The first time I felt the tiniest spark of competition where books and reading are concerned, I was probably eight years old, thrilled to bits by a librarian’s instruction to put a gold star inside a construction paper folder—one for every fairy tale I read. There were at least two long rows of stars by the time I was done. I was only competing with myself: I wanted as many stars as I could possibly get, and given my love for fairy tales, this wasn’t particularly difficult.
But lately—and by lately I mean the last decade, give or take a few years—I’ve noticed a different sense of competition about reading. And competition isn’t even exactly the right word; it’s not like people are jumping online to yell about being first to finish the next Brandon Sanderson tome. (If they are, don’t tell me.) But there’s no word that means exactly what I see and feel. It’s a combination of obligation, social performance, genuine curiosity, love of books, and a desire to be involved, plus a dollop of early-adopterism and cheerleading.
All of these things are good, in balance. But they’re also easy to knock out of balance, shifting the vibe of talking about books online from “this thing I want to do” to “this thing we wind up feeling like we have to keep up with.”
Reading itself should be productive, in the sense that it produces ideas and feelings and thoughts and empathy and a lot of other things, too, across the whole range of human experience. The kind of productivity I mean is the quantifying kind, the kind that wants to get to a certain number of books read, or tick all the bingo boxes, or simply read more books than someone else did. Sometimes it arises in the form of a complaint: “Ugh, I’m so behind on my Goodreads challenge.”
For one thing, this is just a branded way of saying “I’m not reading as much lately as I’d like to be.” This is Goodreads inserting itself into your reading life and reshaping the way you talk about books. But it’s also more than that. It’s turning reading into a task, a tickybox, a number of pages or books. It’s setting a productivity framework around something that doesn’t need it. Yes, you set your own goals, but even if you’re entirely self-directed and pay no attention to the norms or the huge numbers of books other people read, some of us aren’t quite so independent. Those numbers influence people. They make reading very fast, tearing through book after book, seem like the norm.
If you read slowly, that’s okay. If you read very few books, that’s okay too. The secret truth is that there is absolutely no reason to care how many books you read in a year, unless you like stats and numbers and tracking things and in that case, might I suggest a spreadsheet and doing your own tracking, far from the Goodreads crowd.
About a decade ago, I had only just discovered that a person could stumble into rooms where people hung out, discussing books. They were also discussing authors and gossip and how bad the box wine was and how long the subway ride home would be, but they were there because of books, because these rooms were bookstores during author events. I had moved back to New York, which had a lot more bookish events than the college town where I’d been living. I got myself a bookstore job and became part of the book ecosystem, delighting in access to galleys and trying to find just the right book for customers.
It was a world I had not expected to find myself in, and I loved it. I loved the conversations and the enthusiasm and the lit gossip and the people, and I loved feeling like part of it. But there was a weird side to it, sometimes. There could be a sense of just having to hold opinions about certain books or authors, or having to have already read new books. And then the weirdest thing happened: I found myself in a situation where I simply did not want to talk about books. At all.
This was an extremely strange experience, anathema to everything I’d ever felt where books were concerned. But in the basement of a bookstore, a friend’s friend asked, an intense gleam in their eye, “So, Molly, what have you read lately?”
It sounds like an innocent question, but it came with a pile of expectations. This person kept up with everything. This person wanted to know what they could tick off the list with me. Had I read Big Book X? Had I gotten my hands on an advance copy of Massive Novel Y? Did I have opinions about the books a person in my job “ought” to have opinions on?
I did not, and what’s more, in that moment, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to talk about what I’d been reading in the way this person wanted me to respond. I suddenly wanted to hold my cards, and my books, extremely close to the chest. Reading felt gamified, like a thing where you went down a list of titles and got points for which ones you’d read. This was no longer gold stars inside a folder. This was something else entirely.
