My Reading Recap for May 2026

What May 2026 Actually Looked Like

Every month on the 1st, ReadingHabit sends me a recap email. It shows books finished, hours read, pages turned, sessions logged, the streak number, every stat the dashboard tallies for the month that just ended. On Monday I opened the one for May. Until now I'd skim it, maybe screenshot it. The numbers were never seen by anyone else. That stops with this post.

I'm trying a monthly recap as a public thing – partly so future-me has a real record of what an actual reading month looked like in 2026, partly because the data is there and might as well be useful to someone other than me. A recap is also the natural top layer on the session-tracking habit underneath: the streak is the daily unit, the book finish is the weekly-ish unit, and the monthly recap is the next one up. Here's what May added up to – the stats, the four books, the favorite, the habit underneath. If the format works, you'll see another one in a couple of weeks.

The Numbers

Straight from Monday's recap email, my numbers for May:

• Books finished: 4
• Time read: 11h 59m
• Pages turned: 563
• Sessions logged: 55
• Streak at month-end: 152 days (every day of 2026 so far)
• Average daily reading: ~22 minutes
• Current reading speed: 0.67 PPM (≈167 WPM)
• Year-to-date: 20 of 18 books (two ahead of the yearly goal)

The 20-of-18 is the one that surprised me. The yearly math said an 18-book goal was reasonable, but I didn't expect being two ahead with seven months still to go, off the back of a 22-minute daily average. Compounding really doesn't feel like much day-to-day. The end-of-month number is where you actually see it.

The 0.67 PPM is the other stat worth a sentence. It's slow – comfortably under the ~238 WPM that gets cited as the average adult reading speed. The free Reading Speed Test is where I benchmarked the number the first time, and the dashboard's running average has settled close to it ever since. I've stopped trying to be faster and started letting consistency do the work instead.

The Books

In the order I finished them, which roughly tracks shortest to longest (an accident, not deliberate).

Book 11: Highest highs, lowest lows

by Alex West

The 11th entry in Alex West's 'Not Business Advice' series – a public field note from someone building his own business and reflecting on it. 27 pages, honest and specific.

Est. read: 27m

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I went in expecting exactly what it was, which is what I got: Alex West's actual learnings from building his business, alongside his personal reflections. 27 pages, two sittings. A great short read – the kind that quietly comes back to you on a Tuesday afternoon when something he flagged shows up in your own week.

The Minimalist Entrepreneur

by Sahil Lavingia

The case for starting your own business the minimalist way – fitting the life you want, not the swing-for-the-fences VC version. Concrete, actionable steps.

Est. read: 3h 34m

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Lavingia makes the case for going about starting your own business the minimalist way – fitting the life you actually want. The argument is for a small business that's profitable from day one, built around a specific community's real problem. Great actionable advice and steps to follow, not philosophy and not motivation. It also pairs neatly with the next two on the list; together, the three of them make a small running argument about how to actually build something useful in 2026 without selling your life to it.

Show Your Work!

by Austin Kleon

Kleon's argument: stop keeping the progress in your daily work to yourself; share the unfinished pieces in public, consistently. Short chapters, designed for five-minute reads.

Est. read: 1h 54m

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Kleon's argument is exactly what the title says: stop keeping the progress in your daily work to yourself; share it along the way. The chapters are about two minutes each, which is how the book actually gets through you – I read most of it in tiny windows, in a queue waiting, the kettle boiling. It's also the book that quietly nudged me toward writing this recap. Kleon's line I keep coming back to: share your process and the small unfinished pieces of your work in public consistently, so the people who care about the same things can find you and learn with you. A great reminder to get out of your own head and start sharing. Which is mostly what this post is.

The Book of Elon

by Eric Jorgenson

Jorgenson's distillation of Elon Musk's operating principles – built in the same modular structure as his Naval Almanack. Aphorism-style sections you can open at random and read for ten minutes.

Est. read: 4h 55m

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The biggest read of the month – 5h 8m across 26 sessions, about 1.2 minutes per page. I almost didn't start it, for reasons I'll get into in the next section. What pulled me through was the format: short sections, no required order, the same dip-in structure Jorgenson used for The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. You can pick it up and browse, reading whichever section feels right that day. It definitely earned a slot on my re-read shelf the first time through, which is rare for me.

The One That Stuck

The standout was the one I went in kind of expecting not to finish at all: The Book of Elon. I'd had it queued for a bit and kept finding reasons not to start it (in my head it was going to be more about Elon himself than actionable advice I could actually take from it). Elon-as-character wasn't the angle I was looking to add to my reading life. I started it more out of "fine, let me at least know what's in there" than any real pull. Three sessions in, I'd stopped negotiating with myself and started actually looking forward to opening it every session along the way.

What did the work was the part I'd assumed wouldn't be in there: the first-principles framing, distilled. Jorgenson's version goes something like, relentlessly pursue a purpose that truly matters, and use first-principles thinking to strip away assumptions so you can focus only on what actually moves that mission forward. The principles are really inspiring – I can imagine they're very hard to mirror at the scale they were applied to (rockets, electric cars, civilization-scale missions, none of which are on my desk this week), but the prompt translates downward perfectly. The question "what assumption am I borrowing from someone else's playbook?" applies the same way to ReadingHabit as it does to electric cars. The book made me respect the missions behind each of the businesses in it immensely, and it's now on my re-read shelf – the modular structure means going back to read one section at a time will be a pleasure.

May was, otherwise, a clean month – four reads, no duds, nothing I had to drop or grit through. That doesn't happen often enough to be the default, so I'm noting it here while it's true. Next month's recap probably has a "this one missed me" entry; this one doesn't.

What the Numbers Don't Show

The streak held every day of the month – as it has every day of 2026 so far. On most days both the morning and bedtime windows from how to build a reading habit fired; what flexed was the morning specifically, during a week a friend was visiting and the mornings belonged to him. The already-established habit of reading daily made it possible to sustain even when I didn't hit every usual window, which is completely fine. The bedtime window held on those days, which is the whole point of running two of them: one survives almost anything the day throws at the other. By the end of May the streak was at 152 days, and I didn't have to think about that fact once.

The other thing the numbers don't show is the day I replaced my usual window with a reading session by the water. Great weather, same friend, early-summer sun, two books open between us. That session is buried inside the 11h 59m total – the dashboard counts it the same as a bedtime session in winter pajamas. It isn't the same. The 22-minute daily average masks one of the best reading hours I had this year, which is a reminder that the metrics aren't the habit. They're the receipt for the habit.

One book that didn't make the list, in all honesty: Alchemy by Rory Sutherland is still on my TBR. June, maybe – July, more likely. We'll see.

See You in July

If you've never written a monthly recap, give it a shot. A notes-app entry on the last day of the month is enough. The act of pulling a month into a couple of short paragraphs is what makes the books your own. Without it, May would have evaporated into a vague "I read some things" (like most months had until now).

The version that runs in the background is easier: ReadingHabit collects the sessions while you read, the dashboard tallies the month, and on the 1st of the next month the recap email arrives with everything counted. The only part left is writing the recap itself.

See you in July.