My Reading Recap for July 2026

What July 2026 Actually Looked Like

The July recap email hit my inbox on the 1st, same as every month. This is the third one of these recap articles now. May was the experiment (my private stats made public for the first time), June made it stick, and July is just what I do on the 1st now – open the email, pull the month into a few paragraphs, put it somewhere it can be seen. If you've read May's or June's, you know how this goes: the numbers, the books I actually finished, the one that stuck, and the habit running underneath all of it.

July kind of contradicted itself. I finished two books (the fewest of any month I've tracked) and still spent more time reading than in any month this year. Two books, nearly thirteen hours. That is the exact reason I stopped measuring my reading in finished books, and track time spent reading instead.

The Numbers

Straight from the recap email, my numbers for July:

• Books finished: 2
• Time read: 12h 48m
• Pages turned: 500
• Sessions logged: 48
• Streak at month-end: 213 days (still every day of 2026)
• Average daily reading: ~25 minutes
• Current reading speed: 0.7 PPM (≈175 WPM)
• Year-to-date: 25 of 18 books (seven ahead of goal)

The headline is that time-versus-books gap. 12h 48m and 25 minutes a day are both the highest of any month I've tracked while two finishes is the lowest. Fewer, denser books, read slowly is what that looks like on a dashboard. The year-to-date climbed anyway: 25 of 18 books, now seven ahead of the pace the yearly math → said was reasonable. My speed ticked from 0.67 to 0.7 PPM (about 175 WPM, still well under the ~238 adult average I benchmarked against on the Reading Speed Test); slow as ever, and still not the thing that matters.

The Books

In the order I finished them – the next entry in a series I've been working through all year, then the one I'd been promising myself since spring.

$100M Money Models

by Alex Hormozi

The third in Hormozi's $100M series, on pricing and offer structure. He's going over the actual models behind how a product or service gets priced, and what those choices do to the person buying.

Est. read: 3h 49 min

Get your reading estimate →

Like Offers and Leads before it, the title undersells the book. You open it expecting a blunt pricing manual and get something more careful: how much effort, playfulness, and genuine passion he pours into laying out the models and principles he (and others) actually used. It's eye-opening on the tactics behind product and service pricing and the effect they have on the buyer. If you liked the first two, this is an obvious read.

Alchemy

by Rory Sutherland

Sutherland's whole thing is that human behavior runs on psycho-logic, not logic, and that the best solutions to real problems are often the ones no rational spreadsheet would ever suggest.

Est. read: 6h 9 min

Get your reading estimate →

This one I've been foreshadowing since May, and it earned every month of the wait. I read it slowly on purpose (31 sessions across 16 days) because nearly every chapter made me stop and rethink something I thought was settled. It's my book of the month by a distance, so it gets the next section to itself.

The One That Stuck

Alchemy. The idea I keep coming back to is Sutherland's "psycho-logic" – that people don't run on logic, and the smartest solution is often the one that works with that instead of against it. Logic, he argues, isn't the only route to a right answer. That landed hard, because logic is my default setting. I studied computer science; my instinct with almost any problem is to follow the rules to the correct output. Alchemy made a great case that the correct output and the rule-following path aren't always the same road. Sometimes the creative, faintly irrational move is the one that actually works. I finished it and immediately told my partner to read it (she's reading it right now), and I've caught myself applying Sutherland's lens to small day-to-day decisions since (where it fits obviously – I'm not abandoning logic entirely). Alchemy really stuck and changed how I approach things.

What the Numbers Don't Show

Here's why the numbers rose, which I find more interesting than the numbers themselves. July was still a travel month, but the opposite kind from June. Last month was place-to-place. I travelled two countries and took an overnight sleeper train. My routine was in pieces because of it (I'd still do it again). July was one base for the whole month: I arrived late June and simply stayed put. That's exactly why the time and pages climbed. Jumping around wrecks a routine; settling into one place lets me rebuild it. Within a few days the two windows I lean on → (a session in the morning after waking, another at night before sleep) were back, and once they're back the minutes stack up on their own. That's what turned June's 19 minutes a day into July's 25: a simple routine.

None of that is in the numbers. "12h 48m" can't tell you it came from a month in one apartment instead of a month living out of a bag, or that the best reading moment of July was closing Alchemy and asking my partner to read it before I'd even set the iPad mini down. The ReadingHabit dashboard counts the minutes spent reading, and I think tracking time over counting finished books is the way to go about it. That way, two finished books only look like a slow month until you see the 25-minutes-a-day habit underneath it. I'm into Positioning by Ries and Trout now, so that one will probably turn up in the next of these.

See You in September

If you've never turned a reading month into a few paragraphs, try it once. A single note on the last day of the month is enough. You don't need a blog or a public post; the act of writing it is what turns "I read something" into a month you actually keep. If you want a scaffold, the monthly-reflection prompts → I use are a good starting point. And the counting part doesn't have to be work: ReadingHabit logs your sessions as you read and hands you the tallied previous month on the 1st, so the only thing left is the reflecting. This month that reflection was easy: two books, my most-read month of the year, and a book about irrationality I'll be chewing on for a long time.

See you in September.