Almost nothing I have written in the last few years has given rise to more correspondence than a throwaway column about reading, in which I alluded to what I call the “hundred pages strategy.” This is exactly what it sounds like: every day, come rain or shine, on religious and secular holidays, when I travel and when I am exceptionally busy, I read at least one hundred printed pages.
The most common question I have received regarding the hundred pages strategy is, of course, How do you do it? This has proven more difficult to answer than I thought it would. While I have chosen to refer to it as a “strategy,” the truth is that most of it, including the page target itself, is really something more like a post-hoc attempt at systematizing my own habits; I did not wake up one day as an infrequent reader and work slowly towards one hundred pages a day out of some inchoate desire for self-improvement. Rather, like many of us, I decided some years ago that if I did not take it upon myself to spend less time scrolling through Wikipedia or the AllMusic Guide or returning to my Twitter “feed”—the implicit image of a trough is appropriate—I would find myself losing one of my greatest pleasures to sheer indolence.
Statistics suggest that the “average” American reads something like twelve books a year. Upon a moment’s reflection it should be obvious that this statistic is useless. Millions of people finish school and never read another book in their lives: not long ago I spoke to a recent high school graduate (his grade point average was just below perfect) who had not read a book since elementary school. Twelve books a year is, I suspect, the kind of figure we arrive at because some people read nothing and others read several books a week. As it stands, enormous numbers of Americans say they wish they read more than they do, if only they could figure out how. It is to such persons that the following is addressed.
Before I continue I should say that this is not the place to attempt a defense of reading as such. (Those who find other ways to spend their leisure time are free to do so, though I have a hard time taking seriously the idea of people who write or edit for a living but do not consider daily reading of books within the sphere of their chosen profession.) Nor is it the right venue for a discussion of my own taste in books. While incidental references to things I have read will be unavoidable, everything I say here might apply to the reading of almost anything; even my distinction between “heavy” and non-heavy books will apply to almost anyone’s reading.
To start, then, I should say a few words about the rules, such as they are. The hundred pages strategy is not a scheme for working through reading lists. A book counts whether one is reading it for the first time or the fiftieth. Reference books such as printed dictionaries do not count unless they are being deliberately read “through” rather than consulted; the same is true of books that lend themselves to indiscriminate browsing, such as collections of essays. I also do not count books, even comparatively serious ones, read aloud to children, though I would not think it strictly contrary to the spirit of the exercise if someone else did. Otherwise there is no cheating; I do not, for example, try to guess how many pages half a dozen news stories or bits of online sports gossip would translate into. I do not count the reading of periodicals, even in print. Nor is much attention given to the size of the type. My experience suggests that this sort of thing tends to average out across authors, publishers, and editions; only poetry (which I will say more about below) will consistently throw it off. Otherwise the only outlier I can think of is the exceedingly small type of the old J. M. Dent Everymans; these pocket-sized volumes are ideal for traveling and the best way to work through very long books, such as Macaulay. In any case, one hundred pages is not meant to be a precise scientific metric; it is simply a goal, and, I think, a manageably sized one.
Like many people, I generally read more than one book at a time, but—this is crucial—never more than one book of the same kind. By this I mean that if I have one fairly heavy book going—say Heidegger on Anaximander and Parmenides—I try to ensure that the others are all at least comparatively lighter (the second volume of Ronald Hutton’s life of Cromwell, for example). This is not, of course, always possible; while researching my biography of Newman, I have often found myself working through one or more dry-as-dust biographies of mid-Victorian clergymen. When this happens, I try to balance it out by reading something very light—e.g., Wodehouse, or a crime novel.
My experience suggests that the best way to deal with the problem of “heavy” versus non-heavy books is to think in terms of rough time slots, which is also important for its own sake. If you seriously intend to read one hundred pages each day—not occasionally when there is nothing to watch or when you find yourself racing to discover whether the lay cook or the sinister young monk is the killer—you will probably find that you open a book within an hour of waking up in the morning. I start my own reading after I finish looking at the headlines and answering (or more realistically neglecting) correspondence. This is sometimes but not always when I read my heavy book, following my first cup of coffee and my first cigarette of the day. This slot is open until 9:00 A.M. or so, depending upon what time I have risen and what other tasks present themselves. It involves no more than twenty or twenty-five pages, usually with some note-taking.
For some readers, the morning slot will be the hardest to fill; our commutes will interfere, or before we are able to sit down we will find our attention diverted by something else. While acknowledging these and other unavoidable exigencies, I humbly suggest that before saying that it is impossible to read in the morning, one should consider how one’s time is currently being used. Most of us are probably awake for no more than a few minutes before we look at our computers or mobile phones. A casual glance at the home page of the New York Times or last night’s text messages imperceptibly becomes fifteen wasted minutes. The newspaper over breakfast gives way to the social media algorithm or to podcasts, which I have become convinced are the single most pervasive obstacles to adult reading.
