how to read more than they currently do, and c) are looking for strategies to do so.

On November 22 of this year, I completed my reading goal of 150 books. This is an order of magnitude greater than the average American reader,¹ though it is nowhere close to the known record of 462 books per year.² Your reaction to this is likely one of two questions:

1. How do you read that many books?
2. Why do you read that many books?

I thought it would be fun to write up an explanation to those two questions.

How I read this much

I did not get here overnight. Reading is a muscle much like any other: if you want to run long distances, much less with a decent time, it will take you years of practice. I set a goal of reading 100 books in a year back in 2015, and though I tried hard to reach it I eventually scaled that goal back to 75… and I only made it to 60. We had more kids in 2016 and 2018, so my averages through those years were in the 30s-50s per year, far short of my desired goal of 100. In 2020 and 2022 I came close by getting into the 80s, and then I finally cracked the 100s in 2023.

It was nine years from the time I set a goal of 100 books to the time I actually accomplished it, so my first rule of high-volume reading is to keep working at it year after year.

My second rule is that variety is the spice of life. When I look back at what I read in 2015, 75% of those books fell into a single genre: theology/Christian living. That was mostly because I was in seminary, but it revealed something to me: I grow weary of single-track reading over time. In 2020, when I got close to my goal by reading 84 books, what I actually read represents a much more diverse sweep of genres and topics. I was still reading heavy theological works such as Anselm's Cur Deus Homo or Thiessen's Jesus and the Forces of Death, and I was still reading for fun (Sloan's Sourdough) but I was also reading for various other purposes: books about how to improve the quality of my writing/communicating, how to have greater focus at work, how to understand the racial reckoning of that year, educating myself about our country's prison system, and other topics. There's also a spectrum of book length, ranging from 21 pages (C.S. Lewis) to 1,237 pages (Ken Follett), as well as intended age range (I read middle grade books to try to gain a sense of whether they'd make good gifts for my kids).

The other strategy I've found immensely valuable is to lean into the wide variety of book formats that we are spoiled with today. I truly enjoy curling up with a paperback by the fire. I find it helpful when I'm interacting with a monograph for my writing work to have a physical copy of that book in front of me with which I can gain a sense of spatial awareness—I know not just what is being argued, but where, and I can easily flip there. But I also unabashedly lean into ebooks and audiobooks, too. I know plenty of people believe that audiobooks don't count as "real" books, and they are entitled to that opinion. For me, however, I find them incredibly helpful. I retain significantly more information when I listen with my ears instead of see with my eyes. I suspect that this is a personal neurodivergent quirk, but it is nevertheless true. When I sit down and read a systematic theology with my eyeballs, I tend to grow very sleepy very quickly and then realize after a while that I've glazed over, and I'm not metabolizing the words I see. By way of contrast, I needed to read a few portions of John Frame's Systematic Theology for seminary back in 2015 and while this would normally have taken me a huge amount of time, I decided to listen to it while gardening instead. I listened to the entire thing—including footnotes—in just a few days.

Though audiobooks today are a burgeoning market, there are many books I would love to listen to that simply do not have audio versions. This was the case with Frame's systematic at that time,³ so I purchased the ebook version and used my iPhone's "Spoken Content" accessibility feature to have Siri read it to me. This is obviously not as pleasant of an experience, but the voice is far less robotic than it used to be and it works. I go through many books this way these days. As a result, I make comparatively little time for podcasts anymore. By reading in different formats in different situations using different bodily senses I can avoid the fatigue that used to plague me when I only read one way.

So when I say that variety is the spice of life here, I mean:

1. A wide variety of genres
2. Varied book lengths and intended reading levels
3. Book formats and reading situations

My third rule is that speed is my friend. When I read a paperback by the fire, I am a pretty slow reader. I have Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna on my nightstand right now, and I will likely not finish it until sometime next year. When I began to listen to books I also listened fairly slowly. But over time I acclimated to it and was able to "boil the frog" and increase my speed while retaining my level of comprehension. A 12-hour audiobook at 3x speed, for instance, only requires 4 hours of time. That goes by pretty quick when I have to walk my dog, go to the gym,⁴ go grocery shopping, drive around, change the oil on my car, mow the lawn, shovel the walk, cook dinner, etc.

