The 52 Strategies That Help Me Read 100 Books A Year

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Oct 30, 2025, 11:23 PM

the 52 strategies that help me read 100 books a year

Matt Karamazov November 25, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes YOUTUBE 📚 THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 📚 PATREON I guess it’s…Black Saturday by now? Is that a thing? Anyway, Time Mastery (my new course) is now LIVE and inside I’m teaching the 52 mindsets, strategies, and tactics I use personally to: *Read 100+ books a year (and take detailed notes)

As the end of the year approaches, many of us begin writing down our New Year’s resolutions. Among these goals, reading more books often makes the list—but it’s also one of the hardest to accomplish. Why do so many people struggle to reach their reading targets? Let’s break it down and discover practical strategies to help you read over 100 books in just one year. The first reason we fail to meet our reading goals is that the goal itself can feel overwhelming. For my 2024 resolution, I ambitiously decided to read 100 books.

It sounded impossible at first, but I made it happen by breaking the goal into smaller steps. I began by setting a much smaller target: just 10 books. Achieving this felt manageable and gave me the motivation to set another goal of 10 books—and then another. By focusing on incremental progress instead of the big picture, I was able to maintain my momentum and end the year with over 100 books under my belt. A common mistake when setting a reading goal is sticking to one genre, author, or type of book. To keep things exciting and avoid burnout, explore different genres and styles.

Don’t limit yourself to bestsellers or the works of a single writer—give lesser-known books a chance, too. You’d be surprised how much variety can make reading feel like an adventure rather than a chore. This article was co-authored by Grant Faulkner, MA. Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story, a literary magazine. Grant has published two books on writing and has been published in The New York Times and Writer’s Digest. He co-hosts Write-minded, a weekly podcast on writing and publishing, and has a M.A.

in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. This article has been viewed 65,434 times. One hundred books in a year may seem like an impossible accomplishment. Where will you find the time? If you really examine your daily life and your schedule, you’ll probably find that you actually have quite a bit of time that is spent on activities that can easily be turned into reading... If you truly have a passion for reading and want to achieve the goal of at least 100 books in a year, you can definitely do it.

"Audiobooks are a great option if you want to read more classics. Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are meant to be performed or read aloud, so audiobooks truly enhance the experience. Hearing the narrator’s tone of voice and emotional performance also makes the language easier to comprehend and more accessible for a modern audience." Welcome to The One Percent Better Club 📚 - your weekly dose of brilliant ideas from the world’s best nonfiction books that are going to help you be one percent better today than you... So if you’re ready for that one percent upgrade, then let's dive in! 🚀

You’ve told yourself this year will be different. You’ve made the resolution, bought the books, and maybe even started a few. Work is exhausting. Social media steals your attention. And by the end of the day, you’re too drained to do anything but scroll, watch Netflix, or just zone out. The stack grows bigger.

The guilt creeps in. And eventually, you convince yourself that you just don’t have the time. You do have the time. You’re just not using it the right way. A Harvard study found that top-performing CEOs (and most billionaires) read more books than average, up to four books a month. Last year, I managed to double that number.

I love reading… and often have multiple books on the go and sometimes read more than ten books per month. It is one of the few “guilt-free” luxuries that I allow myself to indulge in relentlessly. I am a member of a book club with friends from school. I enjoying reading biographies of founders, inventors, and business leaders. I am a sucker for all the usual suspects in the non-fiction best-sellers aisle. There is no end of information, adventure, and entertainment to be found within the pages of books and over time I have accumulated a bunch of great tools to help me find new books...

As this is often a new year’s resolution, I thought I would put together my top book hacks. "The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read," - Mark Twain Audible, Amazon's audiobook platform, lets you listen to professionally narrated books anywhere. There are over 200,000 titles. It's perfect for multitasking - I listen while commuting, exercising, or doing chores. The first book I ever read was Matilda by Roald Dahl.

It had been a gift from my grandmother, who used to sleep with a book under her pillow every night. I don’t know if this was her intention, but that story sparked within me a passion for literature that still resonates deeply to this day. I remember reaching the end of Dahl’s story feeling both shocked and betrayed, yet intrigued. After reading an ending that was completely different from its 1996 film adaptation, nine-year-old me felt overjoyed that she knew a secret only a select few would understand. Thus started my love for literature, my love for worlds, characters, and stories that only readers could truly know and cherish. From then on, I read childhood classics like Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney; then soon moved up to the YA genre, with...

The truth is, I read A LOT as a child. The last Divergent book Allegiant had almost 600 pages and I loved every second of it. I especially enjoyed getting to say the magic words in every book-to-film adaptation I watched in theaters: “That was different in the book.” Or, my personal favorite: “The book did it better.” And then came the stage that every reader DREADS… the infamous reading slump. I don’t think I looked at a single book in two years, and honestly, I didn’t even care to. Books were so far off my mind during this phase of my life.

It wasn’t until 2019, during my sophomore year of high school, that I decided to resume this hobby. It was a time when power outages were far too common (although sadly, they still are) in Puerto Rico, and most times, there was nothing to do. So, on one of those mindless days, I picked up a book series that had been collecting dust on my shelf for years: The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare. This book series is extremely well known, at least in the YA reader community, and, although my love for it was definitely not immediate, by that sixth and final book I was hooked. After finishing this one, I immediately jumped to its prequel trilogy before starting the sequel series (The Mortal Instruments comprises more than 15 books, and it’s still not over). Once I had finished reading the published books of this world, I needed more, and my love for the written word was reignited.

Trips to the bookstore became common again, and for birthdays, graduations, Christmases, and the like, that’s all I asked of my family: books! I’ll be honest, I used to think reading 100 books a year was only possible for people who had endless free time, no jobs, and definitely no Netflix account. But a few years ago, I challenged myself to try, and surprisingly, I actually managed to pull it off. It wasn’t about speed reading or skipping sleep, it was about building smart habits, staying consistent, and knowing how to enjoy the process. If you’ve ever dreamed of hitting that magical number, here’s exactly how to do it without burning out. Before diving into the “how,” let’s talk about the “why.” For me, it wasn’t about bragging rights, it was about growth.

Reading this much changed the way I thought, expanded my vocabulary, gave me new perspectives, and honestly, made me more creative. And let’s face it, if you read 100 books, you’re basically carrying a mini-university in your head. When I first saw “100 books a year,” it felt impossible. But then I did the math: That’s it. Suddenly, it didn’t feel so scary.

It’s not about racing, it’s about steady progress. Somebody once asked Warren Buffett about his secret to success. Buffett simply pointed to a stack of books and said: “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.

All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will.” Early in his career, Buffett would actually read 800 pages a day, not 500. Even now, he still reads for about 8 hours a day. How does he do it? Easy. He makes reading a priority in his life.

The 52 Strategies That Help Me Read 100 Books A Year

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