One of the most common misconceptions—I almost said “excuses”—that one hears from people who say they wish they read more is that reading must be done for an hour or more without interruption. When I talk about time slots, I am not saying that one should count on being able to read for long stretches during the requisite period; I am simply suggesting that it is one of the possible times at which, upon examination, one span of time previously given over to other things is likely to be available.
Back to the timeline. My second large-ish chunk of reading usually comes around lunchtime. Even a quick lunch—standing in line to grab a sandwich, microwaving leftovers in a break room—usually affords an opportunity for reading ten or fifteen pages. In my own case, I like to take a walk in the middle of the day; reading while walking or sitting outside is itself an important part of the hundred pages strategy. It could even be argued that certain books demand to be read outdoors: there is a park in Marquette, Michigan, that I am half-convinced was designed for the explicit purpose of facilitating the reading of Aurélia and Stephen MacKenna’s Plotinus. But even less romantic readers will find that parks, backyards, and coffee shops are conducive to reading precisely because we do not associate them with work, or at least not with wage labor. Which brings me to the third slot, in late afternoon, when I tend to find myself waiting for emails or phone calls, a time which can easily lend itself to bored, impatient scrolling. For those of us who belong to the so-called “laptop class,” vast swathes of our lives are spent like this: tethered to a computer or phone in a state of low-level anxiety, unable to accomplish anything. It is almost always possible to read a few pages instead.
The rest of my reading takes place at night. After my wife and children go to bed, my time is generally my own. I usually read for an hour in my office and another half hour in bed, unless it is football season, in which case I read during the commercial breaks of primetime games. (So much of the tedium of pointlessly long N.F.L. broadcasts can be avoided after discovering that advertisements can be ignored safely without missing any of the game itself; even with the sound muted your peripheral vision will let you know when the action has resumed.) The final slot is almost always reserved for light reading—novels, undemanding history or biography or belles-lettres, collections of letters or published diaries, or Arthur Waley’s Genji, which I like to re-read over and over again slowly, five or so pages at a time, over the course of a year.
So much for what a hundred pages a day looks like, or might look like, chronologically speaking. For those like my wife who tend to go to bed much earlier than the average American and to rise correspondingly earlier, other slots will suggest themselves. But the same rough amount of time will likely be available. If you routinely wake up at 4:30 A.M. in a house full of people who will not be awake for another two or three hours, you are in more or less the same position reading-wise as someone who burns the midnight oil.
What follows is a series of miscellaneous observations:
1. Nearly four years ago I put my iPhone in a drawer. It never leaves unless I am traveling, when, as a small concession to the tedium of modern life, I use it to board planes, order a cab when I cannot find one (a situation that has become depressingly common in Washington), and so on. While I would never suggest that reading one hundred pages a day is impossible for regular smartphone users, I do think that eliminating the temptation to waste time—a heading under which I would include responding instantaneously to a non-urgent email that could be answered in a few hours or even the next day—makes it far less difficult. Many readers will reply that for both professional and social reasons they are unable to get on without a smartphone: their colleagues do not usually take phone calls (even though nine times out of ten what ends up being a protracted series of emails or text messages spread out over the course of several hours could be addressed in five minutes on the phone), their children’s sports league requires the use of a scheduling app, and so on. All of this is real and vexing. I suspect that until more members of the professional classes agree to the digital equivalent of a S.T.A.R.T. treaty for their attention spans, we will not see anything like a large-scale revival of reading in this country.
2. It should go without saying that one must never go anywhere without bringing a book. Almost no one thinks twice about the purported wisdom of never leaving the house without a mobile phone—what if there were an emergency?—even though the actual odds of absolutely needing to make a call or send a text message during an unremarkable two-hour span on a Sunday afternoon are vanishingly small. The best way of making it at least somewhat likelier that we read a few pages when we are out and about is to have a book already at hand, especially one we have already started and are getting on with. I cannot count the number of cumulative hours I have spent reading while watching my children play at parks.
3. The almost total disappearance of airplane reading is a national tragedy, as is the appearance of free in-flight Wi-Fi. If you fly regularly, leave your phone or laptop in your bag and your headphones at home; do not activate the screen in front of your seat. You will not regret your missed opportunity to catch an hour and a half of some action movie sequel.
4. I almost never read without a pencil or a pen. Sometimes these are only underlinings: a straight line for something I find striking or amusing, a long squiggle for something I find absurd or infelicitous. I tend also to note typographical errors, which for some reason I am far more likely to spot in printed books than I am in my own writing. (This is something I began doing as a teenager, when I found myself wondering how generations of editors had missed that in the Penguin Classics edition of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums the Gary Snyder stand-in called “Japhy Ryder” is referred to by his real first name on page 161.) The books that I would never write in—expensive or rare editions—tend to be those I would never read, shelf copies meant purely for display or idle perusal, e.g., my first editions of Anthony Powell. Otherwise I have no qualms about defacing volumes I own for the very simple reason that I believe that books are meant to be read and written about. Like charity, literary criticism begins at home.
