8 Ways to Read More Books This Year

I read 103 books last year

Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash

One day when I was a kid, a salesman from the Reading Circle came to my house. A kind of book club where you committed to buying at least one book a month.

He used me to convince my parents.

I remember it like it was yesterday: there I was doing the dirty work for the salesman “Daddy sign up” “Mom, I promise I will read the books in the catalog.”

My parents gave in to my insistence. They signed a contract with the reading circle that committed them for three years to buy a book every month. In return, my mother told me that I would have to read every book we ordered. My 9-year-old self accepted without thinking about the consequences, and I spent those three years reading all kinds of books. While my friends were reading comics, I was reading Tolstoy, Chekhov, Borges, etc.

Those years far from being a blessing were like a condemnation. I saw how my friends read Superman, Spiderman, Batman, and I could not because the money went to those books, that as a child, I didn´t understand.

After those three years, I stopped reading.

I never read again until I was thirty. And as you can imagine, my reading muscle was quite rusty. I remember that the first year I took up reading, I barely read ten…