Why do we make yearly reading goals?
I tried to read 60 books in 2021. I failed. It doesn't really matter.
About five or six years ago, I found myself spending the waning hours of December 31 speed-reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was my first time reading Marquez, and I had found it to be a pretty spellbinding experience—one that had taken me the better part of a month as I savored the 450-page novel over my semester break. But with mere hours left in the year and guests scheduled to soon arrive, I found myself almost skimming the book’s final pages. I was way short of my yearly reading goal, after all, and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to add one more to the list before the clock struck midnight.
In the middle part of the 2010s—coinciding, I feel compelled to note, with my graduate school years—I was fanatical about setting reading goals. In 2013, I was determined to read 55 books. (I read 53). In both 2014 and 2015, I set my sights on 100 books. (I read 83 and 71, respectively.) Looking back, I’m glad I kept meticulous lists of what I read and when. But my motives for setting such ambitious reading goals during those years were mostly bad. Namely: I wanted to finish a lot of books so that I could say that I finished a lot of books. Most of all, I seemed to want to cultivate a reputation for proficiency. No one was going to say I wasted my grad school years on beer pong, pedagogy and Derrida.
In fairness to myself, I’ve always felt the pangs of impostor syndrome urging me to make up for lost time. I didn’t start reading contemporary fiction until I took my first creative writing course during my third year of college. I didn’t start writing fiction until the fall of my fourth year. One calendar year later, I was applying to MFA programs. One calendar year after that, I was 23 years old and sitting in a graduate workshop full of writers who were not only talented but also well-read. I had good reason to feel fanatical about my quest to catch up.
The logic behind setting a reading goal is sound. Obviously. If your resolution is to “read more books,” it’s almost indisputably helpful to work toward a specific number. Even more helpful to break that down by month, even more helpful to project in advance which books you plan to tackle.
The question that I forgot during those grad school years—and that I make sure to place front of mind now—is Why? As in, why try to contort this magical experience into another “to-do” list?
When I look back at those mid-2010s list, they look like a library of literary fiction on shuffle. I can of course pick out books that were seminal in shaping my understanding of writing and the world around me. But if there’s a story being told by those lists, it’s one of desperation. In my rush to check boxes, I retained very little from many of those reading experiences.
It was a time of discovery, you might say if you were feeling generous. But at that point in my life most every writer was new to me, and so when it came time to move from one number to the next, I would simply pluck an unread book from my shelf, or any cover that caught my eye at the store or library. Someone to read so that I could say I’d read them. It was perhaps because my process was so random, somehow lazy despite my absurd dedication to keeping the log, that I often did such a poor job of staying on track and meeting my incredibly specific goal of “reading more books so that I could brag about all the books I’d read.”
My lists in recent years haven’t been quite so superficial, but they also haven’t been impressive. My focus—my bandwidth—has waned. Reading with purpose is all-the-more important for me now that I’ve landed on a career that consists, in one form or another, of sitting at my desk and reading. For those of us who work in publishing, it’s difficult to even decide which books should count on our reading lists. How do I account for the hundreds of pages I’ve read that haven’t yet made their way between the covers of a printed book? Do first pass pages count? Do I have to wait until the book is out in galleys to brag about it on Twitter? The real challenge for a person whose life and business is wrapped up in books is, of course, finding the time and dedication to crack one open purely for fun.
All this to say: I no longer keep a list simply to say I read X number of books in a year. I do it because it now takes such a stubborn tenacity to guard that reading time, I’d be completely lost without a list.
In 2021 I set a goal of reading 60 books, broken down into five books per month. It was a number, good as any. I only ended up reading 48 (not counting unpublished manuscripts, or eventual books that I only read in manuscript form). More important than the random number I chose, though, was the mantra behind it: Follow the thread.
I didn’t pluck random books from my unread pile or surf the library “new releases” counter. Instead, I became something like a walking, talking comp title section. In the past, whenever I felt a fleeting curiosity about a topic, I might have let it pass, perhaps jotting a few book titles on a soon-to-be lost napkin before sifting through my bookshelf for another chapbook or short poetry collection I could finish quickly and add to my list.
Instead, this year I let my to-read pile grow high. Whenever I became curious about a topic, or when a client or colleague mentioned a book that piqued my interest, I ordered it from my local library and and read it immediately. I made it a point to become obsessive, to cut back on the scrolling and Wikipedia glancing that had given me so much fleeting, superficial knowledge over the years and instead unapologetically chase the topics that interested me in the moment. To engage with those topics more earnestly and purposefully. It was random and yet focused, scattered and yet intentional. It required letting whatever arbitrary wall I might have been keeeping up between “reading for pleasure” and “reading for work” crumble. I just followed the thread.
As a result, while my 2021 list would definitely look strange to an outsider, to me it looks anything but. I can trace my efforts to better understand the always-fluctuating, poorly defined and mostly arbitrary lines separating commercial fiction from upmarket fiction from so-called literary fiction. (FWIW, I loved Raven Leilani’s Luster but Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half was not for me. Tana French’s The Searcher…actually really good!) I’ve got my own take on this latest wave of online and Millennial novels, from Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This (excellent!) to Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (mixed feelings, but I’m glad I read it) to Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? [redacted].
I can see how I’ve grappled with important questions about how to live, function, and think about the full scope of my life—from reading Elizabeth Segran’s The Rocket Years and Meg Jay’s The Defining Decade at age 31 to reading, skimming and/or occasionally rolling my eyes at books like Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. And I can see myself connecting historical dots through a handful of incredible works that demanded my attention over the last two months of the year: Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain and Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child.
In 2021, for the first time in what feels like a long time, I read intentionally, in a way that allows me to chart in retrospect my own personal, professional and creative growth across a roller coaster of a year. If I could offer any advice to my mid-2010s self, and to anyone who might be contemplating setting some reading goals for the new year, it would be this: Don’t just set a number. Also set a mantra, or a theme.
Maybe this is the year you want to catch up on the short story collection, or the thriller genre. Maybe you want to read books from as many different countries as you can. Maybe this the year you really hammer down on books that invite readers to re-examine the past.
Or, maybe you find yourself with a different obsession, a different tantalizing wormhole just about every week, or month. In the past, you might have waved it off or been satisfied with some late-night Youtube research. But maybe this is the year you just follow the thread.