I surprised myself as I finished my sixth book at 10:30 PM on December 31st. Never had I finished these many books in one month, ever!

Here are the books I finished reading in December:

The Practice of Groundedness by Brad Stulburg
The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford
The Color Master by Aimee Bender
Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

I had started a few of these books before December which helped push the number to six. I always enter a new month with one or two books already started. Capturing the month when I finished books is a good enough metric.

But this is also the trap, the fascination of the numerical metric, the high-score! Six is better than four which is better than one! If all my books were in the genre of Stulburg’s Groundedness then I could have read 10 books easy. This is because the concepts and ideas among similar books are more familiar, and thus faster to absorb.

For example: Two books I have read in 2021 referenced Natasha Dow Schüll’s book, Addiction by Design. This makes the material familiar and thus faster to absorb as I re-read it.

I am turning my focus from hitting a number of books to getting a variety in my diet of books. I have given myself a rough guideline of 1 book a week or 4 a month. However, I have detailed guidelines on adding variety to the books I read.

How do you add variety to your reading list?