It would be really nice to be able to think about reading without thinking about all the ways reading is hard right now. This is, to be clear, not a real problem. It doesn’t even appear in tiny font on the very bottom of the universe’s list of current problems. But if you’re a reader, it feels weird to not be reading, and just about every reader I talk to lately has some version of this complaint. Time is fake. Our attention spans are shattered. What even are books?
I want to push back on this feeling. I want to turn pages, rapt. I want to find ways we can all still fall into books, if and when we have the time and even the faintest inclination to do so. And I keep wondering if, despite my wariness of them, some reading goals might help.
Here’s the entirely undeveloped theory from which I’ve been working: There are goal readers and there are random readers the way there are, among writers, so-called pantsers and plotters. If you are unfamiliar with this slightly awkward terminology, “pantsers” are the fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants writers, who figure out where they’re going as they’re getting there. Plotters make outlines and plans and know the whole story before they start writing.
Perhaps in readers this manifests as those of us who set reading goals and those of us who scoff at the notion. (I do not have clever terms for these categories; feel free to make up your own.) These goals take all kinds of forms: a simple number of books read; a range of genres; alternating new books and old; clearing out the TBR pile before adding anything new to it; reading authors from different countries and backgrounds. Sometimes goals take the form of the nefarious Goodreads Challenge, a clever bit of marketing on Goodreads’ part that ensures that whenever a user talks about the number of books they want to read in a year, they do it by invoking Goodreads’ name.
I have always been more free-range reader than goal-setter. Goals? Plans? A reading schedule? Impossible: How do you schedule moods? If you’re the kind of person who turns to books—consciously or not—for a feeling, an atmosphere, for an adventure you didn’t know you wanted to go on, then it seems impossible to plan these things. You don’t know until you read the first few pages if a book is the right one for the moment. If you’re a reader like this, you can’t simply decide that you’re going to read War and Peace next. You have to be in the War and Peace mood. It’s hard to read War and Peace when your brain and your heart are crying for Legendborn.
But I do keep a reading spreadsheet, so it’s not entirely chaos over here. I track what I’ve started reading, when I finish it, and basic info about each book that is meant to show me at a glance whether I’m reading a wide range of books, or things that are too similar. “Too similar” can mean anything: too many new books, too many books by straight white men, too many YA novels and not enough nonfiction, you name it.
A spreadsheet like this will not allow a reader to lie to themself. You can, to offer just one example, feel like you’re a person who reads widely and diversely, and then your spreadsheet will point out that last year you read a lot of Le Guin, The Expanse, The Wicked & the Divine, and all the Old Kingdom books, which adds up to a lot of white authors. Feelings, as many wise friends have reminded me, aren’t facts. The reader I feel like I am is not the reader I was last year. There is absolutely nothing wrong with all of these books—there is a lot very, very right with them—but I don’t want to get in ruts. I don’t want to read mostly white authors, or mostly male authors; I want to read way beyond that.
Buy the Book
All the Horses of Iceland
And that’s where goals can be useful: for keeping yourself on the tracks you want to be on. That track can be as simple as just reading books by women for a year. Or maybe it’s alternating classics with brand-new books, and filling out any gaps in your reading education (for several years, I ran a classics book group for exactly this purpose). You can also get really specific, and make a list of authors or genres or perspectives you want to read more of. Book Riot’s annual Read Harder challenge offers a detailed list of “tasks” for each year; for 2022 that includes “Read a book in any genre by a POC that’s about joy and not trauma” and “Read a queer retelling of a classic of the canon, fairytale, folklore, or myth,” two excellent suggestions.
I’ve always squirmed away from these challenges and goals, which can be chalked up—at least in part—to simple stubbornness and/or a lifetime wariness of goals in general. (If you are also a person who sets goals too high and then gets frustrated when you don’t reach them, hey! I feel you.) Reading goals and challenges can tiptoe up to productivity culture, which gets real toxic real fast; reading shouldn’t be about how many books you read, or how fast you read them, or how to create more content about them. They can turn art into tickyboxes, feeling more like a to-do list than a way to thoughtfully engage with perspectives and voices unlike our own. And setting reading goals can feel like time spent planning instead of doing: Why sit down and make a list of what you want to read when you could just, you know … read it?
