Are reading goals ruining the joy of reading?

Every January, the same ritual begins.

We all do it. Me included.

As readers, we set ambitious goals. Fifty books. One hundred books. One book a week. That's obviously nothing to some people who seem to announce they've read a dozen, if not twenty, books in a month.

I have no idea how they do that, but that's probably another post.

Some readers swear by colour-coded spreadsheets. Goodreads challenges are launched. Bookstagram fills with beautifully designed trackers, while BookTok celebrates another towering pile of finished novels.

On the surface, this seems like something to celebrate. After all, encouraging people to read more can only be a good thing.

But is it really?

Lately, I've found myself wondering whether we've quietly turned reading into another productivity exercise. Instead of escaping the endless pressure to achieve, we've brought that same pressure into one of the few places that was supposed to offer refuge.

Reading has become something to optimise.

When reading becomes another target

Goals aren't inherently bad. In fact, they can be incredibly motivating.

A reading challenge might encourage someone to rediscover books after years away from them. It might help establish a habit or inspire someone to finally tackle that intimidating classic gathering dust on the shelf.

The problem begins when the goal becomes more important than the experience.

If you've ever found yourself choosing a shorter novel because it helps your annual target, skimming passages simply to move on, or feeling guilty because you've spent a week with one beautifully written book instead of finishing three, then the numbers may have started to dictate the experience.

Reading stops being an encounter with another mind and starts feeling suspiciously like ticking off a to-do list.

The culture of constant consumption

Social media has amplified this shift.

Every week brings another haul, another wrap-up, another list of thirty books read in a month. Algorithms reward volume because there is always something new to talk about.

The message isn't explicit, but it's easy to absorb.

Read more.

Read faster.

Read what's trending.

Move on to the next one.

There is nothing wrong with reading widely, but there is something unsettling about the feeling that books have become content to consume rather than worlds to inhabit.

Sometimes it feels as though we've confused finishing a book with experiencing it.

The books that refuse to be rushed

Some novels simply demand patience.

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall doesn't reveal itself in a single sitting. Neither does George Eliot's Middlemarch, Toni Morrison's Beloved or Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. They ask us to slow down, reread paragraphs and occasionally sit with uncertainty.

Those moments can feel frustrating if we're measuring success by pages completed.

Yet they are often the moments we remember years later.

The books that change us rarely announce their arrival. They seep into our thinking gradually, sometimes long after we've closed the cover.

The forgotten pleasure of rereading

Perhaps the greatest casualty of reading goals is rereading.

There is a strange guilt attached to returning to a familiar novel when hundreds of unread books are waiting.

Yet rereading reveals something remarkable. The book hasn't changed, but we have.

A novel read at twenty speaks differently at forty. Characters we once dismissed become sympathetic. Ideas that seemed insignificant suddenly become central.

Reading is not simply discovering new books. It is discovering new versions of ourselves through books we thought we already knew.

No annual challenge captures that.

Reading is not a competition

There will always be someone who has read more.

Someone with colour-coded shelves, immaculate reading journals and astonishing yearly totals.

None of that tells us whether a book mattered.

Literature has never been about collecting titles. It has always been about curiosity, empathy and conversation. The richest reading lives are rarely measured by quantity alone.

Sometimes a single novel can stay with us for decades.

Sometimes twenty books blur into one.

A quieter way to read

Perhaps the most radical thing a reader can do today is slow down.

Read the difficult novel.

Pause to admire the sentence.

Return to an old favourite.

Abandon the book that isn't working.

Forget the numbers.

Because the point of reading has never been to complete as many books as possible.

It has always been to let a few remarkable books quietly complete something in us.