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.
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.
Originally published January 2022.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
I also am hesitant to set goals about fiction reading, because I don’t know what I’ll be in the mood for and I’m doing a lot of comfort re-reading. But one year not too long ago – either 2022 or 2021 – I noticed that my reading was almost entirely fiction, so I set a goal to read one nonfiction book each month. I read mostly memoirs and travel writing, nothing too heavy, but still different. It was a pleasant change of pace.
I have found that the type of goal you describe can be helpful for me. Back in 2015, having found that I had been reading a preponderance of books by straight white men, I set myself a goal to only read books by women and members of the LGBTQ+ community for a full year. I think that too often when reading we fall back on things in our comfort zone, especially given how much choice we have, and so setting this goal for myself helped me out of my rut. For me it was a valuable experience, and forced me to broaden the range of the books I was choosing. And now, years later, my older child’s Queer Horror reading group seems to mainly be reading books I have suggested to them! (And many of which I first encountered via Tor’s site, happy to give credit where credit is due!).
I’ve definitely re-discovered my reading mojo over the years, and I actually love setting reading goals. Every New Year’s I do a survey/recap of my year (as part of my online journal) that I have a lot of fun with, and it also involves talking about goals for the year. One of those things has to do with my ‘reading resolutions’ (closest I get to a New Year’s resolution). I usually have a few of them I can bounce between throughout the year – an author I want to focus on, a particular series, something new, etc. It gives me some flexibility/spontaneity within the structure. Otherwise my TBR list is too overwhelming!
Currently I’m plowing through Juliet Marillier’s works.
I can only remember one time I set a reading goal (summer reading programs from the library don’t count – I just figured if they were offering free stuff for something I was already going to do [i.e. spend literally a third of my summer hours reading], why not take it). It was in undergrad when for the first time, it occurred to me that I could keep a list of all the books I read, and after extensive backtracking realized that I was just shy of having read a thousand books. So of course the logical response was to see if I could read another thousand and one (because obviously a round thousand would be too prosaic) before I graduated. Never mind that I was a full time student and this goal would require reading almost a book a day. All those adults on the internet talking about how it took them weeks to finish a book and how their New Years resolution was to read one book each month? Amateurs. My naivete lasted till about junior year when I lost my teenage book metabolism, and I finished my goal a year later than planned (with Echoes of Honor by David Weber, which I bought online unread, because the library was closed for COVID, and I couldn’t stand an indefinite wait to finish the series). I have since refrained from setting any goals and simply record my progress for curiosity’s sake.
The 1001 Book Blitz aside, I’ve never really thought of setting reading goals, particularly not of specific types of books (aside from trying to check out a mix of purely fun books and Books I Want to Have Read Without the Bother of Sitting Down and Reading Them so I can knock the latter off my list without burnout). At first glance, I wasn’t sure about the idea of reading a year of just women or just fill-in-the-blank, but on thinking about it, it’s kind of like immersion in another culture. If I read one book by a person of color, that’s good, but it still only gives me one perspective. By reading many books of the same classification in close succession, I begin to integrate them together into a fuller picture of the complicated tapestry that is human experience. And I can update my spreadsheet with a new color code for author background :)
1. Spreadsheets are magic.
2. … I don’t like reading goals, generally; I want to read whatever I want to read. But the cultural immersion point made by @Kyna is a really, really good one – you do get a much wider and less spotty/distorted view if you read a *lot* of something!
3. Sometimes structure can be helpful; knowing what’s up next, or having a shorter list, can prevent a lot of vacillation when one’s brain is particularly jellyfish-like (this is the case for me with to do lists for the past, eh, three years or so). That said, with reading specifically, I have less of a problem with that sort of paralysis. I tend to have more than one current book: a book that I do want to read but that will take a level of brain capacity I often don’t have, a middlingly-difficult book, and a dirt-easy book, and this takes care of some of the waffling, since I usually know which hard book is the top of my priority list by the time the previous one is completed, and the light reading ranges around at will/whim with waffling rare because I know I’ll blow through this book and then I can read that book. (plus some other books; an audiobook, maybe a print book that is of the type to savor in small bits, etc., and the next book group book to be read whenever it seems feasible and/or when the deadline is making crunchy noises; but *mainly* it is those three, ish) Anyway! I don’t seem to need structure for book choice, but I could see a framework being a significant help to people who have been having more decision fatigue in their next-book process.
I just read for the fun of it. So I don’t really see the point of keeping track to make sure I reading a variety or whatever. I do set goal and keep track on Goodreads, but that’s more for connecting to other readers than anything else.
Am I missing something?
@7 you’re missing the fun of variety, of trying new things. It’s like ordering pizza every weekend when there are other fun foods to try, or even foods that you already love but keep forgetting because ordering the same thing is just easy and has become a habit.
Personally, if I don’t remind myself to read something other than fantasy then that’s all I’ll end up reading all year, even though I also love mystery, soft scifi, and gothic horror.
I’d been having such a hard time reading anything that wasn’t online for years that I looked into goals. It didn’t really work for me, but I did find a nice community on Dreamwidth that helps you choose a book and gives you a place to talk about it. That and a Silent Book Club (no assigned reading, just a time to read) helped and I finally seem to be getting over the hump.