The Challenge

50 Books in 2020

How Many Books is Enough?

First things first: DO NOT GOOGLE THIS! I did before writing this post and a more self-aggrandising stream of claptrap you could not hope to find. “I regularly whip through 500-page books in two hours.” Yeh! Course you do, mate.

Anyway, there are multiple answers to this question. First off, the only limit to how many books you should own is how many can fit comfortably in your home. That’s not really the question I’m asking, though, as I’m more interested in how many books is enough to read.

Specifically this question was brought to my mind late last year, when an article popped up on my Twitter feed about how to read 100 books in a year (I think it was this one). It prompted me to consult my own list of the books I’d read in 2019, which revealed I’d managed to make my way through 12. (For what it’s worth, they were: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, Lanny by Max Porter, The Stars’ Tennis Balls by Stephen Fry, Circe by Madeline Miller, The Wall by John Lanchester, A Short History of England by Simon Jenkins, The Power by Naomi Alderman, Tiger Woods by Armen Keteyian & Jeff Benedict, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, Educated by Tara Westover and Normal People by Sally Rooney.)

As far as I was concerned that was pretty pathetic.

For someone who would put reading high on my supposed list of interests/hobbies, a book a month was not enough.

It was a total of 4,136 pages at an average of just over 11 per day, equating to roughly 10-15 minutes of reading per day. As I said: pathetic.

This needed to change, so for the first time in my life I made a genuine New Year’s resolution and set myself the target of reading 50 books in 2020, pretty much a book a week with a little leeway. I felt the target of 100 ventured in the article I’d read was too big a challenge, but 50 was just about doable, and even if I failed, I’d likely at least treble the number of books I’d read in 2019.

The rules? None really, or at least none that are set in stone. A 50-50 split on male/female authors and fiction/non-fiction would be satisfying come the year’s end, as would an average book length of 250-350 pages (it’d be a fairly hollow victory if I reached 50 by reading exclusively pamphlets).

But the aim is simply to read more. A lot more. And I think that will, in most cases, be the answer to the above question. How many books is enough? More than you are reading now.