Most people who want to read more are not short of enthusiasm. They are short of a routine that survives a busy Tuesday. "Just make time" is useless advice when your evenings are already full, and treating reading as a test of discipline tends to end the same way: a heroic start, then three quiet weeks and a stack of half-finished books. The goal here is not to read faster or to rack up an impressive total. It is to read steadily, enjoy it, and still want to pick up a book next month.

Treat reading as a habit, not a virtue

Reading gets tangled up with guilt in a way that few hobbies do. Nobody feels ashamed of the television they did not watch, but a bookmark stuck at page 40 can nag for months. That guilt is a poor motivator: it turns books into homework, and homework is easy to avoid.

So change what you measure. Count sessions or minutes rather than finished books. Fifteen minutes on four evenings a week is a genuinely good week, and at a steady pace it adds up to a book every six or seven weeks. The number matters far less than the fact that you keep coming back to the page.

Set a page target you can hit on a bad day

A page target beats a time target, because you can hit it without watching the clock. Set one you could manage on your worst day — the late finish, the leaking boiler, the evening you would rather scroll.

Ten pages is a good starting number, and takes most people about fifteen minutes. If you read slowly, five is fine. Ten pages a night is 3,650 pages a year, or nine or ten average novels, which is more than many people manage in a decade of intending to read more.

Treat the target as a floor, not a ceiling. Sixty pages on a Sunday is a bonus, not the new standard. Raise it only after a month of clearing it comfortably, and then by two pages at a time. Match the measure to the book as well: dense non-fiction, poetry and anything with footnotes are better counted in chapters or in minutes.

Keep a book within arm's reach

Most reading happens in the gaps — the queue, the kettle, the bus, the waiting room. Friction decides whether those gaps become pages. A book on a shelf upstairs will lose to a phone in your hand every time, so carry one. A paperback in your bag, a slim volume in your coat pocket, an e-reader in the kitchen drawer, an audiobook on your headphones for the walk to the shops.

The five-minute rule helps: if the wait is longer than five minutes, read. You will get through more pages standing in a queue than you would believe.

Audiobooks count. Listening to a novel while you cook, walk or wash up is reading in every way that matters to your enjoyment, and plenty of people finish more books by ear than by eye.

Give yourself permission to abandon

The quickest route to a reading slump is a book you are not enjoying. Give a title fifty pages, or the first chapter if the chapters are long, then ask honestly whether you want to know what happens next. If the answer is no, put it down. You do not owe a book your evenings.

The old rule — subtract your age from one hundred and stop there — exists for a reason. Younger readers feel obliged to finish; older ones have learned that time is finite. A simpler version: fifty pages, plus one more chapter to be fair.

Call it "not now" rather than "abandoned" if that sits better. Some books are simply wrong for a season, and a surprising number will work beautifully in a year or two.

Read more than one thing at once

One book at a time sounds tidy and often fails, because moods move faster than chapters. Keep two or three going in different formats and choose according to the moment.

• The gripping one — crime, thriller, anything with short chapters, for commutes and the tired end of the day.
• The slow one — essays, nature writing, poetry, a chapter at a time, easy to set down without losing the thread.
• The non-fiction one — history, science, memoir, read in the morning when your attention is fresher.

Matching the book to the moment removes most excuses. Poetry, short stories, re-reads and whatever you read aloud to children all count. Nobody is marking your register.

Protect the rhythm, not the numbers

Pick a slot and defend it: twenty minutes before bed, ten with your morning coffee, the quarter of an hour after dinner while the plates soak. Same chair, same lamp, phone face down in another room. Ritual does a lot of the work that willpower cannot.

If you miss a day, try not to miss two. One skipped evening is normal; a fortnight is a habit in retreat. If you track anything, keep it to a line a week in a notebook — title, date, one word about it. Any more than that turns pleasure into admin.

And do not worry about speed. Subvocalising is not a flaw, it is reading. If you want momentum, share it: a book group, a friend who swaps recommendations, a fortnightly chat about what you have both read. Choose people whose taste you trust rather than a list of worthy titles. Consistency beats speed, and pleasure beats both.