How long will it take you to read this article? It would almost certainly take me longer. On average, adults read about 240 words a minute, but I always exceed those pesky “reading time” estimates that appear on some articles. I review books professionally, but I still take longer to read a book than almost anyone else I know. I should probably feel embarrassed about that – but instead, I take joy in it. I inherited the habit of reading for pleasure from my mum who, in my recollections of childhood, is always sitting at the kitchen table zipping through novels or travel literature about places we couldn’t afford to visit. Reading is what I do first thing in the morning and last thing at night, never going anywhere without a paperback in my pocket or a hardback in my bag or both. I’m like a character in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, who says: “I do things like get in a taxi and say, ‘The library, and step on it.’” But it’s always taken me a long time. When I started reviewing books a decade ago, I was averaging 20 pages an hour. I have accelerated to about 30, but that’s still slow, according to one literary critic I know who thinks “most people would read a page a minute”, and another who says she can read 60 to 100 pages an hour. Book reviewers aren’t the only ones under pressure to read quickly. Pictures of “all the books I read this month” are ubiquitous on social media and, in an era when we seem to live through one crisis after another, reading nonfiction has become a way of keeping up. Books constantly appear to help us understand Brexit, economics, environmental catastrophe, war, viruses. Some are an enlightening bulwark against what Saul Bellow called “the din of politics”, while others read like powerful articles opportunistically thinned out into weak books. It is understandable that we read to try to make sense of events, but it can also fuel the notion that reading is a chore, which it absolutely is not. Adding to this sense are the apps helping you to speed through great mounds of these books at pace. Blinkist cuts down books into “easy-to-read-insights”, presenting “the key insights from a nonfiction book as short, actionable takeaways”. Spreeder teaches techniques to speed up your reading pace and promises to “make reading faster, easier and more enjoyable”. Why would pleasure be synonymous with pace? My slow reading seems to be down to a combination of slower processing speeds, and “subvocalising” – sounding out words as I read them. But especially when it comes to the latter, I wouldn’t want to train myself to go faster. It was news to me that not everyone subvocalises, because one of my favourite things about reading in any genre is hearing the language in my mind. “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful,” goes the opening sentence of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, one of my favourite novels. Without subvocalising, I wouldn’t have caught the music of those words, when I picked up the book by chance in 1999. The holiday period is the perfect time to slow down and read a good book. But New Year is also when people make resolutions about reading more. You can set an annual reading target on Goodreads and elsewhere, but it can then become tempting to prioritise reading shorter books, or reading more quickly, so you reach your target. There’s nothing wrong with short books, as this year’s fine Booker prize shortlist demonstrated, but reading with one eye on a target is self-defeating. As Zadie Smith wrote: “When you practise reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it.” There is a place for routine and structure in our reading. Recently, I finished African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, an 800-plus page anthology edited by Kevin Young. It begins in the 19th century, with the work of the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, before moving through the Harlem renaissance and beyond to contemporaries such as Claudia Rankine and Danez Smith. For two years, I read the poems each morning in the four minutes it took my coffee to brew. It was a wonderful reminder that reading is never about quantity and always about the quality of time you spend with a text. So if you’re looking for a reading resolution for 2023, don’t stick a number on it – resolve to read for pleasure, not as a chore. Max Liu is a freelance writer