The Three Book Method
“The wisest woman I ever knew - the best wife, the best mother, the best mistress, the best friend- told me once…'I always keep three books going—a stiff book, a moderately easy book and a novel, and I always take up the one I feel fit for!’”
This quote, from a Parent’s Review Article published in 1892, has formed the basis of my reading life for the past 10 months.
At the beginning of 2025, frustrated with multiple reading slumps and the feeling that what I was reading was not quality, I embarked on a journey to change my reading life. I made a very extensive list (as all planners do) of the books I would be reading and the month I would be reading them. It was categorized. It was color coded. It was beautiful. It was useless.
I barely read any books on my list. While I was happy with the quality of the books I did read, I was frustrated with myself. The list made me freeze. I found myself doing other things instead of reading because I wasn’t in the mood for what book came next. When I stumbled upon this quote and the article it came from, I knew something had to change.
This method provided clarity to my reading life.
I started off creating perimeters for the three books. What would I qualify as a “stiff” book or a “moderately easy” book? Could those be novels? Would only novels be allowed in the novels section? How would I decide what came next? As tempting as it was, I did not create a color-coded list this time. This is what I came up with instead.
A Stiff Book: Non-Fiction. Are all non-fiction books challenging to get through? No. However, I needed a category for ever growing pile of non-fiction books on my to be read list.
A Moderate Book: The Well-Educated Mind Booklist. I’m currently, very slowly, making my way through this booklist. To keep myself from giving up, I gave it its own category. This may change in the future, but for now this category is only for books on this list.
A Novel: Anything else. If it doesn’t fall into one of the two categories above, it goes here.
This method has been an absolute game changer. Instead of going through 5-6 different categories of books that I wanted to read, I have three and I just cycle through them. Ideally, I would read from each category each day, but that does not always happen. Which is okay! The whole point of this is to hold myself accountable and to make sure I am widely read.
Not only is having just three categories extremely simple, I don’t need to keep a running list of all the books I want to read and when. When I finish a non-fiction book I just grab another. When I finish a moderate book I just move to the next one on the list. If I have a book club book, it’s considered my novel. No more feeling stressed about not staying on track and avoiding my list.
If you are struggling to read a variety of books or just get back into (or into) reading in general. I highly recommend creating your own parameters for the three book method. You will find that it is much easier to stick to your reading goals when you have three different options to choose from each day. I am very grateful I stumbled upon it and can already see the fruits based on my reading this year.
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