The Quantity Problem: Avoiding Big Books

In 2019 I read 150 books and that was something that I was incredibly proud of. It wasn't my best reading year, having hit 158 books once, but still, it was a great number and had me confidently setting my reading goal at 155 books for 2020.

But, when I thought back on some of the books that I'd read, and took a look at some of the books which have been sitting on my shelves for years (I'm looking at you Anna Karenina), I realised that I'd often found myself picking my next read, not based on what I particularly felt like reading, but on the amount of pages, the size of the font or the length of the audio book. I fell into the habit of choosing audiobooks under five hours, and I listen on triple speed most of the time so I was flying through books, but now I look back and I'm disappointed that I didn't tackle some of the bigger books that have been waiting to be read for such a long time, and that I've been excited to read.

Don't get me wrong, I read a lot of great books that were shorter. I discovered a lot of poetry books and non-fiction, that I perhaps wouldn't have come across, had I not been searching the Scribd app for shorter audiobooks of ebooks with under 300 pages. I just don't want 2020 to be another year filled with a large amount of short books.

So, despite the fact that my goal is set higher and I don't intent to lower it. Or, that January got off to a fairly bad start, with only 9 books completed thanks to a two week bout of the flu where I couldn't concentrate on any books. I aim to read more full length novels. I aim not to skim past audio books just because it says they're over five hours long. I want to read diversely, and for me this year, that doesn't just mean reading from different genres, cultures, time periods and having a good balance of ficiton and non-fiction. But it's going to mean not shying away from books that I can't comfortably finish in a day, and maybe, just maybe, this might be the year that I actually finish Anna Karenina.

Thanks so much for reading, and if you like this post, please consider subscribing for more bookish content and share it with other avid readers.