Lex Fridman posted his 2023 reading plan on Twitter, sharing his goal of reading 23 specific books by the end of May with one book each week.

Many met this with a nod – “Nice list. Doable”. Others accused him of posturing, claiming you can’t read those books at that pace, and if you do, you’re not digesting them as you should.

As an ambitious reader myself, I thought it would be fun to do a little analysis of the reading plan to see whether it’s reasonable or not.

I read 44 books in 2022 (15k pages averaging 41 pages a day) and 50 books in 2021 (14.5k pages averaging 40 pages a day). Serious readers will consider these rookie numbers. Others will assert that I’m rushing and getting only a cursory understanding of the work.

But I don’t rush at all. I take my time cherishing and interrogating each book. I take detailed notes, discuss them at reading meetups, and follow up with literary podcasts and bookish youtube channels. Besides, I don’t hit 40 pages every day. Some days I don’t read a thing. Some days I lose track of time and find I’ve done 200 pages.

With these modest credentials out of the way, let’s forget about Lex and evaluate the reading plan on its own merits by grabbing some data from Goodreads.

tl;dr: Nice list. Doable.

The books

The following table shows the number of pages, publication year, average Goodreads rating, and total number of ratings for each book:

Let’s get a feel for the items on this list. We have:

• Three Nobel prize winners: Camus, Hemmingway, and Hesse
• Six science fiction classics: HGTTG, Foundation, 2001: Space Odyssey, Player of Games, Dune, and Frankenstein
• Two classic dystopias: 1984 and Brave New World
• Two books each for Orwell, Camus, and Kafka
• Two authors are alive and tweeting today Chuck Palahniuk and Yuval Noah Harari
• One female author: the never sufficiently praised Mary Shelley
• 18 are spread over the 20/21st century, there’s a couple from the 19th century, and a couple of ancient classics
• 12 were first published in English, the others in German, Russian, Chinese, French, Greek, and Hebrew

On Goodreads, they have, on average, a rating of 4.11 stars and over 900k ratings. I’ve read 11 of these in the last two years, all of which I’d give 4.5 to 5 stars, and eight others I have sitting on my bookshelf waiting for the right moment. So I’d be hard-pressed to say this isn’t a good list.

The most suspect item, pointed out by many, is The Brothers Karamazov, at a door-stopping 845 pages (P&V translation at least). I read this in 2021 over 21 days in September. I don’t think you’d want to read it any faster than that, certainly not in one week. Let’s get into that next.

The schedule

The 23 books, according to Goodreads, come to 6,192 pages. About 272 pages per book. The schedule starts on Monday the 2nd of January and ends on Sunday the 4th of June, which gives us 154 reading days to work with. So we’re looking at – drumroll, please… 40 pages a day on average. That’s fun – exactly my 2021 reading rate.

At a moderate pace of, say, 150 words per minute (about the speed newsreaders talk), with about 300 words per page for a typical paperback – 40 pages a day will take about 82 minutes, about the length of The Long Night in season 8 of Game of Thrones. Let’s round it up. Call it an hour and a half per day. Maybe an hour before bed on weekdays and 3 hours a day on the weekend. Considering 55% of Americans spend 1 to 4 hours a day watching TV, that seems a reasonably ambitious and achievable New Year’s goal.

Here’s how long each book will take at 40 pages a day. The “Planned” column assumes one book a week, the “Expected” column assumes 40 pages a day, and the “Error” column is the difference in days:

At 40 pages a day, the shortest, Little Prince, Hunger, and Old Man and the Sea would take only two days. That’s reasonable, heck – good luck not finishing Old man and the Sea in one sitting! Interestingly, The Brothers Karamazov will take 21 days, again matching my own experience.

To make it a bit easier to see how many books will take how many days, let’s use a frequency distribution chart:

So at 40 pages a day, 18 of the 23 books will take one week or less. Seven days is also both the median time and most frequent time expected to finish a book. So this “one book a week” thing is feeling even more reasonable. And while Brothers Karamazov will take 21 days, many more will take no more than three.

On average, we would finish each book nine days earlier than the one book a week schedule. We would finish The Brothers Karamazov 5 days ahead of schedule.

Let’s visualize how one book a week compares to 40 pages a day. I’ll throw in a blue line for the 40 pages a day pace:

Let’s see the two schedules stacked side by side. This chart shows both how closely the two plans are and the relative thickness of each book:

Final thoughts

Estimating is hard. While not perfect, scheduling one book a week is simple, easy to follow, and aligns well with what we would expect if adhering to the moderately ambitious reading goal of 40 pages a day. Certainly that is true with the well-balanced selection of books in this particular list, as we’ve shown.

In my day job, I’ve managed many large projects in the past. While I understand the temptation, spending time and effort to micro-adjust each delivery doesn’t outperform an approximate plan that is easy to follow and maintain. A book a week is fine.

It’s a fun tradition to share ambitious New Year’s resolutions. It’s good to write down goals, stick dates on them, and share them with others to keep ourselves honest.

Sure, a book a week is a little ambitious. But they say that in high jump, whether the bar is high or low, people tend to clear it by only a little. Heck, even if he gets through half of these, it would be admirable.

I’ll be cheering for him, as I would cheer for anyone aspiring to read ambitiously.