Encouragement for Reading

Pastor John Piper writes in, "Brothers We Are Not Professionals",

We think we don't have time to read. We despair of reading anything spiritually rich and substantial because life seems to be lived in snatches. One of the most helpful discoveries I have made is how much can be read in a disciplined blocks of twenty minutes a day.

Suppose that you read slowly, say about 250 words a minutes (as I do). This means that in twenty minutes you can read about five thousand words. An average book has about four hundred words to a page. So you could read about twelve-and-a-half pages in twenty minutes. Suppose you discipline yourself to read a certain author or topic twenty minutes a day, six days a week, for a year. That would be 312 (days) times 12.5 (pages) for a total of 3,900 pages. Assume that an average book is 250 pages long. This means you could read fifteen books like this in one year.

Further on he writes,

This astonishing discovery freed me from the paralysis of not starting great, mind-shaping, heart-enriching books because I lacked enough big blocks of time. It turns out that I don't need long periods of time in order to read three masterpieces in one year! I needed twenty minutes a day, six days a week.