Because you run into aggravating book moods, for one reason. And because you might wind up with a more homogenous reading list than you intended or expected, for another.
I’m still not fully sold on goals that are just a number of books (though I will certainly consider any good arguments). But when you have a list of specific goals—or even just ideas, thoughts about what you want to explore—it can be a way to narrow down the endless possibilities a reader faces. I’m really not good at giving up the power of choice. I can never leave things up to a roll of the dice, or pulling something at random from the shelf. But if I decide that this year, I want to read a science fiction novel in translation, my first Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ books, a horror novel that even a wimp can stomach, and a book about the craft of writing that’s not by a white man, then I’ve translated nebulous desires into something simpler: a decision about where my reading time goes. And maybe a bit of direction as to what to read first.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
As somebody with a lot of existential angst over my TBR list (and knowing that so much of my list includes decades old books, to say nothing of all the NEW stuff I can’t keep up with), and who does a yearly reflection on the books I’ve read and sets reading resolutions each yearh, yes.
I do like having a list so that I can keep track of things I like, and I AM giving myself more mental permission to go through and occasionally take things off, not force myself to feel like have to finish a series or an author’s body of work, etc.
But I also like to have an area of focus each yaer…picking an author or series, and generally having a plan. One of my goals this year is to finish up my read of Sharon Shinn’s works (which I’ve been putting off for awhile), and the ‘Rebellion era’ of the old Star Wars Legends EU. It helps keep things feeling manageable.
Ah, memories of the time I patted myself on the back because I knew the books I read for Bookspan were about 50/50 books by women and books by men, only to have it pointed out all of the books I reviewed that year for Romantic Times were by men.
I decided a few years ago that my Friday reviews would be of recent books by 52 different POC. I didn’t start with a list of 52 books but rather searched for books each week (so organized pantsing). What I soon discovered was that I consistently found more candidates each week than I could review, even if all five of my reviews each week drew from that list. By the end of the year my TBR was much larger than my reviewed list, so I extended it another year to catch up. Ended up even farther behind by the end of that year so I extended it again. Didn’t work that time either, but I am certain the fourth time is the charm.
The plus side of having targets is the zing when I hit them. The downside is knowing all the ones I never finished…
I set a “goodreads” challenge for overall number of books read, and smaller challenges to read “more non-fiction” (aiming for 24) and “more graphic novels” (aiming for 52), because those are areas where I buy way more than I read.
But I also have more detailed challenges within that: read 24 books that I’ve owned longer than 1 year (the “to be read” challenge); a “complete the series” challenge (for series I’ve started and have every intention of finishing and just need a kick); a “page to screen” challenge (read the book, then watch the movie based on it). Some years I do a “complete the author” challenge, although I haven’t identified one for this year.
And I set monthly mini-challenges aimed at keeping my reading diverse. POC authors for Black History Month, LGBTQIA authors for Pride Month, ditto for Asian American and Pacific Islander History Month and so on. Also, of course, “read horror in October, crime/noir in “Noir-vember,” and holiday/winter stuff (usually romances) in December.
Dude. Spreadsheets!?!? I don’t even have that kind of time, and I’m retired! But then again, it’s not my job to review books (thank goodness!) and I stopped reading what I was told to read when I graduated college. I read for enjoyment and therefore read what I like, when I like, not what I think I ought to or because it’s what everybody else is reading, or because I’ve decided I should read X hours a day. I don’t see it as a competition or “Level Up” achievement thing. I have more than enough angst in my life as it is without self-imposing more.
I average around 100 books a year. Some years I’ll read 150+ books; some years, life happens and I do good to read 80+. Yeah, I know this because I keep a list of “Books Read” by year and publish it on my social media platform of choice, but only as a way to share good reads with my fellow readers who share some of my reading tastes, and as a memory aid in case I want to reread something, or can’t remember the name of that book or that author.
