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Can you imagine how fast you’d grow if you were able to read one book a week? It’s not even as difficult as you imagine it to be!
With 52 books full of knowledge absorbed within a year, you will rapidly level up and become more successful than you’d ever imagined.
Many of the most successful people are avid readers, and since you are reading this, I am sure you are ready to join their ranks.
Here is how I read one book per week:
Read also: Reading List For Personal Growth
Read also: 18 Powerful Personal Growth Ideas
1. Use Goodreads for motivation
Firstly, let’s talk about the motivation aspect of reading one book per week.
Reading is not a terribly difficult task. The vast majority of people know how to do it and can do so with relative ease, albeit with different speed levels.
In the end, the reason so few people read books, and even fewer nonfiction books and even fewer than that more than 1 book per month, let alone one per week, is a lack of motivation.
They simply don’t want to. Maybe they even know it would benefit them, and they think they should do it. But they clearly lack the motivation necessary to get started.
I’ve found one great way to get motivated to read more books is Goodreads.
Goodreads is like this huge online bookclub. It is owned by Amazon and has every book you can think of listed with a summary and its different editions in different languages.
Once you create a Goodreads account or connect it to your Amazon account, set yourself a yearly goal on how many books you want to read.
At first, choose a number that seems comfortable enough to reach but is more than you read last year. DON’T just set a goal of 52 books a year right off the bat! This is bound to make you feel stressed and like a failure, if you don’t hit the goal.
Next, I recommend you to search for all the books you’ve ever read in your life and save them under ‘READ.’
Seeing how much you’ve already read is always a nice motivational boost. And if you remember them well enough, you can even go ahead and give them ratings and reviews.
Then, if you already have some books on your mind that you’d like to read, search for them as well and add them under ‘WANT TO READ.’
And once you start to read a book, you mark it as ‘CURRENTLY READING .’
2. Buy only one book at a time
I’ve learned the hard way that my excitement to read a book can wane as quickly as it came.
Sometimes I used to be super motivated to read new books, so I bought four or five at once.
And I was very much thrilled to read the first and second books. But by the time I had read those, the excitement for the other books was slowly dwindling, and I had my heart set upon books not yet on my shelf.
Eventually, sometimes after years of them catching dust on my shelf, I read them, and they were good. But until then, they always created that feeling of guilt when I saw them still standing unread on my bookshelf.
Nowadays, I only purchase one book at a time – no matter how much I might desire two books and how sure I am of reading them both, I will buy only one at a time.
Of course, there is the exception of wishing for books on your birthday or Christmas, but I stick to my one book at a time rule whenever I’m the one purchasing them.
It’s one of the best mindset changes regarding books I’ve ever made. Try it out for yourself!
3. Get inspired and excited for a book
Now, how does one get inspired and excited to read a new book?
For me, there are several ways this can happen.
Sometimes it’s through listening to an interview on a podcast that gets me super interested in the value the book provides. I discovered The Alter Ego Effect this way on the Jim Kwik Podcast.
Other times it’s through book recommendation videos on YouTube. That’s how I discovered Sacred Powers and Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Sometimes I get excited to read books because they are mentioned in other books or even Fanfiction. I discovered The Focault Pendulum while reading an Arthur/Eames (Inception) Fanfiction, for example.
There really are endless ways to find good book inspirations. In whatever way I come across them, I always make sure to save them onto my Goodreads ‘WANT TO READ’ list.
Often, I never get around to reading them because my excitement for them disappears until I am finished with my current book and ready to purchase another one. But if that happens, it is just as fine.
Sometimes, that spark gets rekindled months or years later.
But in any way, I always have a book I’m thrilled to read at hand and many more waiting for me.
4. Divide into sections
Alright, so now, you have a book that you are wildly motivated to read. What now?
First of all, I like to calculate how many pages I need to read in a day to finish the whole book within a week.
If it’s a physical book, I like to put in post-its to have a visual marker, but if it’s my Kindle, then I simply memorize the rough number.
Each day I always aim to reach that number of pages. If I don’t reach it the previous day, I know exactly how much more I need to read today or the other days to get back on track.
5. Make it a habit
Make reading a non-negotiable part of your day. If you don’t turn it into a habit that has an exact time during your day, you will most likely forget about it or remember it at the end of the day when you have to rush to squeeze it in before bedtime.
For me, reading is part of my morning routine. I spend 20-30 minutes each morning reading. If I’ve read in the morning, I can forget about it and be at ease knowing I’ve done my daily reading.
However, often enough these days, I like to sprinkle in some smaller reading sessions throughout the rest of the day.
Every time I have some time to spare and I am in the mood to read, I’ll read a few pages to reach or even superseded my daily page number goal.
I don’t recommend just relying on those sprinkled in reading sessions. You should have a clear time of the day, which you use for reading. Find where it fits best for you.
6. Don’t use books to fall asleep!
That being said, I don’t recommend using your nighttime routine for reading. Or at the very least, you shouldn’t read lying in bed in your pajamas.
If you are serious about nonfiction books and you want to gain as much value as possible from them, you should be wide awake while you’re reading.
First of all, if you’re sleepy, you’re not particularly fast in anything you do. Much less so in reading, which will make your eyes droop after a while. So, in general, you’ll need longer to read the book that way.
Secondly, your comprehension and retention are far from the best when you’re tired.
I mean, imagine someone gave you an important contract of any kind, and it’s crucial that you read over it before signing because it will heavily impact your life. Would you do that reading in bed in the hopes of falling asleep more easily through it?
