OPINION: Eating an elephant

I’ve set a goal for myself that’s going to be hard. I want to read 50 books by the end of the year.

It’s a lofty expectation considering I dramatically failed to read even 20 books last year. I ended the year with 16 despite giving myself such a head start in the beginning of the year. Quite disgraceful.

But I’m 10% of the way there in 2026 with only January concluded. I read “Yellowface,” “Great Big Beautiful Life,” “The Rest of Our Lives,” “Wild Dark Shore” and “Dungeon Crawler Carl” through the month.

Why am I so much more efficient now? Part of it might be the cold pushing more activity indoors, but that’s not the whole story. I’d like to introduce what has repeatedly helped me engage in my hobbies: the system.

There’s specific rules I follow to help keep a hobby fresh but also discourages overindulgence to avoid burnout. For movies, I used to limit how many times I would go to theaters and specifically when to save money. Various systems have existed over the years, but it was mostly limiting my visits to one a week, matinees only and heavy curation of what to see.

Now that I’m staying at home more regularly instead of making long trips to movie theaters, the system I use is quite simple. What are the popular new releases on streaming? If I have time, I just watch what I can, aiming for about three or four per week.

This system works great for movies, which are fully digestible in one sitting. This is what I call a package concept. There’s a clear start and end to the activity, and I know exactly how much time it will take.

I use a similar system for TV, although it’s much more limited. I pick a TV series and try to only watch one episode per week, simulating what it was like when the show first aired. It’s very silly to think about in a world after Netflix created “binge-watching,” but it goes back to the package idea. Plus, in my opinion, I think it makes individual episodes feel more powerful. Personal taste.

But books are a little harder to adapt to a system. The way books are paced are completely and individually different, with the expectation a reader will often pause and pick a book back up later. It’s a bit harder to time how long finishing a book will take.

The length of chapters varies, the number of pages is always different, the format from print to audiobook can change the experience completely and I’m sometimes easily distracted.

Here’s how I fixed this and opened myself to reading as a more fulfilling activity rather than an obligation.

Audiobooks are the closest way I can time myself to how long a book is. I noticed I read at about 1.5 times the speed of the spoken performance, or about an hour for every audiobook hour and a half. If an audiobook is 15 hours long (store listings often include the length), I can probably finish the print version in about 10.

Then, I split the book into chunks. One of my favorite ways of overcoming difficult tasks is breaking it down into small pieces. How would you eat an elephant? You couldn’t swallow such a big animal in one gulp.

So for every hour and a half of the audiobook (rounding up), I’ll create a new section for every print hour. A 15 hour audio book is 10 hours print, so that’s 10 sections. If that book was about 400 pages long, then there’s a new section every 40 pages.

It’s a rough estimate. I always mark where the chapter ends rather than the harsh cutoff, but this system works really well. It’s great for print; a happy accidental side effect allows for me to run my fingers over how many pages I have left in my section which is incredibly relaxing.

There’s the package concept, a clear start and end to each session (with the option to continue reading if I wanted to). If I have an hour, I know how long the next section is going to be.

For those five books I read, there were about 37 sections. I would be on pace for my reading goal if I read one section per day. Suddenly, a daunting goal is getting a lot easier.

And now I want to read even more and finding time to in other ways. On recommendation from our great editor Cheyenne, I started reading in the middle of commercial breaks for sports broadcasts. I’m balancing both hobbies in a symbiotically enhanced way.

A lot of my columns have tackled why the hobbies I’ve stuck with revolve around consuming media. To perhaps finally nail down why, I think I’m just in love with stories, whether fact or fiction. It’s how I feel enlightened and how I open myself to different perspectives.

Books, singularly creative and out of one’s mind in a way movies in their collaborative production could never be, itch the other half of my brain. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a chapter to finish.