Whenever people find out I read over 100 books a year, they tend to assume one of two things.
Either I’m some kind of intellectual powerhouse who spends every spare moment in a leather armchair, sipping tea and contemplating literary themes like “mortality” and “rain as symbolism”.
Or I have absolutely nothing else going on in my life.
The truth is significantly less poetic.
I’m a Kindle reader.
Which means my entire reading system is powered by a small glowing rectangle I treat with more care than my phone, my laptop, and occasionally my social life.
I do read a lot, genuinely. But not in a dramatic, candlelit-library sort of way. It’s more… slightly chaotic, always-on-the-go, “just one more chapter” energy that somehow turns into 100+ books a year.
The Kindle is the real reason any of this works.
It lives in my bag like a very polite addiction enabler. It comes on awkward lunch breaks during training, in queues, in waiting rooms, and into bed where I absolutely intend to read for ten minutes and then somehow find myself still awake at 1:13am because apparently I needed to know what happened to a fictional character’s unresolved childhood trauma.
Battery anxiety is also a key part of my reading strategy. Nothing motivates you to read faster than seeing your Kindle drop to 12% and suddenly becoming emotionally invested in finishing the chapter before it dies.
I don’t really have “reading time” in the traditional sense. I have fragments of time I aggressively convert into reading:
- Waiting for something? Kindle.
- Avoiding doing something? Kindle.
- Sitting down for “just a minute”? Accidentally three chapters.
- Bedtime? Technically sleep, but also Kindle.
The secret, if there is one, is that I don’t rely on motivation. I rely on convenience. The Kindle removes every possible barrier except my own lack of self-control, which turns out to be surprisingly negotiable when a good book is involved.
And yes, I still abandon books.
A bad book on a Kindle feels less dramatic than a bad physical book. There’s no guilt of a half-read paperback judging you from the bedside table. You just quietly move on like it never happened. Emotional closure, but make it digital.
Reading 100+ books a year doesn’t mean I’m constantly in some enlightened literary state. Sometimes I’m reading genuinely brilliant fiction. Sometimes I’m hate-reading something because I’m stubborn. Sometimes I’m just flipping pages because I need my brain to stop thinking about emails.
The Kindle just makes all of that frictionless.
Which is either a triumph of modern technology… or a very efficient way of ensuring I never leave my house without a fully charged escape mechanism.
Probably both.
Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be ignoring my to-do list in favour of “just one more chapter", which, as we all know, is never just one more chapter.
Molly
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