Why I Read One Book a Week and How You Can Too

Why I Read One Book a Week and How You Can Too

There’s a question I get asked often at dinner parties, usually after my second glass of soju: “How do you have time to read a book every week?” The person asking usually looks skeptical, as if I’ve claimed to speak fluent Mandarin or summit mountains on weekends. But the truth is simpler than they expect. In my thirty years as a journalist, chasing stories, meeting deadlines, and sitting in newsrooms under fluorescent lights, reading wasn’t a luxury I could afford to abandon. It became the anchor that kept me sane.

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Last updated: 2026-03-23

This habit didn’t emerge overnight. When I was younger, I read frantically—three, sometimes four books a month. But it was scattered, desperate reading, the kind where you finish a novel and can barely remember what happened. Then I retired, had time to think, and realized something important: one book a week is the sweet spot. It’s enough to change how you think, to let ideas settle into your bones. It’s the pace of a life well-lived rather than a life rushed through.

I want to share why I read one book a week and how you can too, not as some productivity hack or self-improvement scheme, but as an actual, sustainable way to live more thoughtfully. Whether you’re buried in work, raising children, or simply overwhelmed by the noise of modern life, this rhythm might be exactly what you’re looking for.

The Journalist’s Discovery: Reading as Resistance

During my three decades in Korean newsrooms, I watched how information became increasingly fragmented. Shorter stories, faster deadlines, social media reducing complex issues to headlines. We were feeding people data, but not wisdom. I covered education policy, environmental issues, even some business reporting—and I noticed something troubling. The deeper I read beyond daily news, the more I understood what I’d been missing in my own reporting.

That’s when I began consciously choosing books as counterweight. A book forces you to slow down. It demands you sit still for ninety minutes. It asks you to think in longer paragraphs, to follow an argument to its conclusion, to sit with ambiguity. In those years, I read philosophy alongside crime novels, Korean history mixed with international reportage. I wasn’t trying to become “well-read”—that phrase always made me uncomfortable. I was trying to stay human.

After I left journalism, someone asked if I’d miss the newsroom. I said no, but I’d miss understanding the world. They looked confused. Then I realized: reading a book a week was how I’d keep understanding the world, just differently. Not through breaking news, but through sustained investigation. Through other people’s curiosity and research, filtered through their voice.

The Mathematics of One Book Per Week

Let me be practical here, because practicality matters. One book a week means roughly 50-60 books per year. That sounds ambitious until you do the actual math.

The average novel is 300-400 pages. If you read for one hour daily, most people finish 30-50 pages, depending on the book and their reading speed. After thirty years of reading, I average about 40 pages per hour—faster with lighter fiction, slower with philosophy or dense historical work. That means a typical novel takes seven to ten days. A non-fiction book, perhaps twelve days if it’s denser.

So when I say why I read one book a week and how you can too, I’m really saying: dedicate one hour daily to reading. That’s it. Not two hours. Not sneaking in reading during meals. Just one clear hour where your phone is in another room and you’re with a book and a cup of tea or coffee.

For many people, this hour already exists. It’s the time spent scrolling news apps in the morning. The evening hours before sleep when you watch another episode of a series you’re only half-interested in. The commute time buried in your phone. One hour is absolutely achievable if you genuinely want it.

How to Actually Start: Removing the Barriers

The hardest part of why I read one book a week and how you can too isn’t the reading—it’s starting. People often ask if I have special techniques, some kind of reading discipline. The answer is embarrassing: I mostly just sat down and read.

But there are some practical barriers worth removing:

• Find your reading environment. Mine is a corner of my apartment with north-facing light, a comfortable chair, and a small table for tea. I can’t read at a coffee shop—too much stimulation—but you might love it. The key is consistency. Your brain needs to associate a specific place with reading.
• Choose books that excite you, not books you “should” read. This took me years to learn. There’s a difference between challenging yourself and punishment. If a book isn’t working after 50 pages, abandon it. Life is too short, and there are too many good books. I’ve given myself permission to quit, and mysteriously, I read more because reading stopped feeling like obligation.
• Mix genres deliberately. I don’t read four literary novels in a row. I alternate—fiction, history, science, biography, back to fiction. This keeps your mind engaged across different thinking styles and prevents reading fatigue.
• Don’t multitask around reading time. I know people who claim to read while watching television. They’re fooling themselves. Reading requires your actual attention. Protect that hour like you’d protect a business meeting.
• Keep a reading list, but stay flexible. I maintain a list of books I want to read, but it’s not rigid. Sometimes I walk past a bookstore and impulse-buy something. Sometimes someone recommends a book and I start immediately. The list is guidance, not law.