My fourth rule is that it's okay to bail on a book. I try to give a book the benefit of the doubt because it sometimes takes an author awhile to "set the table." But if I've made it through the first quarter or third of the book and I find myself dragging my feet to open it again, I let myself just bail. How does bailing on a book help me read more? If I'm slogging my way through a book, it makes me want to do other things besides reading, so it ends up eating all my book-reading momentum. In numerous cases, it's better to simply acknowledge that a book isn't working for me and move on than it is to try to push all the way through. This isn't universally true—there are times to eat your broccoli, as it were—but I've grown comfortable admitting that just because someone recommends a book to me, it doesn't mean that I necessarily have the same taste as them.

Objections

"You can't possibly be reading deeply or carefully"

You're correct. Once upon a time I had caught the notion, especially in Christian circles, that every book needed to be read slowly and "savored." There are countless books in the "Christian Living" genre that explicitly expect you to engage with them in this way, offering questions and prayer prompts at the end of every chapter. This is well-intentioned, but there are a few problems with the notion that every book needs to be "marinated in."

First, not every author who manages to get a publisher to publish their book is actually a) a good writer, or b) offering anything original or even valuable. Just because you wrap your thoughts in earnest appeals or pious prose doesn't mean that they're God's latest gift that everyone must stop what they're doing to pay utmost attention to. The way I used to solve this dilemma was by being an incredibly discriminating reader. I would only read a book if it was getting a lot of positive buzz from influencers I followed. If I heard about a book on my favorite podcasts and blogs and social media, maybe then I'd give it a go. This isn't a good heuristic, though: influencers are often given advance copies of the book or even paid to offer their opinions… and it's difficult to be truly objective in that case. Or perhaps a hip new pastor writes a book about how we should all recover the practice of writing a Rule of Life and everyone in your circles is raving about it. All the other pastors and faith leaders you've heard of have written the blurbs on the back. It's gotta be good, right?

Unfortunately, no. There's a huge amount of nepotism in the book publishing world, and blurbs tend to say more about the way relational capital flows in those circles than it does about the content of the book. Book reviews (including mine) say just as much about the reviewer's already held ideological commitments as they do about the book's objective value. This is doubly true when the review is published by an outlet that has an established, shared standpoint that it brands itself by.

One thing I began to notice is that I spent so much time with reviews and blog posts and podcast episodes trying to discern which books were worth reading that I could have simply read the entire book in that amount of time and formed my own opinion. In 2019-2020 in particular, there was one blogger I used to faithfully read who would post reliably critical reviews of books about systemic social injustice. I would recommend his reviews to others, and I felt the freedom to not read the books in question because he had already safely written off those books for me. A huge turning point for me, though, was when I decided to just try reading "White Fragility" by Robin DiAngelo for myself. Predictably, the book made me furious, and I found myself disagreeing with a great deal of it (I still think the book is problematic in various ways), but it was a monumental shift for me to establish my own opinions rather than simply agreeing with my tribe's predetermined position on it. Even authors that are "bad" or "wrong" or "on the other team" can make good points here and there! If we as a country are ever going to reverse course on the red/blue self-sorting that has happened, we have to figure out ways to give a fair hearing to people that make us mad.⁵

But if I was no longer going to let influencers decide for me what I would think about a given book, that presents a dilemma: I would have to read a lot more, and that takes time. The solution is to strive for greater efficiency in reading, which among other things means reading more quickly.

When I was in seminary, one of my professors advised a very specific regimen for reading which involved reading a book in three passes:

1. Read the Table of Contents, the introductions, section headings, and conclusions of every chapter. This should take 30 minutes or less.
2. Skim the entire book (first/last sentence of every paragraph). This should take at most a couple of hours.
3. Read the book in full, word for word. This will take awhile.

You can stop after any of these steps if you determine that a book is not worth further investment. If you pick a book of the shelf that seems like it might be relevant, but then you read the Table of Contents and you realize that it's probably not, then don't waste more time on it. For me, listening to an audiobook at 3x speed is akin to a combination of steps 1-2. The objection here is that it's not possible to read deeply or carefully at this pace, and while that's a correct accusation, it's also literally the point. Authors do not automatically have the privilege of my sustained time and attention. But if I speed read my way through a book and I get the impression that it is good enough to deserve more from me, then I read it again. It's as simple as that.