The Goodreads goal is very effective marketing on their part. I find it helpful in keeping track of what I read each year as a retrospective. I don’t have goals so much as wishes: read more poetry, read more classics/literary fiction, etc. I’m interested and I buy books from these genres but I’m almost never in the mood to pick any of them up, they’re way too in the back of my mind to be actual goals. I read The Waste Land last year and that was me doing well in the poetry area, otherwise I’ve mostly been rereading epic fantasy (and most of that epic fantasy was Wheel of Time). This year, again, it’s hopes rather than goals, but some hopes are more realistic, like finishing the WoT reread, others are more vague and I don’t know if/when I’ll be in the mood to get to them.
I am very much a mood reader, probably due to the ADHD. A book cannot simply be GOOD, it has to be both RIGHT and STICKY. I need to be in a state of mind where I can take it in and it has to possess whatever ineffable quality it is that make some books adhere to my neurons so I stay with them without being distracted. As such, reading goals are thoroughly counterproductive and just make me frustrated and sad.
But, I HAVE started listing and documenting my reading. Not a spreadsheet, yet, that seems too much like work, but I have started keeping a little list in the notes app of my phone, as of last year. I think as much to fight against the brain fog and the near total destruction of my sense of time that’s come with the ongoing crisis. It’s good to have documentation. It’s good to be able to look back and go “this year did happen. There was a sequence of events, and experiences.” I read Piranesi in the spring (that was THIS spring?) I read This is How You Lose the Time War in the summer (signed out the ebook and the audiobook both at once and switched back and forth whenever my brain started losing focus, listening while restless hands busied themselves, looking when ears stopped working), read Princess Floralinda and the Forty Flight Tower in December (while volunteering at a Christmas event and struggling with a tooth complaint, reading to distract myself between shifts while wearing a knit cap with little woollen elf ears). I can look at my list and see the year as it unfolded, and remember it through the stories I took in.
Making goals for going forward probably won’t work for me, but keeping a record for looking backward, that’s been invaluable.
All good points. I’ve found that the only way to motivate myself to read more (and more diversely) is to use my library and treat its deadlines deadly seriously. I’m a slow reader, so it’s a challenge, but it has worked for me.
I am still puzzled by how many people seem to have trouble reading lately: what are you doing instead? I read all day for work (scholarly articles) and then read more in the evening, either on my commute (if I’m not working at home) or before bed, or both. And I still feel like I should be reading even more. Writing about what I read has been more difficult for me since COVID, though.
I also like keeping lists of books I’ve read (first in a Notepad file, then LIbraryThing, then the leviathan that is Goodreads); it’s fun to look at them years later and remember what I was doing at the time.
I am not interested in reading for pleasure a list of books with specific categories of authors or themes. I have certain interests of the moment , but I want the freedom to add books that catch my attention in the bookstore, library, or book reviews. I would like to try reading the Shah-Nameh someday, but I have to be in the mood for a door-stopper about ancient Persian heroes. It’s not going to happen when I have a craving for short SFF. My one reading goal is to finish a novel in French sometime in the next few months, because I am studying French and need the practice. Studying a new language really cuts into reading for pleasure.
I haven’t done the GR challenge in years, not because I don’t think a target is good but because it used my excessive reading at a time when I was unemployed/depressed as a way to shame my friends. Since then, I have tried to read fewer books but be more targeted – so last year around Halloween I wanted to read a lot of horror, and then specifically vampires, and within that tried to find books by POC and women. That’s easy enough when it’s vampires; I also wanted to look into the context of the Greek revolution and social history around it, and finding niche, affordable books by anyone other than white men can be tricky…
I read every day. I read what I am in the mood for, toggling between Fantasy, Sci fi, Historical Fiction, Horror, Adventure and occasional straight History. Cover art influences my choices as do writers I have already read. I read summaries and reviews. One thing I do not do is pay attention to race, color, creed, sex, or religion of the author. Anyone can write a book I enjoy, but I’m not going to SEEK out a different demographic ‘just because’. Write a story that interests me and I will read it. Period. (ok, maybe I’ll buy it and put it on my TBR shelf…but you know what I mean..)