I've talked on this blog about how much I read each year (50 books per year, on average), and how much I'm reading concurrently (too much). That latter part comes out of a point in time last year when I borrowed a bunch of books from a friend and read a little bit of each every night for a couple of months, until I'd finished them all.
That unlocked some weird gamification gene in me, and I kept doing that for the rest of the year, but with a lot more books, and with books that were longer. I'd select 12 books, and plan on finishing four each month, the idea being that I'd read a little bit of each and focus the rest of my energy on the last, until I'd gone through all of them. And then the following quarter I'd choose 12 more and start over again.
Well, things didn't quite turn out that way. I still have a few books on the go since that period, which I've been picking away at. Others have been added to the selection and have been finished with more priority, for a number of reasons, but mostly because they were more interesting than the rest of the pile. And one of them went into the donation pile unfinished, because I realized, 200+ pages in, that it wasn't that enjoyable and I wasn't retaining anything.
This change in attitude has partly been influenced by a few things I've read or seen recently. For one thing, a lot of women say on their dating profiles that they want to read more, or to read a specific number of books per year. On the other hand, I read an piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago by a writer whose grandfather kept a house filled with books and read obsessively, a trait that he'd passed on to the rest of the family. This writer, by contrast, had decided to let go of this neurosis and just read for fun.
That appealed to me, so I decided to do the same, although I'm still stuck with the big TBR pile. But then I read another piece, this one in the Guardian (could've been CNET), by a writer who wanted to read more, and suggested doing reading challenges, including keeping a reading journal and setting reading targets on Goodreads or other sites.
All of this is kind of a long preamble to saying, I want to stop doing reading challenges, at least for the time being. My experiences for the last year or so have shown me a number of things about my reading habits, but the big takeaway is that if I'm reading for pleasure, I should just read in a relaxed way. Trying to read a bunch of books concurrently, one or two pages at a time, has the same effect as forcing myself to read a set number of pages each day to reach a self-imposed deadline. The effect being that I don't take anything in from the books.
My page-count target comes from the days when I'd borrow books from the library in London. I usually had four weeks to finish them, so I'd divide the page count by four, to get my weekly target, and then divide that by seven, to get my daily target. I'd then aim to read a little more than that target each day, so the amount I had to read would be less than the day before. And I'd try and hit specific goals by the end of each week to ensure that the following week would require fewer pages to read as well.
When I moved here and stopped going to the library so much, I kept dividing books by 28, so that I could finish them within a given month. I also, for reasons I don't really understand, did something similar with my e-books: I'd aim to read 5% of them each day, so I could finish an e-book every 20 days.
These numbers have started to feel more and more irrelevant as I've gone on. On Kindle, I've scaled my reading goal back to targeting just one e-book per month (the app keeps track of this, and I've also got a 240-week reading streak going, which I should acknowledge is pointless but I'm actually kinda proud of). With my physical books, I'm still dipping into them bit-by-bit each day, but I'm trying to resist the temptation to add more as I finish books, and eventually get to the point where I'm actively reading just one physical book and one e-book at a time.
Like the writer in that NYT piece, I've found that obsessively setting weekly and daily page targets has sucked the fun out of writing. I compare it with the period in 2018 when I was in London and working in an office. I read loads of e-books on the train to work, and a physical book in the lunch area on my hour off at noon. I had no distractions (ie I couldn't watch YouTube or Netflix in that office), so I just read and powered through an epic amount of books - and it all felt organic, because I was paying attention to the words rather than the page numbers.
This is what it comes down to: when I have a daily target to hit each night before bed, then I'm focusing more on getting to my goal than on the narrative, so I end up not taking anything in. I do myself a further disservice by trying to power through to my target page even when I'm too tired to really take in what I'm reading.
To be clear, all of what I've just said is about my own reading habits. I'm probably an uncommonly voracious reader, especially considering that most Americans read just one book per year, whereas I average close to one per week. My life circumstances are such that I can easily fit in an hour of reading on my lunch break, and another hour at bedtime. That Guardian article about reading challenges was written from the perspective of a mother trying to recapture some reading time for herself, which is completely fair enough.
But I do also think that some people who try to fit more reading into their lives are doing so because they think they "should", rather than because they want to. I appreciate that there are a lot of other distractions, like TV and video games, and I'm gradually coming to appreciate the idea that you should just do those things if they're more enjoyable. Nobody's grading us on how much we read or the quality thereof, so we should just be comfortable reading as much or as little as we like - even if that's one book per month.
I'm still probably going to be more interested in hanging out with or dating people who actually like books. But that's not set in stone: as long as they don't mind that I like to read, then we should be fine.
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