Lately I’ve been often asked how I manage to read so many books, usually because I share my recent reads on Instagram Stories. I guess people have noticed I share a new book almost every week.

I’ve always been an enthusiastic reader of books, but when I first moved to Vancouver almost fifteen years ago I lost the habit. I couldn’t afford to buy books very often, and I stopped making the time to read. I think the internet took over at this point and that’s where my free time would go.

I don’t remember exactly what brought me back to enthusiastic reading again, but I’ve been tracking the number of books I read using Good Reads since 2012. I read 58 books that year, and since then the number of books I read over the course of 365 days has increased to 71 as of 2018. I usually aim for 60 books and easily surpass that number.

My secret weapon to reading lots of books over all these years has been to borrow them from the library. I can request books using their app, which sometimes gets out of hand these days because there’s no longer a limit on the number you can request each year. The limit used to be 50, and I’d always blow through that and hope a kind librarian would grant me a few more to get me to the end of the year. These days I have between 12 to 20 books on hold at any given time.

I love the library, and probably go in there at least once a week to drop off and/or pick up books. Library books give you a built in deadline to read and finish a book before the date it is due. I think if I didn’t have that, and access to an all-you-can-read amount of books, I would not be able to read as much as I do.

So there are my hot tips if “reading more books” is on your list of goals this year. Use Good Reads to track the number of books you read, and use the VPL app to request books at the drop of a hat. Now stop looking at the internet and go read a book.