What I learned from reading 50 books in a year

For most of my adult life I had a stubborn relationship with books. I bought them faster than I read them, accumulated unread piles on a Brisbane bedside table, and told myself that finishing a novel every few months was reasonable. Then one January, on a train from Sydney to Melbourne, I finished a worn copy of a Tim Winton novel and decided that a yearly target might give me the push I needed.

The number itself felt arbitrary. Fifty books in twelve months works out to roughly one a week, which sounds like a stunt until you realise that short books, novellas, and collections of essays help the maths along. The point was never the count but the rhythm. Reading became something I scheduled and protected rather than something I squeezed between work, the gym, and the habitual evening scroll.

What surprised me was how ordinary the practice turned out to be. There was no dramatic transformation, no aura of literary wisdom, no sudden desire to retire to a shack on the Tasmanian coast and write epistles about the sea. The lessons were quieter, slower, and far more useful than I expected, especially when I started to carry them into other parts of my life.

The slow start and small commitments

The first month was humbling. I set a target of fifty books and managed three, two of which were slim volumes I could have read in a single arvo on the couch. I sat with that failure longer than I should have. Eventually I realised the year was not a competitive event with a podium in December. It was a practice, and practices are built from small moves.

I dropped my pace to something realistic. Some weeks one book was enough. Other weeks I read nothing at all because work was heavy or the family needed me, and on those weeks I learned to forgive myself. The plan loosened into something gentler, and the books started to flow again. By April I was finishing four a month without pressure, mostly because I had stopped treating reading like a chore to be ticked off a list.

That shift mattered. The mistake many people make when they start a reading challenge is to chase volume in the first six weeks and burn out before winter arrives. In Australia, where daylight savings and a hot February make indoor evenings attractive for reading, it is tempting to sprint early. Patience, I learned, beats intensity every time.

Building a routine around the daily commute

I live near a tram line that takes me into the central business district of Melbourne, and that thirty-minute trip became my main reading window. I started carrying a book everywhere: in the car, in the kitchen, in the small satchel I take to the South Bank parklands on Saturdays. Reading stopped being a special event and became something that lived in the gaps.

Audiobooks, which I had been privately snobbish about, turned out to be useful for the long stretches. I listened to essays and memoir while driving back from weekend visits to my parents in Ballarat, and that cut my effective reading time nearly in half. The trick was to treat listening as reading, not as a softer substitute for it. Once I did, my weekly numbers rose naturally.

There was a side benefit I had not predicted. Reading on public transport softened my relationship with strangers. I read in a cafe in Fitzroy and another in Newtown when I visited friends in Sydney, and I noticed people are kinder to those visibly absorbed in a book. They ask what you are reading, recommend local writers, and sometimes lend you a paperback with a worn cover and a scribbled dedication. The social texture of reading is real, and I had been missing it for years.

The unexpected value of rereading old favourites

About a third of the way through the year I allowed myself to reread books I had once loved. The first was a dog-eared copy of a Helen Garner diary I had read in my twenties, and the second was a Patrick White novel I had marked up at university. Rereading felt like cheating at first, and then it felt essential.

Books change when you change. The lines you once underlined no longer strike the same way, and new ones appear as if the author had quietly rewritten the text while you were not looking. I noticed I had a stronger response to the Garner diary in my late thirties than I did in my early twenties, and that the White novel, which had felt impenetrable during my honours year, suddenly opened up around the fourth chapter.

I began to think of rereading as maintenance, like rotating the tyres or watering the garden in a Melbourne summer. It is not a luxury. It is a way of checking what you still believe and what has drifted under your feet. Halfway through my year of reading I had a long list of books I wanted to return to, and the list itself felt like a form of wealth.

Notes, margin scribbles, and the shape of memory

I started keeping a reading notebook, the kind with a soft cover and rough paper that takes fountain pen ink without bleeding. Anything I wanted to remember went in, from a sentence in a Camus essay to a passing thought I had while waiting for a coffee at a laneway bar in the CBD. The notebook grew fat over twelve months and I filled three of them.

The act of writing things down changed the way I read. I moved more slowly through passages and remembered more the next morning. I noticed that books I took notes in stayed with me longer than the ones I raced through, even when I had loved both equally. Note-taking is not really a technique for retention. It is a kind of attention that trains the mind to notice what matters.

There is also something practical in having a written record. Months later I can flip back through a notebook and find a quote from a Kim Scott novel I had forgotten I had even opened, or the exact phrasing of a passage that shaped how I thought about trust in a workplace setting. Memory, left to itself, is fussier than we admit. A few scribbled lines can outlast a thousand vague impressions.

Changing taste and the books I abandoned

Mid-year I made a quiet decision that changed the shape of my reading: I gave myself permission to abandon a book. Australian readers tend to be polite about books, perhaps because the local literary scene is small enough that you risk running into the author at a writers' festival in Adelaide or a launch in Brunswick. I had been forcing myself through pages I did not enjoy, and the moment I stopped, my reading accelerated.

Abandoning is not failure. It is information. A book I cannot connect with at thirty-eight might have meant everything to me at twenty-three, and a book that fails me now will probably fail me again next year. I learned to read the first fifty pages as a kind of test, and if nothing had shifted by then, the book went back onto a shelf, or more often into a Little Free Library box on my street.

The bigger lesson was about taste itself, which drifts with no obvious schedule. I lost patience with celebrated books and fell hard for lesser-known essay collections and translated works I had never heard of. Around this time I was also reading more openly about careers and self-doubt, which softened the lingering impostor syndrome at work I had carried for years. By October I had stopped reading what I thought I was supposed to read and started reading what I actually wanted. The numbers held up, and the joy returned.

What non-fiction taught me about work and identity

Non-fiction ate up the second half of my year. It started with a stack of books on craft, attention, and creativity borrowed from a library in Carlton, and ended somewhere in the foothills of psychology and self-examination. The strongest non-fiction books read like arguments with themselves, full of hesitation and revision, rather than lecture notes.

That kind of writing rubs off on you. I started to think more carefully about the language I used at work, the way I introduced myself at meetings, and the tone of emails I would once have fired off without reflection. Reading serious non-fiction is good for the ear in ways that are hard to measure. It also made me braver about my own thinking, more willing to change my mind in front of people, and less defensive about being wrong.

Work identity is a delicate thing in any country, but the longer I live in Australia the more I notice how much of it is shaped by the small communities we orbit, from the team at work to the regulars at the bar on a Friday evening. A book that helped me put some of those feelings into words felt almost like a personal manual, and I ended up writing my own mission statement by the end of the year. That turned out to be harder than reading fifty books, but more useful than I had expected.

Reading as a quiet act of restraint

By December I had hit fifty-one books, one over target, and I noticed something that had nothing to do with the number. I read less impulsively. I bought fewer books on the strength of a cover or a recommendation from a podcast. I started to think about what each new book would cost me in time and attention, and whether it was worth the trade.

That mindset has stayed with me. A book chosen carefully and read slowly is a small rebellion against the speed of everything else, from the news cycle to the group chat. It is also a way of being polite to the writer, who spent years on the manuscript, and to yourself, who deserves the hour. I still read in cafes and on trams and in the park on warm Sundays, but I am slower about starting and more honest about finishing.

Reading fifty books in a year turned out to be less about the books than about a quieter kind of discipline. If you are thinking about trying it, start small, allow yourself to abandon, take notes, and read what you actually want rather than what looks impressive on a shelf. The rest follows. A year on, you may find that the habit has outlasted the goal.