The One Hundred Pages Strategy

I wish there were an easier way to think about word count vs pages. I know ebooks/ereaders can handle that sort of thing, and some of the book tracking options—e.g. StoryGraph—will pull those up for you, but if you're just reading a book it's not easy on its own. And if you're doing a page number goal, it's "important" because: not all pages are created equal.

You can double-count non-fiction or something like that, maybe also double-count things from 100 or 150 years ago or something too, but in the end, why? I love the Cortex idea of the Yearly Theme (<https://www.themesystem.com>) and they make the good point that "Read 100 books" or "Read 100 pages a day" are bad goals, whereas "Read more" is a good one.

I enjoyed this, and I identify with it a bit, but I'm trying to get away from that mentality a lot. My goal is to read as much as I am happy with, and then a bit more.

I consider myself a pretty avid reader - I read daily and read about 30-40 books a year. Ranging from 60 page novellas to 1000 page books.

But I never think of this in terms of needing to read x hours or y pages in a day. If anything, that would turn reading from a fun hobby to a chore - which I think would turn people off of reading and turn it into a school assignment almost.

Some days I will get sucked into a good book, e.g when I am on vacation, and fill my waking hours with reading. Other days I just read 10 minutes before sleeping.

If this helps people actually read more.. sure, go for it. As long as you actually enjoy it. Otherwise, do whatever else you like with your spare time lol.

Edit: also want to point out, if I read non-fiction I read to learn. So part of my reading time is spent reflecting on what I read. I’m pretty sure I read maybe a dozen or so pages in a session. If you read just to get your “page count” up but then don’t really grok what you read, you might as well not have read at all.

It's not hard to read one hundred pages each day of newspaper articles and magazine articles and other similar publications. If The Economist were a daily publication, I'd gladly read it every single day from cover to cover. However I see that the author has excluded periodicals in this statistic, presumably because it's not "heavy" reading?

I recently re-read a few books from the Harry Potter series and I could very easily read one hundred pages a day. I just finished reading Deaton's Economics in America and it's comparatively light and I read on average 50 pages per day. But I recently began to read Pigou's The Economics of Welfare (which I discovered only because Deaton quoted it) and there's no way I could read more than 20 pages a day.

I'm learning Polish, and I've so far shadowed Mały Książę (The Little Prince) by Antonio Saint-Exupéry everyday for 37 days straight. My goal is 100 days straight for a Bimodal Blitzathon. The book is approximately 160 pages and it takes me a little over two hours.

It can be done obviously, but it needs to be a priority to finish the book early in the day. The days that I put it off, I ended up finishing near midnight. Not fun, and I don't get as much out of it.

I do try to read 25 pages a day, and I consider 100 pages an almost unreasonable goal. The main key to success is that you focus on the process, rather than the result. This means you should build the habit to read (or whatever you goal is) rather than reaching some specific goal. (you also need to waste less time on the internet and social media).

I would suggest that you keep a list of the books you read over the long term. Inspired by a friend, I started this in 2011 and and almost immediately wished I had begin this practice as a teenager. The list just contains the title, author, and the date I finished the book.

The statistics have been surprising and the trend has been gratifying. In the fist four years I read just over 35 books per year, and in the past eight this has increased in an average over over 60 per year. I don't feel I read excessively, it's mostly in the evenings, on vacations, and while traveling.

Recently I probably did read 100 pages a day for a couple of days. It was a book for the next meeting of a neighborhood book club, sloppy and to be hurried through to get back to more interesting reading. So I am indifferent to the number.

I will, though, mention https://annekennedy.substack.com/p/a-harried-mothers-guide-t... .

With age book reading gives diminishing return to me. I read two fiction books this year and solely to absorb some foreign languages vocabulary.

I read about 10 programming/devops/architecture books though. Even in 2024 I find tech books useful and I'm very grateful to the authors. Writing tech books do not make a lot of financial sense as I understand making me appreciate them even more.

For those looking for something similar in an app “Serial Reader” splits up books, mostly public donation, into 10 minute nuggets a day. Works pretty well!

This is ambitious, and it's refreshing in a way to see someone set an ambitious personal goal like this and then hit it.

This is like 50 push-ups a day etc. Nice, easy to remember round number and very simple instruction. For many people consistency of any sort helps and simple rules are far more effective.