Reading forty books a year, honestly

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:

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.

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.