A while back, I made a post about pacing yourself to achieve your yearly reading goals. It was aimed to be a realistic and practical breakdown of what is feasible for the average person, and roughly how much weekly time they would have to dedicate to reading in order to hit their yearly goal.
But it got me thinking… how many books can you actually read in a year if there were no limitations? By that I mean no responsibilities outside of eating, sleeping, and basic hygiene. On top of that—and for the sake of simplicity—let’s assume we don’t ever get reader’s block or simply want to do anything else.
So if we had almost all the time in the world, and an endless drive to read, how many books could we hypothetically chew through across a year?
The Unrealistic Maximum
Let’s tackle the time not spent reading in this hypothetical scenario. If we need eight hours of sleep, and let’s say at least two hours for all our hygiene/cooking/other needs, that gives a solid fourteen hours per day of straight reading.
For simplicity, we will assume that we read a page per minute, and we only read novels around 300 pages long. That works out to an approximate result of five hours per book, or 2.8 books per day.
Take 2.8 and multiply it by 365, and hey, the total maximum amount of reads would be somewhere within the realm of 1,022 books per year. That’s a lot better than all those people who boast about getting through 50–100 across a year.
The Realistic Maximum
However, that figure above is not realistic, just the ultimate benchmark. To get something more plausible, imagine a typical life where someone dedicates ten hours to reading each week.
Using the same book length (300 pages) and reading rate (1 page/min), that gives us a solid two books per week. That still results in an approximate figure of 104 books per year. If we dial it back to compensate for human elements, slower reading days, and an inconsistent schedule—it’s still likely that many people could easily read 60–80 books per year if they consistently dedicated around ten hours per week to reading.
That is roughly one hundred minutes a day. I guess we have no excuses to not be reading at least fifty or so books per year, dedicating roughly 30-60 minutes per day to our reading habits.
A Book Per Week
And if we—like a lot of people do—aimed for that fifty-two figure per year, it really isn’t that infeasible when you crunch the numbers. Using our same figures again, it would only take around five hours of reading per week to clear a book.
The more I think about this, the more I’m disappointed in myself for only reading around ten titles in previous years.
This was a fun bit of maths to do. It also puts into perspective how short books actually are, and how their length really comes down to perception that is largely influence by our reading speed, consistency, and the overall engagement we have with the hobby.
Of course, it is not a competition; reading would not be fun if all one ever thought about was how efficient and speedy they are being. However, if it were possible, I’d like to see someone read 1,022 novels per year. By my count, that’s around 306,000 total pages across a year. Hell, even 1,022 novellas at roughly half the total pages would be more than impressive.
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