Those who’ve been following along will know: back in 2021, I set out to make regular reading a daily habit and gave myself a page target to work towards. I kept the streak going for two years without breaking it, noticed by the end of each year that I’d comfortably exceeded the average book count the maths required, and decided to write it up on the blog.
See:
In this post, I want to note down how 2023 went on the reading front — which books I read, what I got right, and what I got wrong.
As I’ve mentioned before, the real goal was always to find the right daily page count and build a reading habit around it. In 2021 it was 30 pages a day, in 2022 I pushed it to 40. Following the same logic of gradual increases, I planned to make it 50 pages a day in 2023. On paper, that meant finishing at least 60 books over the course of the year.
It didn’t quite work out that way… Que sera, sera…
So what went wrong?
The Inverted-U Curve
Does continuously increasing something guarantee better results? The instinctive answer is yes. But that isn’t always how it works. See: the Inverted-U Curve.
Seen across healthcare, economics, and many other fields, the Inverted-U has three distinct sections, each operating by its own logic. On the left, doing more of something improves outcomes. In the middle, doing more of it changes very little. On the right, doing more of it actively makes things worse.
Malcolm Gladwell returns to this curve repeatedly in David and Goliath. We know, for instance, that when police intervention in civil unrest is pushed past a certain point, people stop being deterred by it rather than more afraid of it (see: The Troubles). Or that continuously increasing sentences for repeat offenders — regardless of the nature of the offence — tends to backfire over time (see: Three Strikes).
That said, it would be wrong to claim this curve applies to every scenario. But in certain situations, “the act of pushing something too far” can take you in the opposite direction from where you intended to go.
You might wonder what any of this has to do with reading. But I found myself facing exactly this kind of situation. Reading 30 or 40 pages a day had never been a problem. When I pushed it to 50, I struggled. Eventually I broke the streak, and ended up well below what I’d hoped for.
Everyone’s circumstances are different, of course, and the experience is personal. But in terms of knowing myself and understanding my limits, this turned out to be a useful lesson.
Without further ado, here’s the list, here’s the list.
You can follow me on Goodreads or its newer alternative, Literal.
Books I read in 2023
- The Secret Letters of the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Compelling Fable About Living a Meaningful and Remarkable Life — Robin Sharma
- Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro
- Türklerin Tarihi 2 — İlber Ortaylı
- Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones — James Clear
- Dead Poets Society — N.H. Kleinbaum
- The Myth of Sisyphus — Albert Camus
- Don Quixote — Cervantes
- Of Mice and Men — John Steinbeck
- Deli Kurt — Hüseyin Nihal Atsız
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty — Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson
- Hamnet — Maggie O’Farrell
- Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life) — Thomas Erikson
- The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology and Modern Life — Carl Gustav Jung
- Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir
- Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change — Ronald Cohen
- What Men Live By — Leo Tolstoy
- The Humans — Matt Haig
- On the Happy Life / On the Shortness of Life — Seneca
- The Devil Within — Sabahattin Ali
- Mother Earth — Chingiz Aitmatov
- A Theory of Militant Democracy: The Ethics of Combatting Political Extremism — Alexander S. Kirshner
- Sultanın Casusları — Emrah Safa Gürkan
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking — Malcolm Gladwell
- David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants — Malcolm Gladwell
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Here’s to reading more in 2022. Happy New Year!