"We must push back against hustle culture"

Another objection you might have to all of this is that it's yet another example of how 21st century American hustle culture robs the soul out of something beautiful and contemplative—reading—and turns it into a soulless enterprise of information acquisition. Or maybe the root problem here is social media and how it turns something that used to be a delightful hobby into a quantifiable competition with strangers on social media. Whatever the root cause, you're convinced that how and why of my reading 150 books this year just goes to show that our culture is deeply messed up.

Of course, it can be this. It also can not be this. I read books for many purposes, and one of those purposes is absolutely the enterprise of information acquisition. I read Scot McKnight's The Blue Parakeet this year not because I was trying to learn something new, but because it's a notable book that's directly relevant to my writing project, and I wanted to be familiar with it. I read Charles Duhigg's Supercommunicators this year because I have to do a lot of communication in my job, and I wanted to glean and process what might be potentially helpful. I read Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing this year not because I'm super duper into Romantasy, but because she's nearly singlehandedly reshaping the publishing industry and I wanted to comprehend the phenomenon that many of my loved ones are into. As far as the second suspicion goes, I also post my read books on Goodreads where friends and strangers see my progress and occasionally comment on it.

But here's the thing: I don't have to choose. I can read books for information acquisition and also read for pleasure, edification, and delight. I had a paperback of Frederick Buechner's Sacred Journey sitting on my shelf for years and I finally got around to reading it this past spring. It was the kind of book where I wanted to only read a chapter at a time over the course of a month or so. As a family, we read through The Chronicles of Narnia after dinner, and it was a delight simply to introduce my children to those lovely stories.

As far as the social media piece goes, I fully acknowledge that it's a thing for me. My book reviews get pretty decent traction on Goodreads, and that encourages me to continue to publish them there. But it's also not the only reason I read. Put another way, I would continue reading even if Goodreads didn't exist. I read and enjoyed books before the internet, and I'm not going to stop enjoying it if book-tracking sites stopped in their tracks.

"Audiobooks don't count as reading"

At the time of this writing, there's a big hullabaloo on Bluesky about whether audiobooks count as "reading" or not. On the one side are those who argue that the action of looking at text on paper with your eyeballs is pretty self-evidently a different action than that of listening to a recording of someone speak to you. On the other side are those who often bring up neurodivergence as an example of why audiobooks tend to make books accessible to folks for whom it otherwise would not be.

Look, you're already 2500+ words deep into my article, so you already know basically where I land on this. But the long and short of it is that it sometimes matters, and it sometimes doesn't. If someone says, "Don't you just love curling up with a hot cup of coffee and a good book in a café on a rainy day?" they're probably talking about a singular aesthetic experience that isn't even close to replicated by an iPhone using accessibility features to robotically recite the screens of your ebook app. But if someone says, "Hey, have you read that new John Mark Comer book? What did you think of it?" then the format of my reading is irrelevant, and the hoped-for response is not, "Wait, are you talking about the paperback, the ebook, or the audiobook?"

An audiobook version of Silverberg's Roma Eterna wouldn't "count" for me because I want that experience of a cheap paperback with its specific smell and the swish of its paper as I turn the page, cozied up under a down comforter on a snowy day. But an audio version of Lucy Peppiatt's Women and Worship at Corinth "counts" for me because I mostly want to understand her argument, and the best way (for me) to mentally retain it is through my ears.

Why I read so much

So the question of why is now a relatively simple question to answer: I read a lot because:

1. I like reading
2. I'm a curious person who likes to engage with thinkers outside my wheelhouse
3. I want to evaluate a book myself rather than relying on the judgments of influencers
4. I would rather read than watch sports, listen to podcasts, play video games, or any of the other hobbies that occupy a large portion of the time of men in a similar age stage and demographic as myself

I believe that quality is a function of quantity and that by familiarizing myself with a broad array of books, the truly great ones will stand out and stick in my memory. Then I can come back to those with a second pass where I reward them with greater time and attention.

It's basically that simple! I hope that for those of you who wish to read more than you currently find yourself able, this would spark some ideas for how you could creatively work more books into your life.