Year of the Doorstopper
This is it—the year you conquer the doorstoppers taking up valuable real estate in your TBR pile. You know the ones—those venerable classics with 3-inch spines and tiny footnotes. The books you know you should read, that you even want to read, but that—up till now—you just couldn’t seem to make yourself read.
Maybe you’ve had a few false starts. Each time you pick it back up, you resolve to finish this book once and for all, no matter how much of a slog it is, no matter how many other books you could be reading. You resolve to be faithful to the end this time, and you dive in with every good intention. But somewhere between pages 300 and 400, maybe your eye starts to wander. You trade the page for BookTok and all those irresistible new titles everyone’s raving about. You put your phone down and pick up the book, but you’ve been reading for weeks, and you’re still not a third of the way through! There are so many other books, whole series with lightning-fast pacing and irresistible romantastic plot lines and dragons. Eventually, you give in.
I’m not breaking up with you, you whisper to Tolstoy. I just need a little space. If I read those other books, I’ll appreciate you more. Promise.
You tuck your bookmark in, and the next time you think about Vronsky and Anna, they’re avalanched beneath a dozen front-list books you’ve added to your TBR pile. The bookmark peeking out a scant third of the way through is a sad reminder of a failed relationship—yours, not theirs. You push the bookmark all the way in so you don’t have to look at it. You’re not giving up; you’ll finish it next year.
For me, it was the Brothers Karamazov. It took me four tries before a friend turned me on to the method that worked for me, which let me glide painlessly through this 700-page bad boy. Friends, this is the year you finally tick Read on Goodreads next to that Tolstoy or Dickens or Dumas brick. This is the year you take your doorstopper all the way home. Let me show you what works for me.
1. Go get your doorstopper. You know the one—it’s gathering dust and guilting you from its spot on your night table. Now go through and remove all the bookmarks you stuck in there on your previous attempts. You don’t need that kind of negativity in your life.
2. Prepare your bookmarks. Yes, plural. I use two index cards, one red and one green. I like index cards because I can write notes on them as I’m reading. I like red and green (see steps 3 and 4), but you can use any two bookmarks you’d like.
3. Place your first bookmark at the beginning of chapter 1. For me, that’s the green index card because it’s my Go bookmark. If there’s front matter, like a preface or foreword, I read it before I “officially” start reading, to get it out of the way and set me up for what I need to know before I dig into the narrative.
4. Count 10 pages in from the first page of chapter 1 and insert your second bookmark. For me, this is the red index card—red because Stop, obviously. When I hit that bookmark, I know I’ve reached my minimum reading goal for the day. Yay!
5. Commit to reading at least 10 pages every day. When I get to my red/stop bookmark, I replace it with my green/go bookmark and move the red/stop bookmark 10 pages farther. Some days, the tenth page isn’t a good place to leave off, so I keep reading a little farther until I get to a better breaking point (bonus pages!), then I put the green/go bookmark there and the stop/red bookmark 10 pages after that. You always have the option to keep reading—you’re not obligated to stop at 10 pages. However, you are obligated to read at least 10 pages. Move your bookmarks accordingly.
The best part about this method is that it breaks even the most gigantic feast of a book down into tiny digestible bites. You can read 10 pages of anything, right? And, once you’ve finished your 10 pages for the day, you’re off the hook. You can put that book down and meet up with that dragon-packed, magic-sword-wielding-protag-having bestseller that everyone on BookTok is in love with. No literary FOMO for you!
Listen, you could grit your teeth and lucubrate your way through those massive texts, dragging your bleary eyes over blurring passages until you find yourself reading paragraphs over and over to make them make sense. That’s OG, and there’s nothing wrong with doing lit that way, if that’s your thing. But there are a lot of books out there, and more are pubbing every day. Life’s too short to read the same paragraph five times when your TBR pile isn’t getting any smaller. So, happy Year of the Doorstopper!
If this sounds like the trick you’ve been waiting for, drop me a note in the comments and let me know which chunky read you’re going to tackle first in 2025!
