For one virtuous, ambitious month in 2016, I logged each book I read in a journal, hand-wrote a few hundred words of reflection (from one entry: “Felt a bit Canlitty, in that it set itself narrow parameters”), and assigned each book a rating out of ten, down to a single decimal point. At that point, I was in grad school. I began the journal after the semester ended in April, when I finally had time to read for pleasure again. (I was also trying to impress the man I’d recently started seeing, an inveterate note taker who keeps a handwritten list of what he reads.) Ultimately, I moved away from such lengthy annotations, because they encouraged me to nitpick for flaws—case in point, “a bit Canlitty.” But the impulse to keep a list remains.
The urge to track our reading habits is never so strong as it is near the turn of the year, when cultural forces press us to revise ourselves. Like the things we eat or the ways we move our bodies, the books we consume get talked about as yet another avenue for self-improvement. We look back on how many we got through, what gave pleasure, and what incurred disappointment. But with the proliferation of apps and tools that record our reading has come the question of whether all this self-surveillance might harm more than it helps.
Websites and apps like the StoryGraph and LibraryThing invite readers to sign up to track and discuss books and get personalized algorithmic recommendations. And, of course, that lumbering old dinosaur, Goodreads, which, for all its drawbacks, I have been using as an annual tracking tool since 2013. (When I say I’m “on the apps,” these are the ones I mean.) Orbiting around these platforms is a miasma of content, like “22 Short Books to Help You Reach Your Reading Goal Before 2024 Ends” and “16 Short Books to Knock Out Your Reading Challenge” (so violent!).
A 2023 article in Book Riot, authored by a writer who began with a simple spreadsheet that grew more complicated and who then later shifted to Goodreads, asks whether monitoring one’s reading inherently makes the activity less enjoyable. The relevant mechanism on Goodreads, which explicitly calls itself a challenge, provokes its own specific brand of unease. Users are invited to set a numerical goal at the start of the year, and then the progress bar inches forward (or doesn’t). On the site’s help forum, users have asked whether there’s a way they can disable the widget—there isn’t—because the challenge “gives them anxiety.” One Reddit user even confesses that the spectre of it shapes the choices they make when buying books. They can’t buy the lengthy tomes they actually want to read, because “the longer [they] spend on a book, the more stressed out [they] become” about falling behind on the challenge. The affect summoned by books, the mere idea of them, is not the pleasure of the text but the panic of the progress bar.
This strikes me as moderately sad and extremely ridiculous. While it’s true that tracking a habit of any kind risks annexing the pursuit to something more like work, such fears—that the problem is goal setting itself rather than, I don’t know, the way tech platforms prey on our attention—are overblown. These reader concerns are not invalid; I am sympathetic to anyone who questions the pervasive bent toward gamifying everything. But in a number of pursuits, tracking your progress or output is also a basic precondition for development. Asking if you want to set a goal, or heighten it, is not an automatic threat. It’s not even Duolingo owl–level emotional blackmail.
The source of the anxiety goes deeper. Tracking one’s reading is not the cause but a symptom of a culture insistent on assigning extrinsic value to books. This transcends the cycle of the annual resolution. Prevalent in the discourse around literature is the idea that we should read because doing so would let us siphon out some functional value. That reading more books will make us more empathetic. Smarter. More tolerant. This kind of thinking can produce some bizarre habits. Once, at a work dinner, I remember an executive gushing about an app that saved her time and effort by taking her e-books and turning them into slide decks. (The table of mostly literary people vibrated with a collective shudder.) In another, tiresome example of this obsession with extraction, 2020 saw an explosion of reading lists that promised to turn the readers of such books “antiracist.” These listicles hawked books by Black writers as purveyors of an educational service, despite the fact that the improvement of white readers was mostly irrelevant to what many of those books were doing. They were just written by Black people. What gets erased in this quest for digestibility, of course, is the book itself, the craft and labour that brought it into being, and the experience it’s actually trying to provide. It’s the logic of the progress bar all over again.
The reading challenge might seem like a natural vehicle for moral improvement—this can fix me is, after all, the implicit siren song of many lists. But it’s entirely possible, and moreover extremely valuable, to gather data without turning it into self-improvement or a chore. I’d venture that doing so can even make you a better reader.
I still set a goal at the start of the year, but a modest one; the number isn’t the point, the titles are. Sure, I get a little frisson of pleasure as I watch my bar inch forward, but that’s just a by-product. The real payoff comes at the end of the year, in a tradition developed with my husband, that note taker and list maker. Then, I take a look at the totality of the books I read—all recorded, helpfully, in the challenge widget on the aforementioned website of dubious functionality—and run it through my own analysis. What were the best ten? In what order? (This is very difficult.) What was the breakdown by genre, or by writers’ race and gender? (This doesn’t turn into anything prescriptive, but I do like to know.) From this data, I assess how “good” the year in reading was, subjectively. A disproportionate ease in choosing the top ten, for example, would suggest a significant enjoyment gap. A difficulty in both choosing and ordering them is the sign of a great reading year.
I suspect all of this sounds more intense than it is in practice. My goal, in breaking the list down in these ways, is not to read more. It’s to get a keener sense of my own tastes as a reader and how to both indulge and challenge them more satisfyingly and more often. It’s a way of pushing back against the prescriptions of various algorithms and cultural drifts to instead refine my own sonar for what brings me pleasure. Often, I use these lists to formulate a series of open-ended prompts for the fresh calendar. Goals like: more books published earlier than this year. Or: Anna Karenina, finally. Or the most important one of all: more books you actually want to read.
