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# Reading forty books a year, honestly
- URL: https://quiet.labs.enova.studio/reading-forty-books-a-year-honestly/
- Published: 2026-08-09T08:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-23T19:09:41.000Z
- Description: How many I finish, how many I abandon, and the rule that changed both numbers.
- Author: Enova Studio
- Tags: Reading, Attention, Field Notes, #hero-inline

I keep a spreadsheet of everything I read, which is a slightly embarrassing thing to admit and a very useful thing to have. It has four columns and it goes back to 2019\. Every January somebody on the internet announces they have read a hundred books, and every January I open my spreadsheet and feel briefly competitive, and then remember what is actually in it.

## The number, and where it comes from

I read about forty books a year. That is the number I would give at a party, and it is true in the sense that forty books a year pass through my hands and get an entry.

Here is the honest version:

| Year | Started | Finished | Reread |
| ---- | ------- | -------- | ------ |
| 2021 | 47      | 29       | 6      |
| 2022 | 52      | 31       | 8      |
| 2023 | 44      | 26       | 11     |
| 2024 | 39      | 24       | 14     |
| 2025 | 41      | 22       | 19     |

Two things are happening in that table. The finishing rate is falling, and the rereading is climbing steeply. Both are deliberate, and the second is the reason I now read better than I did when the first number was higher.

## Twenty-two of them I did not finish

In 2025 I abandoned nineteen books. I used to consider that a failure of attention, or worse, of character. It is neither. It is the natural consequence of one rule I set in 2023 and have kept since.

> Page sixty, and then an honest question: am I reading this, or am I reading about myself having read it?

The rule is page sixty. At page sixty I stop and ask whether I want to know what happens on page sixty-one. If the answer is no, the book goes back on the shelf, without ceremony and without a note. The one exception is a book someone I trust has personally pressed on me, which gets to page a hundred, because twice that has changed my mind entirely.

What the rule actually does is remove the sunk cost. Before it, a book I was not enjoying at page sixty would take me five weeks to fail to finish, and during those five weeks I read nothing else. The abandoning is not the cost. The dithering was the cost.

## What rereading gives you that reading does not

Teju Cole wrote somewhere that a book read twice is a different book, and the second one is better. I resisted this for years on the grounds that there are simply too many books.

What changed my mind was noticing that I could not remember most of what I had read. I could remember the fact of having read it, which is a different and much less useful possession. Barthes has the unkind version: we do not read books so much as we read our own reading of them.

Rereading fixes this in a way that reading more never did. On a second pass the plot is out of the way and the sentences are visible. I have reread the same four books almost every year since 2022, and each time I have found a paragraph I would have sworn was not previously there.

![The spines of well used paperbacks lined up on a shelf](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1761319114933-38b381ae431c?auto=format&fit=crop&q=80&w=2000)

Four of them, and the slips I leave in to argue with myself.

## Five books I have read more than twice

1. *The Craftsman*, Richard Sennett. For the argument that thinking and making are the same activity, which I did not believe the first time.
2. *Bird by Bird*, Anne Lamott. For permission, reliably, in about four pages.
3. *The Living Mountain*, Nan Shepherd. For what attention to one place over decades actually reads like.
4. *Open City*, Teju Cole. For the walking, and for how much is withheld.
5. *The Wheelwright's Shop*, George Sturt. For a trade recorded by someone who watched it end.

(I have also read a book about barn conversions three times, entirely by accident, because I keep forgetting I own it.)

## Back to the spreadsheet

The column I added last year is the only one that has changed how I read. It is headed "would I read this again", and it takes one keystroke at the end of a book.

Since I started filling it in, the forty-books-a-year number has stopped mattering to me almost entirely. Twenty-two finished, nineteen reread, and a shelf of abandoned books arranged by the reason I stopped. It is a much more useful shelf than the other one, and it is the first year my spreadsheet has told me something I did not already believe.