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?