How to Read More Books (Without Turning It Into a Chore)

Every January, "read more" appears near the top of resolution lists — and by March, the stack on the bedside table has quietly become furniture. If you've ever typed how to read more books into a search bar, you'll have found no shortage of productivity advice: speed-reading techniques, ambitious yearly targets, apps that track your streaks.

We'd like to suggest something gentler.

In France, where the brands we bring to the UK design and make their products, reading is rarely treated as a goal to be optimised. It's part of l'art de vivre — the art of living well. A book with morning coffee. A chapter on the train. Twenty unhurried minutes before sleep. The French read a great deal not because they push themselves to, but because reading is woven into the fabric of the day, the way a good meal or an evening walk might be.

That's the approach this guide takes. Not reading faster — reading more often, and enjoying it more when you do.

Why "read more" fails as a resolution

Most reading resolutions fail for the same reason most resolutions fail: they're framed as obligations. A target of fifty books a year turns every slow, thoughtful novel into a scheduling problem. A tracking app turns a pleasure into a metric.

Research on habit formation points in a different direction. Habits stick when they're easy to start, attached to an existing routine, and intrinsically rewarding. Reading already has the third quality in abundance — the trick is engineering the first two. Everything below is really just that: making the next page the easiest, most inviting thing in the room.

Seven small rituals that add up to a reading life

1. Anchor reading to something you already do

The most reliable way to build a habit is to attach it to one that already exists. Coffee, commute, bath, bed — each is a ready-made anchor. "I'll read more" is vague; "I read while the coffee brews" is a plan. Even ten minutes at the same moment each day compounds remarkably: at an ordinary reading pace, a daily quarter of an hour is roughly a dozen books a year, without ever once feeling like effort.

2. Let the book win the bedside battle

For most of us, the last waking hour belongs to a phone. The screen isn't just a distraction from reading — its bright, cool light works against the drowsiness that makes evening reading so pleasant. Try a simple swap: phone charging in another room, book on the pillow.

This is the hour where a proper reading light earns its keep. A warm, focused glow — enough for the page, dim enough to leave the room (and anyone sharing it) in peace — makes bedtime reading feel like a treat rather than a strain. It's exactly what the Lizia 3-in-1 book light was designed for: a warm rechargeable reading light, page holder and bookmark in one, made in France by one of the brands we're the exclusive UK home for. When your kit makes the ritual nicer, the ritual repeats itself.

3. Always know your next book

A surprising amount of "not reading" is really just the pause between books. You finish one, don't know what's next, and three weeks disappear. Keep a short, honest list — three or four titles you're genuinely curious about, not the ones you feel you should read — and start the next book within a day of finishing the last. Momentum matters more than merit.

4. Give yourself permission to abandon

French readers tend to be unsentimental about this: a book that isn't earning its place gets set aside, sans culpabilité. Life is short and the good books are many. If you're fifty pages in and reaching for your phone instead, the problem isn't your discipline — it's the book. Let it go. Nothing kills a reading habit faster than a guilt-inducing volume squatting on the nightstand for two months.

5. Carry a book everywhere

The waiting room, the delayed train, the ten minutes before a meeting — an ordinary week hides two or three hours of found reading time. A slim paperback in the bag turns dead time into chapters. (A bookmark that won't fall out helps here too; losing your place twice a week is a small but real tax on enthusiasm.)

6. Make travel your reading retreat

Flights and long train journeys are the closest thing modern life offers to enforced stillness — no errands, patchy Wi-Fi, hours to fill. Frequent readers often log more pages in transit than anywhere else. It's worth setting yourself up properly: a book you've been saving, and enough comfort to actually settle in. The Le Petit Dormeur travel collection — an ergonomic 3-in-1 travel pillow and soft cotton and velvet sleep masks from another of the French brands we distribute in the UK — was made for precisely this rhythm: read until your eyes grow heavy, then sleep properly. Arrive rested, a hundred pages further on.

7. Read what you love, at whatever pace

Rereading counts. Short books count. Poetry, essays, cookbooks read in bed — all of it counts. The readers who read the most are almost never the ones chasing numbers; they're the ones who long ago stopped apologising for their taste.

A word on the evening hour

If you take just one thing from this guide, let it be the evening ritual. Reading before bed is the habit with the most generous returns: it displaces the screen, settles the mind, and — because it happens at the same time every day — it's the easiest anchor of all. Keep the light warm and low, keep the phone elsewhere, and let the last thing your eyes do each day be something unhurried.

Build the shelf slowly. Choose things that last. That philosophy runs through everything in our full collection of French-made pieces — thoughtfully designed objects from award-winning French brands, brought across the Channel to make the quiet hours a little finer. (And with free UK delivery over £20, the next chapter of the habit is easy to start.)

Bonne lecture.