I consider myself a pretty avid reader - I read daily and read about 30-40 books a year. Ranging from 60 page novellas to 1000 page books.
But I never think of this in terms of needing to read x hours or y pages in a day. If anything, that would turn reading from a fun hobby to a chore - which I think would turn people off of reading and turn it into a school assignment almost.
Some days I will get sucked into a good book, e.g when I am on vacation, and fill my waking hours with reading. Other days I just read 10 minutes before sleeping.
If this helps people actually read more.. sure, go for it. As long as you actually enjoy it. Otherwise, do whatever else you like with your spare time lol.
Edit: also want to point out, if I read non-fiction I read to learn. So part of my reading time is spent reflecting on what I read. I’m pretty sure I read maybe a dozen or so pages in a session. If you read just to get your “page count” up but then don’t really grok what you read, you might as well not have read at all.
Treating reading as a pleasant time instead of a goal is what got me reading again. School almost completely killed my desire to read by assigning and measuring it. I read what feels right at a pace that feels right for as long as it feels right.
The last thing I want is for my pastimes to be quantified and judged by another weird offshoot of the hustle culture.
I wish there were an easier way to think about word count vs pages. I know ebooks/ereaders can handle that sort of thing, and some of the book tracking options—e.g. StoryGraph—will pull those up for you, but if you're just reading a book it's not easy on its own. And if you're doing a page number goal, it's "important" because: not all pages are created equal.
You can double-count non-fiction or something like that, maybe also double-count things from 100 or 150 years ago or something too, but in the end, why? I love the Cortex idea of the Yearly Theme (<https://www.themesystem.com>) and they make the good point that "Read 100 books" or "Read 100 pages a day" are bad goals, whereas "Read more" is a good one.
I enjoyed this, and I identify with it a bit, but I'm trying to get away from that mentality a lot. My goal is to read as much as I am happy with, and then a bit more.
A typical typeset page has ~250--300 words per page. The standard rule of thumb is to assume 250. A double-spaced typewritten page is about half that as I recall.
100 pages is about 25,000 words of text.
Obsessing over just how many words are on a page isn't terribly productive. 100 pages is very roughly about 90 minutes of reading per day. Commuting is a tad out of fashion these days, but divided between two legs of a commute plus some additional downtime you could fit that into 2--3 sessions per day.
It's not hard to read one hundred pages each day of newspaper articles and magazine articles and other similar publications. If The Economist were a daily publication, I'd gladly read it every single day from cover to cover. However I see that the author has excluded periodicals in this statistic, presumably because it's not "heavy" reading?
I recently re-read a few books from the Harry Potter series and I could very easily read one hundred pages a day. I just finished reading Deaton's Economics in America and it's comparatively light and I read on average 50 pages per day. But I recently began to read Pigou's The Economics of Welfare (which I discovered only because Deaton quoted it) and there's no way I could read more than 20 pages a day.
I'm learning Polish, and I've so far shadowed Mały Książę (The Little Prince) by Antonio Saint-Exupéry everyday for 37 days straight. My goal is 100 days straight for a Bimodal Blitzathon. The book is approximately 160 pages and it takes me a little over two hours.
It can be done obviously, but it needs to be a priority to finish the book early in the day. The days that I put it off, I ended up finishing near midnight. Not fun, and I don't get as much out of it.
Recently I probably did read 100 pages a day for a couple of days. It was a book for the next meeting of a neighborhood book club, sloppy and to be hurried through to get back to more interesting reading. So I am indifferent to the number.
For those looking for something similar in an app “Serial Reader” splits up books, mostly public donation, into 10 minute nuggets a day. Works pretty well!
This is like 50 push-ups a day etc. Nice, easy to remember round number and very simple instruction. For many people consistency of any sort helps and simple rules are far more effective.
I consider myself a pretty avid reader - I read daily and read about 30-40 books a year. Ranging from 60 page novellas to 1000 page books.