5. Some people ask me whether I ever use a Kindle or similar devices and whether such reading would be compatible with the hundred pages strategy. The answers are, respectively, no and maybe. When I was a teenager, I read hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of words on Project Gutenberg, in the glow of an old Hewlett-Packard C.R.T. monitor. I do not like to think about what this has done to my vision, and I have resolved whenever possible to read anything longer than a short article on paper, including things I am editing. That said, if your device gives you actual page numbers that correspond to the ones in a physical version of the book in question, I see no reason why you could not use an e-reader in pursuit of the hundred pages strategy.
6. There is really no satisfactory answer to the question of how reading poetry fits into the hundred pages strategy. If one is reading a Shakespeare play or a long narrative poem, it seems to me reasonable to count pages in the ordinary way—there are fewer words, but each one is more significant. In the case of a volume of lyric poems opened at random, this seems more dubious.
7. I keep a notebook in which I jot down the title and author of every book I read. This is true whether I am reading it for the first time or the fifteenth. Keeping a notebook serves a number of valuable purposes. The first is that it will motivate you; it gives you a sense of what you have accomplished, and at the end of the year it will be satisfying to see the long roll of titles in their glorious order and array. I have also found that for some reason I am far more likely to remember what I have read if it has been added to my annual register, especially when I have made notes in the book itself. The notebook is essential to the hundred pages strategy. I suspect that it works for the same reason that pedometers help people to walk more or that certain online banking platforms make it easier for others to save money. It is a primitive example of what sociologists and pedagogues call “gamification”; by gratifying our desire to see numbers go up on the page, we turn the cultural technology of modernity against itself.
8. I have found that for some reason I tend to read in phases. This year, for example, I have read half a dozen books about Cromwell and the English interregnum; two years ago I had a modern German history phase, and about ten years ago I found myself reading the biographies of twentieth-century British prime ministers. I am inclined to think that this kind of bunched reading is a sort of catalyst: when you’ve read all the novels of Evelyn Waugh and the lives of Knox and Campion and A Little Learning and Selina Hastings’s biography, you will want to read Martin Stannard’s life and Mark Amory’s edition of the letters almost by definition.
9. Returning to one’s favorite books is an important part of anyone’s reading—perhaps the most important. This includes favorite books from childhood. The reasons why we prefer Treasure Island or The Wind in the Willows to the latest airport nonfiction are so obvious as not to require explanation.
I could say much more in this vein, but it occurs to me that in anticipation of possible objections, I should address a few words to my readers who are parents, especially of small children, as I am. Assuming that you wake up before your children do (which is not always the case, e.g., with newborns) you are probably in more or less the same situation as the childless or empty-nesters in the early morning. While kids are very good at monopolizing our time, they very rarely leave us in a situation in which we haven’t got even ten or so minutes to ourselves at a stretch, especially early in the morning. Which is to say, enough time to read about five pages—five percent of the way there! (The best thing about the hundred pages strategy is that the math associated with it is necessarily simple.)
Apart from the question of children, I can imagine someone asking me whether any of what I have said applies to people who work long hours, or have physically demanding jobs, or suffer from physical or other disabilities which make it difficult for them to take twenty-minute walks. Here I can only plead truthfully that most of the people from whom I have received inquiries about the hundred pages strategy tend not to fall into these categories—or, if they do, they are themselves still under the impression that they possess sufficient leisure time to read more than they currently do. Like most plans of self-improvement, this is a voluntary one.
In any case, the resolution is more important than the result. If one hundred pages sounds like or proves to be too many, aim smaller. Fifty pages a day allows you to get through something like fifty books a year, which is more than four times the ostensible average in this country. Even a goal of twenty pages—a page and a half per hour, assuming average sleeping habits—would allow you to read David Copperfield in little more than a month; it is also humble enough that if kept too long enough to become an actual habit it will almost certainly be exceeded at least half of the time.
I realize that I have written some three thousand words without addressing an obvious question: “Do you know what you sound like when you tell people how much you read?” Of course I do. In our bookless culture the only thing more shameful than openly confessing that you do not read at all is admitting that you read what other people consider a great deal. The subject lends itself effortlessly to self-aggrandizement and accusations of dishonesty. I have mixed feelings about the moral approbation which we attach to the act of reading. For this reason I have attempted to discuss the subject in value-neutral terms, for the benefit of an implicitly interested audience, the way a weight lifter might talk to someone who says he wants to gain muscle mass. Despite my best efforts, it is possible that my tone has betrayed a certain degree of evangelical zeal.
Not long ago I spoke to an old friend who confessed to being an aspirational one-hundred-pager. He says that he had been skeptical after hearing my testimony secondhand. He converted some time later after a night when (in his telling—I cannot swear to any of what follows) he and I had enjoyed what the English press used to refer to as a “good dinner,” which, knowing us, almost certainly meant a marathon pub session followed by a midnight visit to McDonald’s. We had been walking for several minutes, he says, before he realized that he was talking to himself; looking over, he saw me soldiering along beside him, apparently none the worse for a dozen-ish beers, holding a volume of the old Everyman’s edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. For the rest of our walk, he says, I continued silently reading. Like Saint Thomas, he believed only after seeing.
