How I Read 42 Books a Year

It used to be my strong belief that I should only count a book as Officially Read if I had read a hard copy. This is strange considering my attachment to audiobooks from a very young age.

When I was about four years old, my mom’s parents moved from New Jersey to Tennessee for my grandfather’s job. Worried about losing our close connection, my grandmother, a retired English teacher, came up with a plan to 1) keep my sister and I interested in books, and 2) to remain a presence in our lives even if living far away. Grams started sending Meredith and I books on tape, specifically all seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia read by Grams herself.

Meredith and I listened to those tapes on repeat for years. I cannot speak for Meredith and how she ran things in her room, but in my bedroom my tape player was on a shelf over my bed. When I was tucked in for the night, part of the bedtime ritual was to put on one of Grams’ tapes and I would fall asleep listening to a story of Narnia. The Horse and His Boy rapidly became my favorite and I listened to the same tape over and over again. Something about that story grabbed me and hearing my favorite parts on repeat was very soothing and helped me to sleep.

So Grams read us all seven books and we had them playing regularly in the house. Because of this I walked around thinking I was all cool because I had read all seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia. But to be honest, I had not. I had listened to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader multiple times as they were also favorites. But then once I got to The Horse and His Boy I was hooked and stopped progressing through the series. So I never recall listening to the last two (which are The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle - in our family we read these books by the publication order, not the chronological order and don’t fight us on it). When my mom or sister refer to something from the last two books I never know what they are talking about, but usually nod along as if I do.

Many years ago, well beyond the age of tape recorders but before the age of smartphones, I picked up my old copies of these books and started reading them. I thought I was re-reading them when I started, but soon found that I didn’t remember much of the stories of the books that I only listened to once or twice. And so I concluded at that time that listening to a book is not the same as actually reading a book.

Then, inevitably, things changed. I started using the Goodreads app. This app allowed me to track the books I wanted to read, books I had read, and the books I was currently reading. Best of all, the app has a feature where you can set yourself a yearly reading challenge. You decide how many books you want to read in a calendar year, set the goal, and the app tracks your progress as you mark books as read throughout the year. This really activated my excitement to start reading more again post-grad school; anything that turns an activity into a sort of challenge or game and I want to play to win.

As I first got back into reading for pleasure my goal was only 10 or 15 books per year. I say “only”, but for someone who had basically stopped reading for fun since college, this was a big deal. I remember the first year I barely scraped by, reading frenetically during the week between Christmas and New Years to hit my goal. Over the next couple of years my total book goal stayed relatively low as I was not counting any books that I listened to or any books that I was re-reading (Harry Potter). My strict rules were making it harder to hit my yearly reading goals. They also made reading feel more like work that had to be done rather than a relaxing and enjoyable hobby.

Then I started driving a lot more on long road trips to Iowa and eventually on my hour long commute to work. These long periods of time needed to be filled and while music and podcasts did their part, I found the time passed faster if I was engaged in the plot of a story. I started listening to more audiobooks, books that were really exciting with really excellent narrators that brought the stories to life. This made me almost happy to get in the car after a day at the office for the long drive home; it was like tuning in for the next episode of a great story.

Commuting five days a week at two hours a day meant I was consuming at least one book every week or two, depending on the length of the book. But I still wasn’t counting these books in my reading total for the year because “audiobooks don’t count”. Even though between work obligations, sheer exhaustion, and mounting anxiety at the time I wasn’t reading much in hard copy, I stood by my audiobook rule.

My work wife/platonic life partner Krystina will often ask me what I have been reading lately. Sometimes she is looking for a book recommendation; sometimes she’s just checking in on what I’m up to because she’s the best like that. More and more often in those conversations I found myself talking about the books I had listened to rather than those I was reading in real life. And as I talked and described plots and characters, I found I could recall the stories just fine, sometimes even better than stories I had read with my eyeballs. I realized that the engaging narrators contributed a lot to me following the story. Picking the right books with plots that kept my mind going meant that I would be deep in the world of the book when listening. I often got more out of a story when listening to it than when I read it myself.

The rules had to change. After discussing the question with my sister and other readers I know, I decided that audiobooks had to be allowed to count towards a reading total. And from there everything changed.

Now my yearly reading goal is up to 42 books (42 being a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of the books that I listened to). So far in 2024 I am at 26 books read; according to the app that puts me right on pace to finish by December 31st. Nearly half of those books have been audiobooks. In addition, nearly half of the paper books I’ve read have been re-reads; I allow myself to count a book I’ve already read in my lifetime as a “new” book towards my reading goal if it has been more than 10 years since the last time I’ve read it AND if, while reading it, I find that I have forgotten some bits of the story. For this reason all of the Harry Potter re-reads will never count towards my goal, in case anyone was concerned that I was cheating.

I don’t really know what type of learner I am: visual, auditory, whatever other kinds there are (something I should know given that I wanted to be a teacher for many years…whoops). But I do know that everyone receives information differently. Some people can read a paragraph, understand it immediately, and retain it for the rest of their lives. Others take time to process before they comprehend and the information becomes part of their knowledge bank. Likewise, some people read fast and some read slow. Some can keep track of a story when they hear it, while other people have minds that wander. Audiobooks work for me, so long as the story is interesting and the narrator doesn’t suck. For me that changed the rule: listening now counts as reading.

The exception to the rule is Grams’ renditions of The Chronicles of Narnia. I am currently working my way through re-reading each of those books and continue to come across plot points of which I have zero memory. Those stories didn’t stick through listening, but I don’t think that was part of Grams’ plan. What stuck was my grandmother’s voice in my head, the connection across the many miles between us, and a love of good, engaging stories with an excellent narrator.