Every January, ambitious readers announce their Goodreads challenge: 52 books this year. One per week. How hard can it be? Very hard. Impossibly hard, if you have a job, a life, or a Netflix subscription. But the challenge isn't really about reading. It's about the brief, intoxicating feeling of announcing a goal on social media.
Week one: You finish a book. You post about it. People react positively. You feel cultured and disciplined. Week two: You finish another book, although this one was shorter. Week three: You start a book. You don't finish it. You start a different book. Week four: You haven't read anything but you've browsed a lot of book recommendation lists, which feels adjacent.
The average adult reads about 200-300 words per minute. The average book is about 80,000 words. That's roughly 4-5 hours per book, assuming you don't pause to check your phone, re-read paragraphs you zoned out during, or fall asleep. At one book per week, you need about 40 minutes of reading per day, every day, without fail. That's the same amount of time as one episode of prestige television, which is much easier and doesn't require you to look up words.
At some point, you'll switch to audiobooks and count those. This is perfectly fine except that you'll listen to them at 2x speed while doing other things and retain approximately nothing. "I read 52 books this year" and "I had 52 audiobooks playing in the background while I drove to work and thought about other things" are technically the same achievement but experientially very different.
Read one book you actually enjoy. The whole thing. Don't set a number. Don't track it. Don't post about it. Just read because you want to, the way you did when you were twelve and nobody was counting. If you finish it and want another one, great. If you don't finish it, put it down and try something else. Reading isn't a sport. There's no scoreboard. The people who read the most aren't necessarily the wisest. They might just have longer commutes.