A few months ago, my friend Adam Santino suggested that I try building a presence on Substack, a suggestion for which I have largely forgiven him. Although it didn’t exactly begin that way, Substack has grown nicely into a social media platform that is tailor made for authors, journalists, essayists, writers, and readers of all kinds. People post articles on the most niche topics you can imagine. Others serialize their fiction. There’s one guy on there whose entire presence seems to be dissecting every possible nuance and detail of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, and that ain’t even CLOSE to the nerdiest person I follow. There’s an awful lot going on there, is what I’m saying.

But even the most wholesome social media platforms (which, at present, this seems to be) will occasionally erupt into controversy. The current one is surrounding – and I apologize to anybody whose political sensibilities may be offended by this at this difficult, divisive time in our country – how many books it’s possible to read in a year. There is a strict divide forming among people who claim to have read large quantities of books over the first 10 months of 2026, and other people who claim that the first people, to put it colloquially, are liar liars with their pants on fire.

For some reason, the number that seems to have stuck as the tipping point is 30. Some claim that reading 30 books in 10 months is absolutely impossible. Others claim that it’s a breezy Sunday afternoon. So just out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at the list of books I’ve read so far this year (of COURSE I have a list of the books I’ve read) to see what number I, personally, am up to. And to my surprise I realized that the book I finished most recently, Cold Storage by David Koepp, turned out to be – drumroll please – number 30.

This number, I should mention, does not include comic books or graphic novels, nor does it include audiobooks (I have no objection to including audiobooks towards your count, but the only ones I’ve listened to this year are the audiobooks of some of the Dungeon Crawler Carl novels, which I didn’t start listening to until after I read the books and I didn’t want to count the same book twice). That number, for what it’s worth, includes 24 novels, three anthologies, two nonfiction books, and one memoir.

Now, why does any of this matter, you may ask? If you’re a sane person, it doesn’t. But according to the internet (an organization that has been semifunctional for at least six weeks, according to various credible sources), reading so many books in such a period is virtually impossible. Three books in a month? A book roughly every ten days? What kind of psychopath is capable of such a feat?

And the answer to that question is: pretty much anybody who actually wants to do it.

I make it a point to read every day. That doesn’t mean I read the same amount every day. Sometimes I get in a good 20 to 30 minutes before bed. Sometimes I’m utterly exhausted and I give in after two or three pages. Sometimes – most often when I’m approaching the end of a really ripping story – I’ll try to stay up late and finish the book on my kindle app, and sometimes that effort is derailed when my wife tells me to go to sleep because I’m losing consciousness and the sound of my phone hitting the floor has woken her up three times now.

“That’s fine for YOU, Blake,” you say, “but I just don’t have the TIME to read.”

Yes you do.

“I’ve got kids!”

I have a nine-year-old.

“I’ve got a job!”

I’m a high school teacher.

“I have other responsibilities!”

I’m currently writing a novel. (More information about that on my aforementioned Substack, by the way.)

If you don’t want to read, go ahead and own it. Lots of people – particularly celebrities, for some reason – are pretty vocal about the fact that the last book they read cover to cover featured both a cat and a hat, and therefore it should count for two. But if you’re claiming that there simply isn’t any TIME to read, I’m calling shenanigans.

Besides reading before I go to bed, which of course is the natural habitat of any great reader, I steal time at assorted other points during the day. While I’m waiting in the parent pick-up line to get my son from school. While I’m sitting in the stands during my son’s basketball practice. While I’m in the waiting room while my son does his speech therapy. Have you noticed a theme here? Waiting. I don’t care who you are or how important you think your schedule is, to all of us there come moments in our lives where there is nothing to do except…wait. And it is in those moments that cracking open the latest LitRPG, an old familiar friend by Stephen King, or a classic by Mary Shelley is the absolute best way to pass the time.

In fact, for those of you who poo-poo audiobooks (you should really reconsider your diet if that’s happening by the way), those are PERFECT for people who are busy all the time. Listen to them while you’re driving, while you’re washing dishes, while you’re mowing the laundry, while you’re folding the grass. There are few positions I find stupider than people who say “audiobooks aren’t reading.” It’s true, listening engages the brain in different ways than reading words on a page, but you’re still taking in and processing information. And some people simply are better auditory learners than visual learners. If it works for you, it works.

I know it sounds like I’m telling you that you should be reading all the time, but that’s only because I am. Reading is a skill and your brain is a muscle, and exercising both of those things is the only way to keep them sharp. Now if you’re even reading this column in the first place, odds are you’re not in the category of people who have to be convinced that reading has value, but you may have fallen off. It’s okay. It happens to all of us. I had some fallow years a while back where I was lucky to make it through one or two books in a year, because I simply didn’t have the motivation. Eventually I found it again.

I say this to my students a lot, especially when ACT season rolls around and they want to know how to get better at the reading portion of the test. They hate when I say it, but the test measures reading skill and comprehension, and the only way to get better at that is to practice. To read. Preferably every day. And I don’t care WHAT you read – a book, a magazine, a newspaper, a comic book – as long as you read it with focus and without distraction. Even 15 minutes a day will help, and you’ll start to see improvement.

True, most of you reading this are probably past the stage in your lives where college admission essays are a significant concern. But that doesn’t mean that reading has ceased being worthwhile. In fact, without the impetus of school pushing it on you, it’s probably more important than ever. You’ve reached the point where you can read what you want instead of what your teachers told you to read, after all. That means you can choose your own material. It also means that there’s no one making you do it now, so just like any other form of exercise, you’ve got to convince yourself to do it on your own.

By the way, I know that a lot of those books you read in school seemed boring at the time, but may I suggest that you go back and give some of them another chance now that you’re a little older and wiser? Most of those books were required reading for a reason, after all.

Anyway, the points that I’m trying to get here are, as in descending order of importance:

• Reading is important, and everybody should do it.
• You may not think that you have time to read, but trust me, you’re wrong.
• All reading is valid – fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, and yeah, even audiobooks. Everything except AI “summaries.” That’s bullshit.
• You should totally subscribe to my free Substack, and I promise, that’s the last time I’ll mention it until you get to that italicized portion down there at the end.

Reading is education. It’s entertainment. It’s exercise. It matters. And if it’s been a while, consider this your invitation to start again. Okay, maybe you’ll never hit 30 books a year. But if you’re not reading already, ANYTHING is better than the nothing you’re reading right now.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can view his LitReel videos on TikTok and read his writerly yammerings on his free Substack.