For a few years I kept a reading log. Not just a record — a goal. Fifty books a year, then sixty. I highlighted passages and moved on before the ink was dry. I was reading at books rather than with them.
The shift came gradually. I picked up Middlemarch in January thinking I’d push through it. Instead I slowed down. I reread pages. I put it down and looked out the window. I finished it in March and sat with it for a week before I could start anything else.
That was the year I stopped counting.
Now I have a different relationship with my shelf. Some books I abandon without guilt. Others I read twice in a row, immediately, because the first read was just learning the territory. I’ve stopped treating a long book as a challenge and started treating it as a gift — more time inside something good.
The name of this space, Zsófi reads, is honest in its simplicity. Not a thesis. Not a review. Just marks made because something was worth marking.
I read slowly now. I like it better.