This vibe has crept into so much online book discourse. People stress about not having time to read—a fair complaint, but one that has a different tone when the subtext (or text!) is “I’m getting behind.” Behind on what, and to whom? Who is served by all this stress, by reading challenges and goals and lists and shelfies and book hauls? What is it for? What are we getting out of it? What difference does it make if you read a book that came out last week or one that came out last century?
If these things bring you joy, by all means: continue. If you just don’t even notice them: Bless you, I envy that ease! But if, like me, you find both that you can’t ignore the social-media side of reading and find it sometimes overwhelming, and depressing, and makes you feel like there’s a right and a wrong way to read a book, please: Give yourself space. Step away from the internet. Ignore the websites that want you to rate and review art like it’s a toothbrush or a new pair of sneakers. Don’t even keep a list of books read, if you don’t want to. What we get from reading is not quantifiable, not a statistic to earn or an item to collect. It’s an experience, a process, an education, a gift. You will get something out of it whether you read 10 books a year or 100. And no one has to know, either way.
Something very similar happened to me in my record store days. I loved music; a huge, wide swath of many different kinds of music both new and old and I listened to and read about music an awful lot. Unfortunately both record store employees and customers love to talk way too much about music and get way, way to invested in their opinions and in keeping up with new releases. This was also at the peak of the CD boom when (much as is happening now with books) there was just too much stuff being released and just as the publishers have discovered, a lot of records were being perpetually rereleased with “bonus” content to try and squeeze every last penny from the fans’ fingers.
The internet made it even worse with sites such as Pitchfork feeding off of the insidious need many music fans felt at that time to be hip to the newest thing 15 seconds before anyone else. Eventually I had to step away from it all and for almost two years couldn’t listen to music which was a once inconceivable thought to me. To this day I refuse to discuss music with anyone and while my love of music has returned it is entirely my own weird little thing I don’t share with anyone.
Being a book geek from an even earlier age and way too much a lover of serendipitous used bookstore finds I’ve never felt the need for a book readers community let alone staying current with new releases. I can’t imagine investing the time or interest in “keeping up.” I know I’m in the minority but being an introvert who has always been out of step with fads and fashions with no interest in social media outside of the comments sections of a few websites I’ve dodged this bullet completely. I do empathize though and hope that you come to something like the private peace that I have. I think I know what you are going through although I suspect that you were more tuned in than I ever was or could be. Being a contented loner does have its perks. Best wishes.
I’ve been reading since I was a small child and have never kept a log of what I read in a year… until this year, and I gotta say… it’s a bit uncomfortable, like I’m feeding that social obligation/performance. Which is totally inaccurate; it’s a list for me, I haven’t show it to anybody else. I started it because I’ve been in several book clubs for a couple of years now, and I got curious about what my ratio of book club books to books for me is. (So far: overwhelmingly books for me, further evidence that I’m not doing this for social performance.)
Perhaps I’ve been fortunate; it’s only since I’ve joined book clubs that I’ve felt that need to try and “keep up” – but generally it’s easily ignored, probably because it’s backed by long habit of reading for myself.
In a way Goodreads and Tor.com together helped encourage me to reenergize my love of reading books. Along with the confluence of buying a house again (bookshelves of books removed from boxes ad new books!), COVID, and wonderful new bookstores. Tor reminded me of the books that I hadn’t read. Including Armor which my cousin had loaned me when I was young and I did not read and read and return until I was old. Talk about guilt. And Goodreads has helped me to track and remember and provided a fun way to reference. And more ways to broaden my horizons both for new books and older books that I had forgotten about it or never realized existed.
I had never felt forced to read xxxx books a year or two rate/review every book. But it can be fun when the mood moves me and provides some perspective too.
Thank you for writing this, I’m thoroughly enjoying a lighthearted fantasy series from 12 years ago and at the same time I can feel the social media hype to all these new works. I didn’t classify it as a feeling of getting behind but I think it’s the social media competitive vibe you mention here. Lets just enjoy what we’re reading whenever and whatever it is.
