Every term it goes the same way. Exams get close, the timetable tightens, and the first thing cut is the book on the bedside table — because it is the only item on the list nobody is grading. Three weeks later the exams are over, the habit is gone, and getting it back takes longer than the exams did.
The goal during exam season is not to read a lot. It is to not lose the habit, so you do not have to rebuild it from zero in November.
Cut the size, not the thing
When people get busy they keep the ambition and drop the activity: still planning to read fifty pages, therefore reading none. Invert it. Ten minutes is not a sad version of reading, it is the version that survives a loaded week. Two pages before sleep keeps the thread of the story alive, and a thread you can still feel is one you will pick up again.
If you want the longer argument for shrinking the target instead of abandoning it, that is the whole point of how many pages you should read a day.
Pick a book that matches a tired brain
This is where most attempts fail. A dense literary novel with four timelines is a terrible exam-season book, not because it is hard but because it demands the exact resource you are spending elsewhere. During revision, choose on these grounds:
Short. Something you can finish inside the term gives you a win at a time when everything else is unfinished. Plot-forward. You want a book that pulls rather than one you have to push. Familiar. A reread is not a waste of exam season; it is the lowest-effort way to read, because you cannot lose the thread. Separate from your subject. If you study history, read something that is not history — the brain needs a different room, not a smaller version of the same one.
Short books to beat a slump is a good shelf to raid here, and why rereading is worth it makes the case for the familiar option.
Put it in a gap that already exists
Do not try to find new time; it does not exist in exam season. Attach reading to something already fixed in your day. The bus. The twenty minutes between finishing revision and actually falling asleep. The queue. The wait before a session starts. These gaps are the only reliable reading time a student has, and they are also where reading on your commute comes from.
One practical note: if the book lives on your phone, the phone also contains everything that will interrupt you. Deciding in advance how to handle that is worth five minutes of setup — reading on your phone without distractions covers the mechanics.
Three things not to do
Do not set a target. A page count during exams turns the one unassessed thing in your life into another assessment. If you track anything, track that you opened the book.
Do not start a series. Six hundred pages of book one is a commitment, and commitment is the thing you are short of. Save it for the holiday — that is genuinely the better time, and the reward is real.
Do not read to feel productive. Reading improvement books about study technique instead of revising is procrastination wearing a tie. If you are reading for pleasure, read for pleasure.
And sometimes: put it down on purpose
There are weeks — the last one, usually — where the honest answer is that there is no room, and forcing it just adds a second source of guilt. Stopping deliberately is different from stopping by drift. Say to yourself that the book waits until the last exam, note the page, and stop thinking about it. A planned pause does not break a habit. An unplanned collapse does.
If sleep is the thing being squeezed, protect sleep first. That is just common sense, not advice about your health: a tired brain is bad at both revision and reading, and nothing on your to-read list is worth a worse exam.
After the last paper
The first week after exams is the single best moment in a student's year to rebuild a reading habit, because the pressure is gone and the appetite is still there. Have the book chosen before the exams end — something you actively want, not something improving — and start it the same evening. How to build a reading habit is the longer version of what to do next.
One more thing that helps more than it sounds: having somebody to talk to about the book. During a heads-down term, a two-line reaction to a chapter is often the whole social life a reader gets, and it is enough to keep you going. That is the gap Arwy — the Android reading app we make — is built around: while you are reading it connects you with other people in the same book. It is not a study app and it will not help you revise, there is no iPhone version yet, and if what you want is a strict reading tracker a dedicated tracking tool does that better. But for the part where you finish a chapter at midnight and want to tell someone, that is what we are for.
Reading between study sessions? Talk to someone else in the same book. Arwy is on Google Play.