Reading more without turning it into a scoreboard

Somewhere in the last decade reading acquired a leaderboard. People set annual targets, log completions and post year-end totals, which is an odd development for a practice whose value is almost entirely in the residue rather than the throughput.

Abandonment is a skill

The single change that most reliably increases how much people read is permission to stop. Finishing a book you have lost interest in costs three weeks and teaches you very little, and the guilt of the unfinished pile suppresses starting the next one.

A reasonable rule: fifty pages, then decide. For a difficult book you have chosen deliberately, extend it. For one you picked up on a recommendation, do not.

The best readers I know abandon more books than most people finish.

Notes, but lightly

Elaborate note-taking systems have a way of becoming the hobby, replacing the reading they were meant to support. The version that survives contact with real life is a single sentence per book, written a week after finishing, describing what you would tell a friend.

If you cannot produce that sentence, the book did not land, and no amount of highlighting would have changed it.