Should you set reading goals?

Did you set a goal to read a certain number of books in 2024, and if you did, how are you getting on? For this week’s newsletter, I delved into the online world of reading challenges and book-tracking apps, looking at whether setting ambitious targets and sharing our progress with others enhances our experience of reading, or makes it seem like a chore. And the writer Xan Brooks shares what he’s been reading this summer. First up though, it’s this week’s top features and interviews.

If you’re anything like me and enjoy both reading and setting unrealistic new year resolutions, you have probably experienced a certain type of panic around this time of year: the realisation that you’re not on target, and that catching up will be a tall order.

The affliction is only worsened by venturing into online book communities, where posts such as “How I read 200 books a year” are sure to induce a sort of literary inferiority complex.

Despite this, I continue to set a yearly goal and track my progress along with many others – more than 8 million people have joined the Goodreads Reading Challenge in 2024, a record year for the site. Participants most commonly set goals of between 11 and 25 books, or around one or two books a month.

Other reading trackers have been popping up as an alternative to Goodreads, an Amazon subsidiary, for some time – I use StoryGraph, which gives you fun charts based on data about the top genres and “moods” you read. And this week, London Libraries launched ReadOn, an app inspired by the Couch to 5k fitness plan to help users make reading a habit.

ReadOn’s flagship feature allows you to track your time spent reading, rather than the number of books read. The pace at which you read varies, and “different book genres affect how long it takes to finish a book,” said Rachel Levy, who is the head of Barbican & Community Libraries and led the project. “The decision to go with time logged was to encourage a longer-term reading habit of 10, 20, 30 minutes of reading a day rather than, say, a book a week.”

Focusing on hitting a certain number of books “brings an unnecessary pressure to reading books that feels inane” said Sunny Lu, who gives book recommendations on the YouTube channel a sunny book nook. “But being able to accomplish goals you set for yourself is always fulfilling”.

One obvious benefit of tracking your reading on sites such as Goodreads or StoryGraph is having a record of books you’ve finished, and making this publicly available means that friends can see what you’re enjoying.

Goodreads said that users find its challenges motivating. However, telling the world how many books you’re getting through could set up some odd incentives: you may be tempted to pick books that are shorter or plough on with a book you’re not enjoying just to add another to your yearly total. It could encourage you to speed through books rather than savouring them.

Suzanne Skyvara, VP of marketing and editorial at Goodreads, said that the company wants its reading challenge to be “helpful and fun”. If “life throws you some unexpected challenges, it’s totally OK to adjust your goal”.

On the social media communities we’ve come to call BookTok, BookTube and Bookstagram, it can often feel as though everybody else is reading more. Several book influencers who spoke to Bookmarks said that they are moving away from numerical goals towards more holistic reading ambitions.

Ebony Kenae, who posts poetry and reviews on Instagram and YouTube, said that while she used to aim for 50 books a year, she now sets a goal of just one.“Focusing on meeting my goal would cause me stress and harmed my love for reading, especially with the added pressures to read frequently and often as a content creator.”

Eric Karl Anderson, who posts book content on YouTube, doesn’t set goals “around completing any particular number of books” in a month or year. “However, I do aspire to read a certain number of classic books or modern classics to get to some of that backlist of titles I’ve always meant to read – especially if there is a special anniversary for that author or the book’s publication.” He also challenges himself to read most, if not all, of the books nominated for particular literary awards, such as the Booker or Women’s prize.

“The danger of setting any reading goal is that it will come to feel like a school assignment and that will inspire rebellion,” Anderson added. “So I try to be casual and flexible concerning any reading goals I set for myself and allow room for spontaneity.”

Ariel Bissett, who co-hosts the Books Unbound podcast and runs a YouTube channel with 344,000 subscribers, said that she stopped using any public-facing reading tracking website a few years ago, and that her reading life is “better for it”.

“I shifted to my own, scrappy Google sheet that I love keeping up with,” she said. “It’s a log of what I’m reading with some statistics.” Her goals this year range from reading 100 books to visiting every bookshop in Nova Scotia to reading three biographies.

With that, I’m off to set some more realistic goals for the remaining five months of the year.

My summer reading has involved two adventure stories of sorts, each brilliant in their way but each so distinct from the other as to almost count as a different species. Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter is a rambunctious lovers-on-the-run picaresque, cantering from 1890s Montana to California on a stolen palomino, via a scenic route that’s studded with gothic grotesques and clownish oddballs. It’s a novel that plays like an unruly circus, with Barry as the barker and every line salted and pretzelled to within an inch of its life. Robert Altman, I think, would have made an excellent film adaptation.

Where A Heart in Winter tacks west, Briefly Very Beautiful flees north. Roz Dineen’s superb debut novel is cool and measured where Barry’s is gaudy and garrulous. Briefly Very Beautiful is a gripping tale of everyday survival in a climate-breakdown Britain that’s probably around the next bend. The infrastructure is collapsing, the suburbs are combusting, and so Dineen’s heroine lights out for Scotland with her kids, seeking milder weather and safe havens that turn out to be either mirages or traps. It’s become a cliche to point out that all good science-fiction tales are actually about the here and now. But Briefly Very Beautiful moulds itself so snugly against the real world that it reads like a message posted back from next year.