Deciding to read a book a week was the best new year resolution I ever made | Katie Cunningham

I read 52 books that year and I've kept the habit up in the years that followed, the routine now firmly established

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I've always been a reader. In primary school, I'd tear through 60-odd books in a month when the annual Read-A-Thon rolled around (they were mostly Babysitters Club books, but still). Then as a teen, I discovered the quiet beauty that could be found in great novels, taking solace in those pages as hormones and high school made the real world awful.

In my 20s, though, my pace started to wobble. I was still getting through 15 or 20 books a year, but less consistently. Partly this was because I had to make time for an exciting new hobby called binge drinking. But I was also increasingly distracted by the bottomless pit that was my iPhone. It always went the same way: I'd be on a roll with reading until I hit a book that just wasn't that interesting. I'd gradually stop reaching for it at night as doomscrolling on Reddit became a more appealing prospect, then I'd look up and realise it had been a month since I'd turned a page.