Since 2016, a woman in Anaheim, California, has taken out over 1,300 books from her neighborhood public library. It’s not a typo. While the rest of us were busy telling ourselves we really needed to read more, thirteen hundred books—roughly 130 a year, or almost three every week—were borrowed, read, and returned. Sandy Potter is her name, and she is extraordinary by any standard. However, when speaking with those who are familiar with her habits, it is clear that she is not unique. Her consistency is the reason.
This distinction is more important than it might seem.
Reading-related discussions often get bogged down in the wrong questions. People are curious about speed—whether super-readers use a technique, skim, or employ a trick. Recently, a journalist named Kelsey Rexroat conducted interviews with over a dozen individuals who read more than 100 books annually in an attempt to find answers. What she discovered was far less dramatic than most people would anticipate. No courses on speed reading. No palaces of memories. No four-hour morning rituals with highlighters and cold plunges. Because it appears so unremarkable from the outside, what these readers have in common is something more subdued and, in some ways, more difficult to duplicate.
They read on life’s periphery. That’s all. That’s the problem.
Frederick Goodall, a creative executive from Houston who is a father of five and managed to finish 614 books in 2025—a figure that is nearly unfathomable—carries a book with him everywhere he goes. standing in line to pick up his children from school. While his mother is seeing her doctor, he is waiting in a room. Ten minutes here, five minutes there. It’s the only explanation that makes sense when you consider how these readers actually add up their totals, even though it seems almost too straightforward to be the solution. They can’t find more time in the day. Hiding inside everyone else’s day, they are discovering the hours that were already there.
That contains something worthwhile to sit with. Strictly speaking, the majority of people who claim they don’t read enough are not time-constrained. They lack the habit of considering brief bursts of time as valuable. During those moments, the typical person reaches for their phone; this habit is so deep-rooted that it hardly seems like a choice anymore. The voracious reader grabs a book, an e-reader, or an app from the library. Over the course of a year, the difference between those two answers is equivalent to the difference between 0 and 100 books.
The fact that these readers don’t moralize about the entire endeavor is equally fascinating. Generally speaking, they don’t think that reading books they don’t enjoy is a good way to stay motivated. The Morbidly Curious Book Club’s founder, Patricia Brown, who read 181 books last year, puts it simply: read what you enjoy, and only what you enjoy. Life is too short to read bad books, according to Sandy Potter, who frames it with a wisdom that seems to have come from sheer volume of experience. or, for that matter, to sip poor wine. That viewpoint, coming from individuals who read as much as they do, has an almost radical quality. It’s often assumed that serious readers are serious, obedient, disciplined, and driven to finish challenging texts out of a sense of duty. The truth is nearly the opposite, at least for the individuals Rexroat discovered. These individuals are pursuing enjoyment. They don’t strive for the volume; rather, it is a byproduct of their enjoyment.
Josh Pele, a magician from New Jersey who, prior to the pandemic, had never read a book cover to cover, provides what may be the most important piece of information in this entire discussion. He set a daily goal to read only ten pages of a hundred-page book while under lockdown. He completed it. He went into what he now refers to as “reading like crazy” as a result of the sense of completion, of that tiny momentum growing into something genuine. He is a super-reader now. He used to be someone who didn’t read at all. Perhaps there isn’t as much of a difference between those two versions of a person as the publishing industry would like to acknowledge.
As always, the topic of retention comes up, and the responses are surprisingly candid. A few readers maintain journals. On the final page of every book they finish, some people write a single paragraph that serves as an anchor to help them remember the experience rather than serving as a review. Goodreads logs are used by some. And many have come to terms with the blur, especially those who read mainly for enjoyment. Molly Cain, a senior director at a government consulting firm, says something that sounds like it belongs on a wall somewhere: she prefers to let books reorganize her rather than memorize them. Some remain as vivid scenes. Some as disagreements. Some are sentences she will always carry with her. The point, she believes, is that mix.
It’s difficult to ignore how different that is from how reading is typically marketed: as a means of productivity, self-improvement, or drawing lessons from the knowledge of others. There is a place for that kind of reading. However, it also has a tendency to make reading feel like homework, which may be the reason why so many people who make the decision to read more in January end up with a half-finished book by March. Rexroat’s investigation’s super-readers aren’t optimizing. Simply put, they are reading with genuine joy and stubbornness. For them, the discipline, whatever it is, appears to be almost imperceptible; it is more a question of orientation than willpower.
Binges weren’t the foundation of the 1,300-book library record. It was constructed the way most worthwhile projects are constructed: five minutes in a grocery line at a time, ordinary Tuesday by ordinary Tuesday, checkout by checkout. That kind of accumulation usually doesn’t make for an engaging story about self-help. There is no significant turning point, no morning ritual to follow, and no system to set up. There’s only the next book and the tiny choice to open it, which is repeatedly made in parking lots, waiting rooms, and the ten minutes before bed.
Chloe Olliver is senior editor at vclib.org, where she leads editorial coverage of literary criticism, political commentary, cultural analysis, and the evolving relationship between literature and public life across New York City and beyond. With a career spanning the intersection of literary journalism, political commentary, and educational publishing, Chloe brings both rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an accessible editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant.