A Beginner’s Book of Mormon Reading Plan

The Book of Mormon has 239 chapters and 531 pages, and that can feel like a mountain when you’re holding it for the first time. Here’s the pacing math, the schedule I’d hand to anyone starting out, and the small habits that finally carried me from 1 Nephi to Moroni.

Updated August 2026 · 13 min read

I want to be honest about where this plan comes from. Years ago I kept the Book of Mormon on my nightstand like a piece of furniture. I had a testimony of it, I believed it was true, and I could tell you about the Brother of Jared’s sixteen stones if a lesson called for it. But read it cover to cover, start to finish? I had tried twice and stalled out somewhere in 2 Nephi both times. The book felt dense in a way that the stories I’d grown up on in Primary didn’t prepare me for. What changed wasn’t my faith. What changed was that I stopped treating the book like a homework assignment and started treating it like a hike with a map. I did the math, picked a pace I could actually keep, gave myself permission to be a very ordinary reader, and finished in nine months. Then I did it again. This article is the plan I wish someone had handed me at the beginning: real numbers, a real schedule, and real talk about the stretches where the reading gets hard.

Why a Plan Beats Good Intentions

Most of us don’t fail to finish the Book of Mormon because we don’t care. We fail because “I’ll read the scriptures tonight” is not a plan — it’s a mood, and moods evaporate by Thursday. A plan does two things that good intentions can’t. First, it breaks 531 pages into daily bites so small they feel almost silly. Second, it gives you a way to know, on any given Tuesday, whether you’re on track. That second part matters more than it sounds. When I was winging it, I never knew if I was behind, so I always felt vaguely behind, and vague guilt is a terrible reading companion.

There’s also something quietly spiritual about a schedule. Showing up at the same time each day, even for ten minutes, turns scripture reading from an event into a relationship. I’ve noticed the difference in myself. When I read in bursts — forty pages on a Sunday, then nothing for two weeks — the book stays a stranger. When I read a page or two every morning, the characters start to feel like people I’m actually traveling with. Nephi’s frustrations make more sense. Alma’s sermons land differently. I catch connections between chapters I would have blown right past in a binge.

So before the numbers, here’s my one non-negotiable principle: pick a pace you can keep on your worst week, not your best week. Anyone can read five chapters on a quiet Sunday. The question is what you can read on the Tuesday when the kids are sick, work ran late, and you’re running on fumes. Build the plan around that Tuesday, and you’ll finish.

The Numbers: How Big Is This Book, Really?

Let’s get concrete, because vague goals die young. The standard English edition of the Book of Mormon runs 531 pages. It contains fifteen books — from 1 Nephi through Moroni — divided into 239 chapters and 6,604 verses. Chapters vary wildly in length: 1 Nephi 4 is about a page and a half, while Alma 32 stretches past five. That’s why I prefer to plan in pages rather than chapters. Pages are honest. Chapters lie to you.

Here’s the pacing math for the three most common timeframes, assuming a roughly even daily pace:

Look at that middle row. Two pages a day. That’s it. Two pages is one long conference talk’s worth of reading, or about five to eight minutes for most adults. When I first did this math I actually laughed, because the mountain I’d been avoiding for years was, at a reasonable pace, a five-minute daily walk. The Book of Mormon is not a long book by the standards of anything else we read. It’s shorter than most of the novels on my shelf. It only feels long when there’s no plan attached to it.

Why do I push the nine-month pace for beginners instead of six? Margin. A six-month pace demands three pages a day, every day, and the first time you miss a few days you owe yourself nine or ten pages, which starts to feel like debt. Two pages a day leaves room for real life, and real life is coming whether you plan for it or not. If you find the two-page days easy, you’ll naturally read ahead, and arriving early at the end feels wonderful. Arriving behind schedule feels terrible. Choose wonderful.

Choosing Your Pace and Setting the Schedule

Once you’ve picked a timeframe, turn it into an actual schedule you can check against. Here’s the method I use, and it takes about ten minutes with a pencil:

Step one: Pick a start date and an end date. I like starting on a Sunday, because my reading rhythm is anchored to the weekend. Count the days between them.

Step two: Divide 531 by your number of days. Round up. For nine months from September 1 to May 31, that’s 273 days, which works out to 1.95 pages a day — call it 2.

Step three: Open the book and find your weekly milestones. At two pages a day, you’re covering about 14 pages a week. In my copy, week one ends partway through 1 Nephi 5, week two lands in 1 Nephi 9, and so on. I jot those milestones on an index card I use as a bookmark: “Sep 7 — page 14. Sep 14 — page 28.” That’s the whole system. The card moves with the book, so the plan is always in my hand.

Step four: Decide where in your day the reading lives. This is the step everyone skips, and it’s the step that determines everything. “Sometime today” is not a time. Mine is first thing in the morning, before I touch my phone, because I learned the hard way that after the phone, the day belongs to everybody else. A sister in my ward reads on her lunch break, in her car, in the parking lot — the only fifteen minutes of the day that are fully hers. A friend of mine reads to his kids at bedtime and lets their questions set the pace. There’s no holy hour. There’s only the hour you’ll actually keep.

If you prefer digital, the Gospel Library app will build a schedule for you — you set the book and the end date and it tracks your progress automatically. Plenty of people in my ward swear by it. I still love my paper copy and my index card, partly because the card gives me a little physical record of the whole journey, but the app solves the math problem in about ninety seconds and I recommend it to anyone who finds the pencil method fussy.

What to Do When You Fall Behind

You will fall behind. I say that not to discourage you but to take the drama out of it. Every reader I’ve ever talked to — including the bishop — has fallen behind on a scripture plan. Travel happens. A new baby happens. A hard month at work happens. The plan that survives is the one with a rule for getting back on track, so make the rule now, while you’re feeling optimistic.

Here’s mine: I never try to “catch up” by bingeing. Binge-catching-up is how reading plans die. You miss a week, you sit down to read fourteen pages in one sitting to make up for it, the session feels like punishment, and now scripture reading is associated in your brain with punishment. Instead, when I fall behind, I do one of two things. If I’m only a few days off, I just read two days’ worth for the next couple of days — four pages instead of two — and I’m home by the weekend. If I’m more than a week off, I move the goalposts: I take out my index card, redivide the remaining pages by the remaining days, and start fresh from where my bookmark actually is. The end date slips a little. Nobody is keeping score but me.

Falling behind isn’t failing. Quitting because you fell behind is failing. The bookmark doesn’t judge you; it just waits.

One more thing about the hard stretches, because there are a couple. Around the war chapters in Alma — roughly Alma 43 through 62 — some readers hit a wall of strategy and geography. My advice: keep reading, but read for the people instead of the battles. Watch Captain Moroni under pressure. Watch what happens to the two thousand stripling warriors’ families. Watch how the same events humble one group and harden another. The war chapters are a study in character wearing a military coat, and at two pages a day they pass quickly.

The Isaiah Chapters: 2 Nephi’s Speed Bump

Every beginner needs a warning label for 2 Nephi 12 through 24. Right when you’re hitting your stride — Lehi’s family has crossed the ocean, Nephi has taught his brothers, you’re feeling like a real scripture reader — the book settles into thirteen consecutive chapters quoting Isaiah, and the language shifts from story to dense, poetic prophecy. This is where my first two attempts died, and it’s where a lot of reading plans go to die. So let’s talk about it plainly.

First, know that this is normal and even Nephi knew it. He introduces these chapters by telling us his people didn’t understand Isaiah well either, and he explains why — they didn’t know the “manner of prophesying among the Jews” (2 Nephi 25:1). You’re in good company. Confusion here is not a spiritual deficiency; it’s a translation-of-a-translation problem across thousands of years.

Second, adjust your goal for these chapters. In the narrative parts of the book, my goal is to follow the story. In the Isaiah chapters, my goal shrinks to this: find one verse per sitting that says something to me. Just one. Some days it’s the famous ones — “he was wounded for our transgressions” territory in the Isaiah chapters Mosiah and Abinadi quote later, or “they shall beat their swords into plowshares” in 2 Nephi 12. Some days it’s a half-verse about the Lord remembering His covenant. I underline it, write the date in the margin, and move on with a clean conscience. I am not in those chapters to master Isaiah. I’m there to keep my appointment with the book and let a verse or two work on me.

Third, remember what’s coming. The Isaiah block ends, and 2 Nephi 25 through 33 is some of the most beloved teaching in the whole book — Nephi’s plain explanation of why he quoted Isaiah at all, the doctrine of Christ laid out in 2 Nephi 31, the promise in 2 Nephi 32 that if you press forward feasting on the words of Christ, “the words of Christ will tell you all things what ye should do.” The speed bump leads somewhere beautiful. Don’t turn around at the bump.

Keeping a Simple Reading Log

I’m not a journal-every-day person, and I’ve abandoned every elaborate scripture journal system I’ve ever attempted. What has survived, for years now, is a log so simple it’s almost embarrassing: a small notebook where each reading session gets one or two lines. Date, chapters read, and one sentence. That’s the entire system.

The one sentence can be anything. “1 Nephi 8 — noticed Lehi worried about his family even after the dream.” “2 Nephi 4 — Nephi got discouraged too, huh.” “Alma 32 — read this one twice.” Some days the sentence is a question I want to ask someone smarter than me. Some days it’s a person I thought of while reading. Once, memorably, it was “I have no idea what Isaiah is talking about but the part about the vineyard was pretty.” That counts. Everything counts.

Why bother? Three reasons. First, the log is proof of life. On days when I feel like my scripture study is going nowhere, I flip back and see months of small, faithful entries, and it changes how I feel about the whole effort. Second, the one-sentence habit forces a tiny act of reflection — I have to decide what the reading was about, which is the difference between reading words and studying. Third, the log becomes a personal index. When I want to find “that verse about the Liahona working according to faith,” I’ve got a dated trail leading right back to it.

If a notebook isn’t your style, the Gospel Library app’s notes and highlights serve the same purpose, and they sync across your devices, which the notebook definitely does not do. The medium doesn’t matter. The one sentence matters.

Your First Week, Step by Step

If you’re starting from zero, here’s exactly what I’d do in the first seven days:

• Day 1 — Set up, don’t read. Pick your timeframe (I say nine months), do the math, make your bookmark card or set up the app schedule, and choose your daily reading time. Then read just the title page and the introduction of the book itself. Notice the promise in the last paragraph of the introduction — you’ll be coming back to it.
• Days 2–3 — Meet the family. Start 1 Nephi 1 and read at your daily pace. Don’t chase insights yet. Just learn who’s who: Lehi, Sariah, the four sons. If you want the text with footnotes and study helps close at hand, the online Book of Mormon is free and works beautifully on a phone.
• Days 4–5 — Find your rhythm. Read at your chosen time, at your chosen pace, and write your one-sentence log entry each day. Notice when resistance shows up — for me it’s always the moment I pick up the book — and notice how fast it disappears once the first verse is read.
• Day 6 — Check your milestone. Compare where your bookmark is to where the card says you should be. If you’re ahead, enjoy it. If you’re behind, practice the recovery rule now, while the gap is tiny.
• Day 7 — Tell someone. Mention at church or at dinner that you started reading the Book of Mormon cover to cover. A reading plan with one witness is roughly twice as durable as a secret one, in my experience.

Reading Alongside Your Ward’s Study

One practical question I get from friends: how does a personal cover-to-cover plan fit with the Come, Follow Me curriculum the whole Church studies together? My answer: let them be two different things, and don’t try to merge them. Come, Follow Me moves slowly and topically — a chapter or two a week, with questions and family discussion built around it. Your personal plan moves steadily and linearly. When the two overlap — when your personal reading happens to hit Alma 5 the same week your ward studies it — it’s a small delight, like running into a friend on the trail. When they don’t overlap, nothing is lost. The curriculum feeds your Sundays; the plan carries your daily habit.

If doubling up feels like too much scripture in a day, there’s no shame in letting the personal plan be your only daily reading and simply living in Come, Follow Me during a year when life is full. The goal is a lasting relationship with the book, not a gold star for volume.

What Finishing Actually Feels Like

I expected to finish Moroni 10 the first time and feel triumphant. What I actually felt was quieter and better. The last chapters of the book are an ending that feels like an ending — Moroni, alone, finishing his father’s record, leaving his testimony and his father’s sermons and that famous promise, and closing the book. I remember sitting there thinking about how the whole story had been held together by people who were, most of them, just trying to be faithful in their own ordinary stretch of years. It reframed the book for me. It wasn’t a textbook I’d completed. It was a family I’d visited.

And here’s the part nobody told me: finishing made starting over easy. The second time through, the fear was gone. I knew the terrain — where the Isaiah stretch sits, where the war chapters are, where the book of Ether compresses centuries into a few pages and you have to slow down or you’ll miss the tragedy of it. The second read took me six months. The third took five. The book that once sat unread on my nightstand for years is now the one I reach for first.

That’s my real hope for you with this plan. Not that you’ll check a box, but that somewhere around page 200 you’ll stop reading a plan and start reading a book you love. The math just gets you to the door. What’s behind the door — “another testament of Jesus Christ,” as the title page says — is worth every five-minute morning it costs to get there.

This article reflects personal experience and study, not an official statement of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Scripture quotations are from the Book of Mormon; the full text is available at ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Page and chapter counts reflect the standard English edition (531 pages, 239 chapters).