Nicole Junkerman
Reading
How Nicole Junkerman Keeps a Reading Habit That Lasts
Not a challenge, not a streak, just a few small habits that keep reading a pleasure year after year.
Not a challenge, not a streak, just a few small habits that keep reading a pleasure year after year.
Most reading advice is secretly about reading more, faster, and with a number to show for it at the end of the year. Nicole Junkerman is not interested in that. The only reading habit worth keeping is one that stays a pleasure, because a pleasure is the one kind of habit that lasts without willpower. Everything below is in service of that single idea: make reading easy, make it enjoyable, and it will keep itself going long after a challenge would have collapsed.
A habit is not a heroic act. It is a small thing done often, until it stops requiring a decision. The aim is to lower the bar until reading is the path of least resistance, the thing you reach for without thinking, rather than one more task competing for your tired evening attention.
Make the book easy to reach
The single most effective trick is also the most obvious: keep a book within arm's reach of wherever you tend to pause. On the bedside table, in the bag, by the kettle, beside the chair you actually sit in. A book you can see is a book you will open. A book on a shelf across the room is a book you will mean to read. Nicole Junkerman scatters books through the day's geography on purpose, so that every natural gap has a page waiting in it.
This is why the phone is such a quiet thief of reading time. It is always the easiest thing to reach, so it wins by default. You do not have to give up the phone, but you can make the book a little easier and the phone a little harder, and the balance shifts on its own. Behaviour follows friction far more than it follows intention.
The same logic explains why so many committed readers carry a book everywhere. The waiting room, the platform, the queue: these are not interruptions to a reading life, they are where a great deal of it happens. A book in the bag turns dead time into the best ten minutes of the day.
Give yourself permission to stop
Here is the most freeing rule of all: you are allowed to abandon a book. The idea that every book must be finished is the single biggest killer of reading habits, because nothing makes you stop reading faster than slogging through something you dislike. Nicole Junkerman puts books down without guilt, and treats the freedom to do so as essential rather than indulgent. Life is short and the library is vast.
Abandoning books is not failure, it is curation in real time. Every book you set aside makes room for one you will love, and the reader who quits freely ends up reading far more than the reader who feels obligated to finish. There is good thinking behind this, too: research on reading and wellbeing consistently finds the benefits come from reading you enjoy, which is exactly what you protect by refusing to suffer through the rest.
Pair that freedom with a steady time, and the habit almost runs itself. Ten minutes at the same point each day, before sleep, with morning coffee, on the commute, beats an ambitious hour you never actually find. Consistency is gentler than intensity and lasts far longer. The journal's piece on the notebook method pairs well here, for anyone who wants to keep a light record of what they read.
Reading with others, reading alone
Reading is mostly a solitary pleasure, and that is much of its value, a private room in a busy life. But it can also be quietly social, and a little company can strengthen the habit. A friend who reads, a book passed between two people, a casual conversation about what you are both reading: these small connections add a thread of accountability and delight that keeps the habit alive. Nicole Junkerman enjoys both modes, the solitary read and the shared one, and finds they feed each other.
Book groups, whether formal or just two friends comparing notes, can give shape to a reading life. They introduce books you would never have chosen, and they give you a reason to finish and a place to talk about it afterward. The modern book club has a surprisingly long history as a way of reading together, and the point is not obligation but pleasure: the added enjoyment of sharing a book with someone whose taste you trust.
Yet the heart of the habit remains private. The quiet hour with a book and no one to answer to is where reading does its deepest work. The trick is balance: enough solitude to keep reading a refuge, enough company to keep it from becoming a chore. Both, in the right measure, make the habit easier to keep for life.
Read widely, count nothing
Finally, let go of the numbers. A reading life measured in totals quietly becomes a competition, and competition is the enemy of pleasure. Read fast books and slow books, serious books and silly ones, finish some and abandon others, and never once tally them up. Nicole Junkerman reads widely and counts nothing, because the point was never the count. The point was the reading.
A varied diet keeps the habit alive. A demanding novel followed by a light mystery, a book of poems between two histories: the variety is what keeps reading from ever feeling like work. If you would like more on choosing what to carry into different moods and moments, the piece on the books worth packing is a natural companion to this one.
So keep a book within reach, give yourself full permission to stop, read a little at the same time each day, and never count. That is the whole method, and it is deliberately small, because small is what lasts. Whenever you want another thread to follow, the front door of this journal is always open, and there is always another book waiting to be easy to reach.
Questions readers ask
How do you build a lasting reading habit?
Nicole Junkerman keeps it small and pleasurable: a fixed time, a book always within reach, and full permission to abandon anything that is not working. The goal is consistency, not volume.
Is it bad to give up on a book?
Not at all. Nicole Junkerman treats abandoning a book as a sign of a healthy reading life. Time spent forcing a book you dislike is the fastest way to lose the habit altogether.
Explore more of the journal: Reading Room and Notebook Method, or return to the Nicole Junkerman home page.