Reading is important. You don’t need me to tell you this, but it is worth remembering just how powerful a reading habit can be. Every study shows that children who read more do better in school, emotionally, and in life. Reading makes you smarter, more empathetic, and allows your mind to mimic experiences you’d never otherwise be able to feel. If it came in a pill form, reading (like exercise) would be prescribed to everyone.

And yet. Few people read for pleasure anymore. There are a host of reasons for this. No Child Left Behind testing mandates have rewarded analyzing passages of text rather than entire books, so you now have Ivy League students who can’t read even a short novel. Social media in general, which crushes attention spans and is now morphing from text into video, shorter and shorter, auditory largely, and mostly AI-generated at that. We are in many ways already a post-literate society, with all the ills that lead from it around democracy, mental health, and the rest.

But, but! If you do some simple maths, you’ll see that with only 15 minutes a day of reading, you can read 15 books a year. And if you can up that to 30 minutes a day, you’re at 30 books. If you can manage an hour, that puts you at roughly a book a week, 52+ a year. Imagine that! And it takes so little time.

Here is the maths. A typical book is 100,000 words, roughly 300-400 pages. How fast do you read? A very conservative estimate is around 250 wpm (words per minute). At this pace, you can read a 100,000 word book in roughly 7 hours. Which means a book every month–actually somewhat faster, at 27 days per book. So 15 minutes a day of reading = 15 books a year.

Isn’t that cool! And once you’ve read for 15 minutes, you might find you enjoy it quite a lot and want to read a bit more. 30 minutes a day is 30 books a year; 60 minutes yields almost 60, more than one a week. Crazy.

So, how to cultivate such a habit? Well, the first thing is to prioritize it. I always read in bed before going to sleep. So that’s good for 15-30 minutes. I really enjoy stealing a few moments to read in the morning if I’m up early before the kids. I’d like to say I find time during the day, but that’s not really the case. I daydream of a life where I can set aside an hour for lunch and a book, as my mother has managed most of her life. One day.

The thing with any habit is starting it. And pick good things to read! Libraries have every book you want. If you don’t like something, just stop reading it. Nothing is required. I will give a book 50 pages because I normally start one due to a recommendation from someone. But if it’s not hitting after 50 pages? Done. Life is too short. There’s too much good stuff to read.

And there’s so much good writing out there. So many more than any of us can consume.

If you read 15 minutes a day from age 15-85, you’d manage 1,000 books in a lifetime. Double that time and you’re at almost 2,000. Still so little if you really step back and think about it.

So read. Take the time to do it. Put down the phone and the news. Subscribe to RSS Feeds of your favorite writers on the internet to stay somewhat informed, and let yourself enjoy an oasis of focus from time-to-time in this modern world.