Trigger warning: there are no photos in this post.
I have a complicated relationship with Goodreads. Yes, it’s a nice way to make lists of books that I will emphatically refuse to acknowledge I’ll never read. It’s also a great way to see what other people who I currently know or previously knew are reading. It affords me the opportunity to think: Hm. That’s a surprise or yeah, that figures. I’m sure most of you are above that sort of thing.
I don’t write reviews anymore, mostly because I peaked early with one of my very first book reviews. I made a one or two sentence comment about wishing there was a reality TV show in which a particular celebrity was made to read a particular book (fantasies about television shows and performance art installations that would never be funded are common for me).
This review has been so successful—leading me at times to wonder if maybe this would make excellent TV— that every now and then, years later, a stranger likes the comment. Like everyone on social media, when I get a like, I reconsider my entire life path. Producer. Show-runner. It’s too much pressure. By the time the likes got to a total of around 8 or 9, I realized I probably couldn’t top this success. Even the writers of Mad Men knew when to quit! So, I retired from the role of Goodreads book critic. Still, it’s not the standard social media fare that inspires my conflicted feelings about the site. Likes, comments, and amateur literary crit are all fine with me, it’s those damn goals.
What Qualifies As Reading?
When you make the transition from Creeper spying on people’s reading choices or Aspirational List Maker to the boastful position of Goal Setter, the waters get a little murky.
At first, it seems simple. Let’s say your screen name is Book Scooter. That name sucks, I hope that’s not your screen name. How about Emperor Bookington the 42nd to the 3rd power! Now that’s a name! Certainly worthy of the delusions of grandeur required to announce your plans to break Goodreads (and maybe the internet itself) by reading 365 books in 2025.
But now you’ve got a problem your highness. What constitutes reading? Are you allowed to read with your ears? Or does the simple fact that this is both potentially pleasurable and time-saving strike it from the purity litmus of suffering required for bragging rights? Let’s say you come down resolutely on this issue. No, mine royal ears will NOT take in literary rambling.’Tis only my eyes that shall read, so sayeth the Emperor!
But what about pages? Does a forty-page book of poetry have an equal status to Thomas Mann’s 700 pages of Magic Mountain? Come on Bookington, we all played the chapter book game in grade school to get our personal pan pizza certificates. The game is up!
Maybe this doesn’t concern you. Maybe you take a broad general view of the whole thing and accept that long and short books will average out and these details are for mere reading mortals who will only manage 12 or fewer tomes across this coming calendar. What if you don’t finish the book? How many skipped chapters nullifies your read? And what about stuck together pages or reading while drowsy or when your mind wanders because well this part or that part of the book is just a tad over written and un-necessary. I mean did no one have an editor in the 19th century?
Face it: your kingdom may not be based on lies exactly, but certainly there’s a thick layer of gloss obscuring the details. Nevertheless, isn’t the point personal satisfaction? congratulations? achievement?
Reading Goals or Challenges Are Nice, but Why Are You Reading?
Maybe you’re reading because it’s fun! Alright Emperor Bookington the 42nd to the 3rd power, you’re in it for the random and unfocused enjoyment of it all. I’d tell you to move on to a different website now because I absolutely can’t relate to that as a motivation for anything, but if fun is your game, you’ve probably already stopped reading this blog and now anyone still reading is having the uncomfortably awkward experience of reading my words to some other reader who isn’t even here.
Sorry about that! I didn’t realize you were still here. You’re probably, like me, wondering why you read too! Sure you might have page count goals or book number goals, but that isn’t really the why. As the year comes to a close, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own habits of reading and how they form a kind of equation that’s needled its way into my subconscious bringing with it a lot of guilt and judgement (both for me and for the written word).
As a kid, I walked the aisles of libraries and bookstores grabbing volumes with interesting artwork or exciting titles — this is probably why the algorithmic uniformity of titling that has all but overtaken the titles of articles and nonfiction works fills me with such profound boredom. I read randomly and unsystematically and my goal was never to master a topic or elevate my standing in a field of knowledge. In fact, I don’t know that I had a goal in that SMART goals, end of the year performance assessment, culture of self-improvement, list making and checking framework that is so much a part of nearly every aspect of American life these days.
I just read stuff and mused about connections and necessarily I spent less time concerned with the arguments of experts and more time building my own narratives about the organization of the world and my place in it. I was a cosmological reader, and I think to some degree most children are. They have to be. This year, my reading goal or the intent behind my reading is to regain some of this control over the construction of my inner world through a less systematic and more organic reading which I’ll talk more about in future posts. Oh, and I will be beating Emperor Bookington’s book count!