I sure hope you wouldn’t!
And you should treat valuable nonfiction books the same.
7. Get a Kindle
Look, I get it. E-Readers like the Kindle are not very aesthetically pleasing.
They don’t soothe a true bookworm’s heart because they don’t have that paper smell, and you can’t feel the texture of the pages when flipping them. You also can’t appreciate the softness and design of the binding.
They are, plainly said, dull enough to make you want to cry.
That being said, they are undoubtedly much more practical than physical books.
You can easily travel with them, you don’t have to worry about getting them wet on the poolside, you can bring a whole library with you in your handbag wherever you go, you can purchase new books instantly, the books are cheaper, they don’t take up space, and with the right tools, you can quickly transfer your highlighted passages and save them all in one place.
So the way I am handling it at the moment is like this:
If there is a book that excites me because of its utterly gorgeous cover (just saying Shadow and Bone here, that book literally has me starstruck every time I see it), I will get it in paperback or hardcover.
Sometimes I hate the aesthetics of a book so much that I know I will be demotivated to pick it up despite how much I want to read it. That’s when I’ll get it on Kindle.
And when the book is visually neither terribly exciting nor bad, I’m often swayed by the lower price to get it on my Kindle as well.
I might rely even more on Kindle from now on, simply because I can’t be bothered typing up notes from the books to refer back to them, and with E-Readers, it is so much easier to do.
8. Practise Speed Reading #1: Pointer
All right, now let’s talk about your reading speed.
If you are like most people, me very much included, you’re reading terribly slow most of the time.
In reality, you could read much, much faster without losing much of your comprehension.
Just think about it, if you see signs on the road or commercial banners in the city, you just throw a quick look at them, and you know exactly what they said.
Reading books can be very much the same way. Speed readers can read at twice or even three times the speed of us slow readers, simply because they use a different strategy.
So, let me give you some tips on how to do this.
This first tip, unfortunately, doesn’t really work well for reading on touchscreens the Kindle included.
It is using your finger for pacing through the lines. This makes your reading faster because it keeps your eye tracking a smooth line instead of jumping forth and back and halting throughout.
Just try it out for yourself. Look straight ahead wherever you are and try to let your eyes move in a straight line from left to right.
It doesn’t work, does it? Your eyes always jump a bit.
Hold out your arm, point a finger, and move it from left to right in a straight line while following the movement with your eyes.
No jumping now, is there?
This effect can help you speed up your reading, so try it out for yourself.
9. Practise Speed Reading #2: Eliminate Subvocalization
Now let’s talk about possibly the biggest obstacle to speed reading: Subvocalization.
I’m sure you know that voice in your head that’s reading along with every sentence as if you were speaking them out loud.
For me, it’s especially bad when I read in English (which is most of the time, if I’m not reading for uni). Because it’s a foreign language, I still focus on the right pronunciation, which makes me subvocalize a lot.
I’m sure you know that your thinking speed is faster than your talking speed. So why would we slow our reading down by speaking the words as slowly in our heads as we would out loud? It’s entirely unnecessary.
But how do you actually reduce subvocalization?
Some say that humming while you read helps. For me counting 1, 2, 3 repeatedly in my head while reading is more effective.
Admittedly, I am still struggling very much with this, and it’s annoying me greatly.
Sometimes I get these glimpses of how fast I could read without subvocalization. Once in a while, I have a phase where I practically fly through sentences and pages of a book, but then I lose momentum, and I’m back to snail reading.
I assume it is, like most things, merely a matter of practice. And once you get those glimpses of how fast you can read without subvocalization, you’re never going to want to read slower again.
10. Practise Speed Reading #3: Musik
Listening to instrumental music while reading can help you blend out environmental noise.
I always tend to get my mind hung up on other people’s conversations if I am so much able as to understand a few words even from a distance.
This is immensely annoying and slows me down dramatically.
So whenever people are talking around me, I listen to a Spotify or YouTube study playlist. I prefer alpha wave music over classical music in these situations.
11. Practise Speed Reading #4: Use your peripheral sight
Our eyes are amazing! They can see a great deal more than simply what we focus on directly.
This peripheral sight can come in handy while you’re reading.
Many speed readers don’t actually read a full line from the first word to the last. Instead, they read maybe the third word to the third last.
It is as if they have an invisible margin left and right that cuts through the first few and the last few words of each line.
Try it out for yourself. Take a quick look at the second or third words of each line of this text. Do you still know the previous words without looking at them? I’m sure you do.
Try this out when reading the next time. If you use your pointer finger, don’t let it start at the beginning of the line but a few words in and let it stop a few words earlier.
This technique on its own will help you to improve your reading speed so you can read one book per week more easily.
I hope these 11 tips on how I read one book a week helped you. I highly encourage you to try it out for yourself.
Make a challenge out of it! Simply start with a ‘2 books in 2 weeks’ challenge and if that goes well, add another week on top of it. That’s how I got started.
I always thought reading 52 books a year was a crazy lofty goal, and I was excited with my +12 books a year.
But when I started the year with a ‘4 books in 4 weeks’ challenge, and it went surprisingly well, I simply had to keep going. And from there on, I never looked back.
Reading books is sooooooo much more fun if you don’t slow-read the same book each day for 2 months. If you know you’ll finish it within a week, you’re much more likely to pick it up and read it till the end.
Tell me in the comments down below how your challenge went. Did you manage to read one book per week for 2 weeks, a month, or even longer in a row?
I’m cheering for you!
Sophie
