Every year around this time I open my reading challenge, look at the little progress bar, and feel personally attacked by it. “You are 6 books behind schedule.” Thanks. The instinct is to panic-read, stay up past midnight, and maybe finally try one of those speed-reading apps that promise to double your pace. I’ve looked into it, and that last idea is the one I’d skip. If you’re wondering how to read more books in the 49 days left in the year, the answer isn’t more speed. It’s more minutes, and you probably have them already.
A lot of us are in the same spot, by the way. A 2025 study in iScience, from researchers at University College London and the University of Florida, looked at more than 236,000 Americans in the American Time Use Survey and found that the share of people reading for pleasure on a typical day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. That’s a drop of about 40% in twenty years. If your book count slipped this year, you have plenty of company.
Speed reading can’t save your reading goal, because your eyes aren’t the bottleneck
The most common tips for how to read more books are things like carry a book everywhere, read before bed, quit books you don’t like, and they’re not wrong. What most of those lists skip is the obvious shortcut people actually reach for when they’re behind, which is trying to read faster, and what the research says about it.
In 2016, a team of cognitive scientists led by Keith Rayner and Elizabeth Schotter published a big review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest asking whether speed reading works. Their answer was basically no. Eye movements account for no more than 10% of reading time, so training your eyes to skip around saves very little. The real limit is how fast your brain recognizes words and builds them into sentences, and when you push past that, comprehension drops. They called it a trade-off between speed and accuracy. People who claim huge speeds usually already know a lot about the material, and they tend to stumble on detailed questions when they don’t.
So how fast do normal adults read? A 2019 meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert in the Journal of Memory and Language pooled 190 studies with 18,573 participants and landed on 238 words per minute for nonfiction and 260 for fiction. That’s your realistic pace. Doubling it means skimming, and nobody sets a reading goal so they can skim the ending of a novel they’ve been waiting all year to read.
How to read more books without reading faster: listening counts, and 1.5x barely costs you
I wish I’d figured this out years ago: the same time-use study that tracked the decline counted audiobooks as reading for pleasure, right alongside print and e-books. And unlike print, listening fits into time you’re already spending on something else: the commute, folding laundry, the 25 minutes you spend on the dishes after a dinner party.
Speeding up audio is also a lot safer than speeding up your eyes. In a UCLA study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, 231 students watched recorded lectures at normal speed, 1.5x, 2x or 2.5x. On the immediate test, the normal-speed group averaged 26 out of 40 and the 1.5x and 2x groups averaged about 25. Comprehension only really fell at 2.5x, to about 22. Lectures aren’t novels, so I wouldn’t push it to the limit with a twisty thriller, but 1.5x is a comfortable place to start, and most people adjust within a chapter.
The math on six books in 49 days
I love this kind of math, so stick with me. Say you’re six books short and every one of them is a typical-length novel, around 80,000 words. Today is November 13, which leaves 49 days through December 31.
Reading in print at Brysbaert’s fiction rate of 260 words per minute, one book takes 80,000 divided by 260, or about 308 minutes, roughly 5.1 hours. Six books is about 1,846 minutes. Spread over 49 days, that’s 37.7 minutes of sit-down reading every single day, and December is not a month known for quiet evenings.
Now switch half of them to audio. ACX, Amazon’s audiobook production platform, says most narrators record about 9,300 words per hour. An 80,000-word book runs about 8.6 hours, or 516 minutes, at normal speed. At 1.5x that drops to about 344 minutes. Three audiobooks at 1.5x add up to roughly 1,032 minutes, which is 21.1 minutes a day for 49 days. The three print books take about 923 minutes, or 18.8 minutes a day.
So the total time barely changes. What changes is where it comes from. Instead of carving out 38 quiet minutes every evening, you need about 19 minutes on the couch, and the other 21 happen while you’re driving to work or wrapping gifts. That’s the difference between a goal you finish and a goal you quietly delete on December 28.
It doesn’t have to cost anything, either. Libby, the app most public libraries use for e-books and audiobooks, is free with a library card. Popular titles can have waitlists, so put holds on three or four books today and let whichever comes in first decide what you listen to next.
Picking the right books matters more than reading them faster
One more honest thing. If the goal is a number on an app, shorter books are a perfectly legitimate strategy, and I don’t think anyone should feel weird about reaching for a 200-page novella in December. But I’d rather you picked books you’ll actually look forward to, because that’s what keeps you reading in January when there’s no progress bar shaming you.
If you’re looking for the minutes, check your screen time first. When I tried the grayscale phone trick, the reclaimed scrolling time was the easiest place to fit in a chapter. And if you’re flying for the holidays, an early departure (here’s why the 7 a.m. flight is the safer bet) plus a downloaded audiobook covers a good chunk of a book before you’ve even landed.
So, how to read more books before the year runs out? Skip the speed-reading app. Pick your six, put half of them in your ears at 1.5x, and give the other half about 19 minutes a night. You don’t have to read faster to finish. You just have to stop leaving the commute and the dishes empty.