Goodreads is a toxic environment owned and operated by Amazon in their customary manner, combining surveillance and manipulation, so I’ll pass on that. But I follow writers (and readers) on Mastodon and the discussions are interesting. On April 1 someone posted “I just finished a book! It was good! I recommend it!”
So much head nodding here. There are things I used to love about Goodreads, but the reading goals weren’t one of them, and having people comment on what I was reading and why became increasingly uncomfortable. I shifted to a private reading log database in 2021 and have to say that it has made reading so much more enjoyable to keep it mostly private. I’m still reading around the same number of books that I did back in reading challenge days, but I feel a whole lot less guilty about re-reads than I used to. If I want to read a favorite for the third time in a single calendar year, it’s between me and no one else.
This is why, although I have thousands of ebooks — majority on my ‘to be read’ list, I do not use goodreads. I look at the “Reader’s Insights” part of the kindle app but just for fun.
Reading books is as much re-reading favorites as reading new books and that is often discounted.
Reading is fun — let’s just keep it that way.
I will admit to noticing this sort of trend. In part, I have to wonder if Ms. Templeton’s experience is somewhat due to having a bookstore job. I know even though that I do something I enjoy, my relationship to it changes when not at work. That said, that gamification of a hobby definitely is apparent when you go through places like the /r/fantasy and /r/printsf with their bingo cards and lists and such. I made a Goodreads account long ago when they first started because I liked the idea of bar code scanning everything I had, but after I did that, I guess I didn’t fall into the community. Seems like that may have been a good thing in retrospect.
I figure I like the things I like. I enjoy being thoughtful in appraising what I read, trying to be as generous as I can, just laughing when I can’t even do that, and keep my “group read” down to just the one book of a month for the local book club. Anything more than that feels like it’d interfere with pursuing the authors and books that I want to pursue, or stumbling across an author I’d not read.
Communities are good for swapping ideas, but social standing and gaming these hobbies tends to turn it into work!
I very much appreciate this article. I’m not on Goodreads, but I’m in various SFF-related groups on Facebook. I usually enjoy the discussion, but occasionally, when people are discussing various well-known writers, I feel apologetic about not having read various classics of the genre (Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Left Hand of Darkness, etc.) Then I have to remind myself that I’m not taking a course with assigned reading.
It’s me, hi, I’m the problem. It’s me.
I set goals for myself including a daily reading goal. I set monthly goals and yearly goals. I join the readathons and tick the boxes. But, I love it. I love the hunt of finding that book that has the right color, image, page count etc to fit the prompt.
That said, I hope I never make anyone else feel like how they read, or what they read, is wrong. Reading is individual. It’s personal. Read what and how makes you happy. One book a year? Slay. 100 books a month? I’m jealous of your free time.
I enjoyed Goodreads when it first came out. Now it sometimes reminds me of a high school pep rally and slam book combined.
I’ve been on goodreads since before Amazon bought it, and stubbornly refused to flee despite being generally comfortable with leaving bad spaces (see: twitter). I can understand why GR can be a very difficult space for authors, and there are certainly some bad actors on there, but I don’t think of it as toxic, at least not the niche I’ve carved out for myself there (participating in several SFF reading groups). I really started to dive into it when I started reading a lot more after a fallow period, and found I didn’t have anyone to talk to as I was discovering a deep love of SFF, so went there for lack of other spaces to find community. It’s not perfect but I did find some.
But yes, I often find myself careening someone too far into the reading-as-rat-race mentality and have to pull myself back. I have a whole ecosystem of tracking spreadsheets, but I really enjoy doing it, but my reading goal has become focused around limiting my ambitions: I’ve capped myself at a monthly page count, split into various goals, to keep myself from feeling overwhelmed by All That’s Out There and just focusing on what I can handle and enjoying what I do choose to spend time with.
Well said, the last paragraph is beautiful.