Once upon a time, reading was a straightforward activity. Someone would give you a book– or you’d take one out of the library, or buy one– and you’d read it. If you liked it, you might go and choose another one by the same author. Or you might just let it swill around in your head until another interesting book randomly crossed your path.

Now, of course, reading is a highly stressful business. There’s this month’s book-club novel to be read. Then there’s the heavyweight literary biographies you were given for Christmas that threaten to topple the tower you are building on your bedside table. This tower consists of books-recommended-by-friends and books-you-liked-the-look-of-on-Amazon and books-that-you-got-stuck-on-half-way-through but which you promise yourself you will finish one day (or else the time you’ve already spent on them will be wasted). There’s also the shelf of books-you-intend-to-read-but-haven’t-yet-got-round-to, and the books shoved in sideways that are of course the books-written-by-your-second-cousin’s-next-door-neighbour and which give you guilt trips whenever you see them.

And this is not taking into account the books-you-haven’t-bought-yet, which are on a growing list in your BlackBerry and that you will pick up next time you’re in Waterstone’s, bring home lovingly, then get in a stew over whether they should go to the bottom of the pile by the bed or be allowed to jump straight to the top, because what if the desire to read them has disappeared by the time you get to them?

If this hasn’t brought you to the verge of a panic attack, you’re either not a book-lover or you need to hear some statistics. Try these. A book is published every 30 seconds. This includes 10,000 new novels a year, with nearly 10 times that many on publishers’ back lists. The number of books in the world is growing at five times the rate of the human population. Even if you read full-time you’d need 163 lifetimes to get through all the books currently offered on Amazon.

Enough?

It’s hard being well-read these days. If you were born in England in the 17th century, when there were about 2,000 published books available, you could have read them all and felt extremely well-read. These days, as Mexican critic Gabriel Zaid says in his thought-provoking So Many Books: “Books are published at such a rate that they make us exponentially more ignorant.”

Luckily – or unluckily, depending on which way you look at it – help is on hand, in the form of a spate of books (more books!) that offer advice on how to manage this “condition of surplusage”, in the somewhat ungainly wording of John Sutherland. Sutherland, a professor of English at University College, London, argues that in order to cope with the printed deluge we have to become better readers – better at choosing what to read, and better at extracting enjoyment from them. In How to Read a Novel, he takes us on a tour of the book, from jacket design (pointing out how publishers use sex to sell) to what information we can glean from the copyright date (which comes with a long explanation of the 65-year gap between the first and second editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover). Most people who read novels – and who else will buy this book? – will not find much that’s new here. But Sutherland is an entertaining writer, and there are nice stories along the way, such as how Thackeray, when the title of Vanity Fair came to him in the middle of the night, jumped out of bed and ran round the room three times shouting: “Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair!”

Strangely, Sutherland seems more concerned with the peripherals of books than what’s inside them – he is at his most passionate when writing about nice wide, white margins, for instance – and his observations on creative content remain superficial. When, on the subject of titles, he asks why Virginia Woolf chose to call her novel To the Lighthouse and not The Lighthouse – “or, if she had wanted to be crystal clear, Sailing to the Lighthouse”, his question, worryingly, does not seem wholly rhetorical. And his advice on the all-important task of choosing the right book is woolly in the extreme. Chapter titles, he says, are “worth scanning before purchase”, even though they may offer “no clear guidance”. Titles are useful too, although “in many cases, the title does not make sense until you have read the novel.” In the end he suggests ignoring dust jacket, blurb and critics, and instead applying the McLuhan test, which is to read page 69 and, if you like it, buy the book. “It works,” he promises. I tried it on his book and was plunged back in to the (yawn) Lady Chatterley trial… Perhaps it really does work.

Where Sutherland sticks to the edges of novels, the excellent John Mullan – also a professor of English at UCL – dives right in. How Novels Work comes out of his weekly “Elements of Fiction” column in The Guardian. He re-arranges his ever insightful critiques of the sort of novels likely to be discussed in book clubs (Brick Lane, On Beauty, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time) into categories (genre, voice, style, plot etc) and less obvious subcategories (meals, weather, lists, names etc). Written with the book-club member in mind, he pitches it somewhere between academic lit crit, a book review and the way ordinary readers talk about books. The result is wholly satisfying, and a great education for book-lovers and would-be novelists alike.

How different Mullan is on the subject of titles: sitting Emma and Portrait of a Lady side by side, he asks why Henry James didn’t use the title Isabel Archer instead. “Emma,” he explains, “is about a singular and powerful individual, freed by wealth and lack of parental guidance to exercise her sometimes imperious will” – and it’s therefore absolutely appropriate that the novel should carry her name. The title of James’s novel, on the other hand, “insists on a certain analytical distance” from the heroine; we watch her making mistakes without forming too close a sympathy. This is exactly the stuff that helps us get more from our reading.

Mullan is willing to go where other academics do not usually deign to tread. His section on the use of parentheses, with reference to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s artful homage, The Hours, had me almost weeping with pleasure: when I was at university I wanted to do a dissertation on brackets in Woolf, but none of my tutors thought it worthy of study.

Mullan is equally good on the subject of paragraphs, and the spaces in between one line and another – which, as many writers would agree, is where the really important stuff happens. But where else can you read about blank spaces? And for those of us who studied literature chronologically, it’s weirdly gratifying to have Mullan draw parallels between Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Amis’s Money. At last we can consider our bookshelves as cohesive entities.

No great depths of analysis are to be found lurking in the pages of Nick Hornby’s The Complete Polysyllabic Spree. As with Mullan’s, this book began life as a column. For more than two years Hornby kept a reading diary that appeared in the US magazine The Believer. Unlike Mullan’s column, however, it has not been reworked to suit its new incarnation – nor, in this case, its UK readership. I will not be the only one taken aback by being told that After Eights are “sophisticated chocolate mints”.

This oversight aside, Hornby’s laddish tones take us on an easy gambol, via an occasional out-loud laugh, through a satisfyingly wide range of reading material – from a biography of Arsene Wenger to the selected letters of Philip Larkin.

The annoying thing about Hornby is his anti-intellectual chippiness. More than once he equates literariness with opacity and dullness. “I am not particularly interested in language,” he states at the onset, declaring a preference for books that can be read quickly and, if possible, in one sitting. He soon catches himself in his own net. Of Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, which he rates highly, he says: “I was… briefly worried about the title, which sounds portentously and alarmingly Literary, until I was reminded that it refers to Superman”. David Copperfield (surely a work of literature if ever there was one) leaves “a devastating hole in [his] life” and he falls head over heels for the indisputably literary Marilynne Robinson. Her novel Housekeeping, he says, is impossible to read fast because “it comes fitted with its own speed bumps… If you are so gripped by a book that you want to read it in the mythical single sitting, what chance has it got of making it all the way through the long march to your soul?” Such is the power of literature: it’s got Nick Hornby over his adolescence at last.

As we follow Hornby’s literary journey, we become aware that it is a journey: we get to watch how one book leads to another. (A BBC4 documentary on Ian Hamilton makes Hornby buy Hamilton’s biography of Robert Lowell, which makes him buy Lowell’s Collected Poems etc.) We also see, amusingly, how many more books he buys each month than he reads, as he lists both. One month he buys 11 books and reads just one. Hornby would find justification in So Many Books, where Gabriel Zaid states firmly that those “who aspire to the status of cultured individuals” feel bad about accruing unread books, while those who are “truly cultured” are “capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.” Phews all round.

Those short on recommendations from friends – or Nick Hornby – and who need help plotting their reading journeys, can try Bloomsbury’s Good Reading Guide, now in its seventh edition. Restricted to 400 entries, there are inevitably omissions (we get Donna Tartt but not Jeffrey Eugenides, Peter Matthiessen but not Mary McCarthy), but it fulfils a service not provided by The Oxford Companion to English Literature in that it makes links between similar authors. After reading Michael Ondaatje, for instance, it suggests trying Paul Bowles or Romesh Gunesekera. There are also suggestions under themes. Like reading about dark old houses? Try Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet. Small-town American life? Read Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, or Jayne Anne Phillips’s Machine Dreams.

What Hornby, Mullan and Zaid all capture so well is how, the more we read, the more we want to read – that reading is (as Sutherland’s subtitle, “A User’s Guide”, subtly suggests) an addiction. I wrote “sold” in the margin whenever Hornby inspired me to read a particular book. At the end I counted 27 solds. In this way reading journeys are made, addictions are fed and, alas, bedside towers get taller. But reading about reading has brought a sense of calm and order back to my reading life. It helps to be told it’s impossible to read everything – and that our own, unique reading journeys are what it’s all about. As Zaid puts it: “What does it matter how cultivated and up-to-date we are, or how many thousands of books we’ve read? What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive.”