How many pages a day is realistic?
Twenty pages a night is a comfortable, unheroic target that most people can manage in around twenty minutes, and it quietly adds up to a book every couple of weeks. Setting a page count is usually more effective than setting a number of books for the year, because it turns reading into a small daily action rather than a large annual verdict on yourself.
What if I keep abandoning books halfway?
Look at where you stop rather than at the fact that you stop — if it is always around the same point, you may be choosing books that are slow in the middle, or reading at a time of day when you are simply too tired to hold a plot. Try switching to shorter forms for a month, or to audiobooks during walks and washing-up, which suit some people far better than print and still count entirely as reading. If a book keeps defeating you, a different translation, a different edition with larger type, or reading it alongside a friend can change the experience completely.
Make it slightly social
You do not need a formal book club with minutes and a rota. Two friends and a group chat where you all read the same thing at a leisurely pace does the same job: a mild, pleasant obligation to have got somewhere by Sunday. Libraries help too, because a due date is a gentle deadline and borrowing widely costs nothing, which makes abandoning a book far less painful. By the time the clocks change, you may find the receipt at page forty has moved all the way to the end.