The paradox of why I read one book a week and how you can too is that removing pressure is what makes it sustainable. Once I stopped treating reading as self-improvement and started treating it as pleasure, the habit stuck.

What Reading One Book a Week Actually Does to Your Mind

After a year of this rhythm, something shifts. I can’t measure it precisely—there’s no graph for wisdom—but I notice it in how I think, how I talk, how I move through the world.

First, you develop what I’d call “narrative patience.” You understand that complex problems don’t resolve in a news cycle. You’re comfortable with ambiguity because books are full of it. A character can be right and wrong simultaneously. History can have multiple true interpretations. This tolerance for nuance, which we desperately lack, comes from sustained reading.

Second, your vocabulary shifts, and with it, your thinking. This isn’t about impressing anyone—it’s that having precise words for experiences lets you understand those experiences better. After reading psychology books, sociology, literature in translation, you have more granular ways to think about human behavior. You notice things. You make connections.

Third, reading books is the deepest conversation you can have with someone who isn’t in the room. An author spends months or years organizing their thoughts, distilling their experience. When you read, you’re listening to that thinking directly. It’s more intimate than most human interactions. During my KATUSA years, assigned to work with American soldiers, I learned as much from reading American novels and essays as I did from conversations. Their books taught me how Americans thought about honor, fairness, and duty in ways that casual conversation couldn’t.

There’s also something almost meditative about it. I don’t meditate formally—I tried and felt foolish—but reading gives me the same thing meditation promises: a chance to quiet the anxious chatter of your own mind and be present to something else.

Building Community Around Reading

One thing I didn’t expect: reading one book a week and how you can too became something I could share. I started mentioning books at social gatherings. Someone would ask what I was reading, and instead of giving a one-sentence summary, I’d say, “Let me tell you about this part that made me think about our conversation last month.”

Some of those conversations became friendships. I started a small, informal book group—nothing fancy, just four of us meeting once monthly at a restaurant, talking about what we’d been reading. Not in a structured way, not with discussion questions. Just: “What moved you?” “What confused you?” “What did you learn?”

This is optional, of course. Reading is solitary. But it can also be social. Your reading becomes richer when you have people to talk to about it. It helps you notice what actually stuck, versus what you forgot by page fifty.

In Korea’s culture of self-improvement and education, reading groups are common. I initially avoided them because they felt competitive. Then I realized the best groups aren’t about proving you’re smart. They’re about genuine curiosity. Finding even one person who reads with intention makes the whole practice deeper.

A Gentle Conclusion: The Cumulative Power of Consistency

When people ask why I read one book a week and how you can too, I think they’re asking something larger: How do you become a more interesting, more thoughtful person? How do you resist the fragmentation of modern life? How do you age without becoming cynical or closed-minded?

The answer isn’t dramatic. It’s one hour a day. Fifty or sixty books a year. Five hundred or six hundred over a decade. That accumulation—that’s where transformation happens.

I’ve read roughly two thousand books across my lifetime. I don’t remember most of them. But they’ve shaped how I think, how I see other people, what I believe about how the world works. That’s not boasting. It’s just honest acknowledgment of what sustained, intentional reading does.

You don’t need to read a book a week to be a good person, obviously. But if you’re looking for a practice that costs almost nothing, takes time you probably already have, and changes your thinking in measurable ways, this is it. Start this week. Pick any book that genuinely interests you. Read for one hour. See how it feels.

In my experience, after the third week, it stops feeling like discipline. By the third month, it becomes part of how you understand yourself. By the end of a year, you’re a different person—not because reading changed your personality, but because it let your real personality develop in ways the noise of daily life usually prevents.

That, more than anything else, is why I read one book a week and why I believe you can too.