My Reading Recap for August 2026

What August 2026 Actually Looked Like

The August recap email arrived on the 1st, and this article basically wrote itself. Opening the email and pulling the month into a few paragraphs is just how a month ends by now. If you want the format explained, check out July's recap →.

August split in two: one homebase for most of the month, then an 11-hour overnight flight in the second half. The numbers came out backwards from last month's recap, with twice as many books finished in an hour less of reading time. Below are (as always) the numbers straight from my ReadingHabit dashboard, the books I read, the one book that stood out, and the habit behind it all.

The Numbers

This August, summarized:

• Books finished: 4
• Time read: 11h 45m
• Pages turned: 616
• Sessions logged: 62
• Streak at month-end: 244 days (still every day of 2026)
• Average daily reading: ~21 minutes
• Current reading speed: 0.7 PPM (≈175 WPM)
• Year-to-date: 29 of 18 books (eleven ahead of goal)

I finished four books in 11h 45m, compared with July's two books in 12h 48m. That's an hour less reading time, and double the finishes. Mostly because all four books I read in August were short. One number that caught my attention was the 62 sessions (my highest ever) at about 11 minutes each. July's 48 sessions averaged 16 minutes. More reading in smaller pieces, which is also why the daily average dropped slightly, from 25 minutes to 21. The year-to-date total climbed to 29 books out of an 18-book goal, well past what the yearly math → made me think was possible. My reading speed stayed the same at 0.7 PPM (the result the Reading Speed Test gave me as well).

The Books

In the order I finished them. All four came from the summer pool I wrote about in August →.

Positioning

by Al Ries & Jack Trout

You don't win a market by being better, but instead by owning a specific spot in someone's head. A fast read, and still super relevant.

Est. read: 3h 44 min

Get your reading estimate →

It was written in 1981, and some of the examples used by the two authors kind of show its age, but the arguments underneath haven't aged at all, and it's far more actionable than I expected from a book that "old". Thumbs up.

Hell Yeah or No

by Derek Sivers

Short essays on deciding what to do (or not to do) in your life and your work. If the idea takes two pages, the chapter is two pages.

Est. read: 2h 31 min

Get your reading estimate →

Sivers writes the way I wish more authors did. The filter in the title is the whole book: if a decision isn't a "hell yeah", it's a no. Seems obvious right up until you hold your actual commitments against it.

Talking to Humans

by Giff Constable

How to interview the people you're building a product for without leading them into telling you what you want to hear. Closer to a field manual than a book.

Est. read: 1h 32 min

Get your reading estimate →

My book of the month, so it gets the next section to itself.

Useful Not True

by Derek Sivers

Most of what you believe isn't true or false so much as useful or not. Pick the belief that makes you do the better action and stop arguing about the rest.

Est. read: 1h 43 min

Get your reading estimate →

Sivers again. Reading two of his books so close together might have been a mistake: they've half-merged in my head, which is the risk of reading two books by the same author in a single month. Both are really good though. Next time, I'd read them a few weeks apart instead of just a few days between them.

The One That Stuck

Talking to Humans made me a bit uncomfortable (in a good way). In a previous article, I admitted there are no customer conversations behind ReadingHabit yet. I'm building a reading app out of my own reading habit, a bunch of research on behavioral design (I wrote my thesis on it), and a pile of assumptions.

The idea I keep thinking about is the interviewing rule: ask people what they did, not what they would do. "Would you use this?" mostly gets you a polite yes from whoever you might ask. "When did you last try to keep track of a book you were reading, and what did you use?" gets you closer to the truth because it already happened. It's a small distinction, but it changes the whole conversation.

Honestly, so far it only changed how I'll ask, not how often I have asked since reading it.

Now for the inverse: there has also been a miss this past month. The book I'm reading right now is The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. I got the argument early on, and I feel like the last several chapters have just been going over it again and again. My sessions with it shrank to almost nothing, which also contributed to the drop in my average daily reading time in August. Some nights I'd reach the bottom of a page with no memory of the top – reading it before sleep was closer to a fever dream than reading a book. I'm about 20 pages from the end, so I'll finish it, but that's the only reason. Had this hit me a bit earlier on, it would have been an easy, guilt-free DNF →.

What the Numbers Don't Show

The 11-hour overnight flight was the only real threat to my reading habit in August, and luckily it went the way June's sleeper train journey did: I read before departure and again during the stopover, so the day was logged before the long leg started. Afterwards my usual two reading windows → came back unchanged, just a little shorter than normal. Another argument for having both of my reading windows instead of just one – a (travel) day has to go horribly wrong to take both of them away.

None of that really shows in the "11h 45m" I read over the past month. The dashboard kept track of a four-minute, half-asleep session exactly the same as a stopover reading session with a book I loved, even though the two experiences weren't the same. The numbers are just the receipt. That's also why I'd rather track time than count finished books →: two finishes and four finishes turned out to be the same habit.

Next up for me is Influence by Robert B. Cialdini, also taken from my summer stack. That one should have its moment here next month.

See You in October

Try turning a reading month into a few paragraphs at least once, if you haven't already. A note on the last day of the month is all it takes – no audience needed. Writing it turns "I read some more books" into a month of reading you can still recall a year later. The monthly-reflection prompts → I use are a good starting point. The counting takes care of itself: ReadingHabit logs your sessions and sends you the month's totals (with some more insights) on the 1st of the following month, so the reflecting is the only work left. August in one line: four short books, an hour less reading than July, and two of the books I read changed the questions I'm going to ask.

See you in October.