But I never think of this in terms of needing to read x hours or y pages in a day. If anything, that would turn reading from a fun hobby to a chore - which I think would turn people off of reading and turn it into a school assignment almost.
Some days I will get sucked into a good book, e.g when I am on vacation, and fill my waking hours with reading. Other days I just read 10 minutes before sleeping.
If this helps people actually read more.. sure, go for it. As long as you actually enjoy it. Otherwise, do whatever else you like with your spare time lol.
Edit: also want to point out, if I read non-fiction I read to learn. So part of my reading time is spent reflecting on what I read. I’m pretty sure I read maybe a dozen or so pages in a session. If you read just to get your “page count” up but then don’t really grok what you read, you might as well not have read at all.
Treating reading as a pleasant time instead of a goal is what got me reading again. School almost completely killed my desire to read by assigning and measuring it. I read what feels right at a pace that feels right for as long as it feels right.
The last thing I want is for my pastimes to be quantified and judged by another weird offshoot of the hustle culture.
I wish there were an easier way to think about word count vs pages. I know ebooks/ereaders can handle that sort of thing, and some of the book tracking options—e.g. StoryGraph—will pull those up for you, but if you're just reading a book it's not easy on its own. And if you're doing a page number goal, it's "important" because: not all pages are created equal.
You can double-count non-fiction or something like that, maybe also double-count things from 100 or 150 years ago or something too, but in the end, why? I love the Cortex idea of the Yearly Theme (<https://www.themesystem.com>) and they make the good point that "Read 100 books" or "Read 100 pages a day" are bad goals, whereas "Read more" is a good one.
I enjoyed this, and I identify with it a bit, but I'm trying to get away from that mentality a lot. My goal is to read as much as I am happy with, and then a bit more.
A typical typeset page has ~250--300 words per page. The standard rule of thumb is to assume 250. A double-spaced typewritten page is about half that as I recall.
100 pages is about 25,000 words of text.
Obsessing over just how many words are on a page isn't terribly productive. 100 pages is very roughly about 90 minutes of reading per day. Commuting is a tad out of fashion these days, but divided between two legs of a commute plus some additional downtime you could fit that into 2--3 sessions per day.
It's not hard to read one hundred pages each day of newspaper articles and magazine articles and other similar publications. If The Economist were a daily publication, I'd gladly read it every single day from cover to cover. However I see that the author has excluded periodicals in this statistic, presumably because it's not "heavy" reading?
I recently re-read a few books from the Harry Potter series and I could very easily read one hundred pages a day. I just finished reading Deaton's Economics in America and it's comparatively light and I read on average 50 pages per day. But I recently began to read Pigou's The Economics of Welfare (which I discovered only because Deaton quoted it) and there's no way I could read more than 20 pages a day.
I'm learning Polish, and I've so far shadowed Mały Książę (The Little Prince) by Antonio Saint-Exupéry everyday for 37 days straight. My goal is 100 days straight for a Bimodal Blitzathon. The book is approximately 160 pages and it takes me a little over two hours.
It can be done obviously, but it needs to be a priority to finish the book early in the day. The days that I put it off, I ended up finishing near midnight. Not fun, and I don't get as much out of it.
Recently I probably did read 100 pages a day for a couple of days. It was a book for the next meeting of a neighborhood book club, sloppy and to be hurried through to get back to more interesting reading. So I am indifferent to the number.
I will, though, mention https://annekennedy.substack.com/p/a-harried-mothers-guide-t... .
That post is a really solid response.
For those looking for something similar in an app “Serial Reader” splits up books, mostly public donation, into 10 minute nuggets a day. Works pretty well!
This is ambitious, and it's refreshing in a way to see someone set an ambitious personal goal like this and then hit it.
This is like 50 push-ups a day etc. Nice, easy to remember round number and very simple instruction. For many people consistency of any sort helps and simple rules are far more effective.
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