Reading challenge: picking a number you will actually reach
A reading challenge is a target number of books in a set period, usually a year. The useful move is to convert it into pages per day before you commit: 24 books a year is roughly 25 pages a day, which tells you immediately whether the number is realistic for your life.
How many books a year is realistic?
Work it out from pages per day rather than picking a round number, because the round number is where over-ambitious reading goals come from.
An average novel runs roughly 300 pages. Most people read somewhere around a page a minute for straightforward prose. So a book a month is about 10 pages a day, and two books a month is about 20 to 25.
Run that against the time you actually have. Twenty five pages is a comfortable 25 minutes before bed. A hundred pages a day is a part-time job, which is why 100 book challenges tend to end in March. This is breaking a goal down applied to reading.
Books or pages: which should you count?
Count pages if you want the goal to be fair, count books if you want it to feel like an achievement.
Books are the natural unit and a bad measure. A 900 page novel and a 120 page novella both count as one, which quietly pushes you toward short books near the deadline.
Pages are the honest unit. They also let you log progress every single day rather than once a fortnight when you happen to finish something, and daily logging is what keeps a record accurate.
The practical answer is to set the target in books, because that is how people think about reading, and track the progress in pages. That is an amount goal, and it fills continuously rather than in jumps, which is how tracking works best.
How to track a reading challenge
Log pages daily, watch the total weekly, and let the book count take care of itself.
Set the target as a number and a date
24 books by 31 December. Then convert: about 7,200 pages, about 20 a day.
Log pages the day you read them
Reconstructing a month of reading from memory produces a smooth line that never happened.
Attach reading to an existing cue
After dinner, on the sofa. Before bed, phone in the other room. Deciding the moment in advance is the best-evidenced trick here. See if-then plans.
Check the total, not the pace
A slow fortnight looks like failure day by day and like a small dip against a yearly total. Only one of those views is accurate.
What to do about a book you are not enjoying
Abandon it. A reading challenge that makes you finish books you dislike is a challenge that will make you stop reading.
This is the specific way reading goals backfire. The target starts selecting for short, easy, fast books, and the reading stops being the point.
Two guards against it. Count pages read rather than books finished, so an abandoned book at page 90 still counts for 90. And allow yourself a fixed number of abandonments, decided in advance, so quitting a book is a rule rather than a failure.
Do audiobooks count?
That is your rule to make, and the only wrong answer is deciding it halfway through.
Most people who read a lot count them, because the point of the goal is usually to spend more time with books rather than to perform a particular activity.
If you do count them, convert to pages using time rather than guessing: audiobooks run roughly 9,000 words per hour and print runs roughly 250 to 300 words a page, so an hour of listening is very roughly 30 pages. Write the rule down at the start.
Frequently asked questions
- How many books a year should I aim for?
- Work backwards from pages a day. Twelve books a year is about 10 pages a day and 24 is about 20 to 25, which most people can fit before bed. Pick the number whose daily version you would actually do.
- Should I count books or pages?
- Set the target in books because that is how people think about it, and track in pages because that is fair across book lengths and lets you log something every day.
- Do audiobooks count in a reading challenge?
- Your call, made before you start. If you count them, convert listening time to pages at roughly 30 pages an hour so the units stay comparable.
- Is it okay to abandon a book?
- Yes, and building it into the rules protects the goal. If you count pages rather than finished books, an abandoned book still counts for what you read, which removes the pressure to finish things you dislike.