Why we can’t resist setting book targets every new year

Happy New Year! Have you set any reading resolutions yet? For the first newsletter of 2025, I dig into why we have the urge to set reading targets, and speak to novelists Yiyun Li, Geoff Dyer and Kit de Waal about their goals and how they track their reading. And Nicola Dinan gives us some book recommendations to kick off the year. That’s all after the highlights from this week.

“Here are my resolutions for the next 3 months; the next lap of the year. To have none. Not to be tied,” wrote Virginia Woolf on 2 January, 1931. And when it came to books: “Sometimes to read, sometimes not to read”.

Perhaps your 2025 reading resolutions are as noncommittal as Woolf’s. Or maybe you have loftier ambitions: to hit a certain number of books, read all the works of a particular author, or get through a certain number of pages a day.

If you are in the goal-setting camp, you may have been inspired by the flurry of end-of-year reading roundups posted to social media. While Barack Obama’s list of favourites is perhaps the most famous, videos by creators on BookTube and BookTok reviewing the 50 or 80 or 180 books they read during the year continue to rake in huge view counts.

Where does this urge to track and set goals for our reading come from? We don’t generally set targets for other forms of cultural consumption, such as the number of TV shows we watch or the number of hours spent in museums (perhaps with the exception of film – Letterboxd has been described as “Goodreads for movies”). So why for books?

One answer is that reading is simply harder. “It’s generally easier to find time to watch TV,” says Lizzy Hadfield, an influencer who runs a book club called Buffy’s. “And oftentimes there are a huge number of people watching the same thing, so there is conversation readily available around it.”

Tracking and sharing reading habits can help you find a community to talk about books with – “an incredible way to enhance your reading”, adds Hadfield, who aims to read 60 books in 2025, after getting through 58 last year.

Some say that reading challenges are performative. The trend “baffles me the same way as the hotdog-eating contest baffles me,” the novelist Yiyun Li says. Setting a reading goal “seems to me to focus on numbers or statistics for others to see, while reading feels to me an intensely internal dialogue between one’s mind and the books one reads”.

Li’s only goal is to read “thinkingly”. She spends at least four or five hours a day reading. “A line of poetry may lead to an hour of contemplation. A novel may require a slow reading that spans days, even weeks, rather than being devoured in one sitting (people often say this about a book as though it’s a compliment, but any book that makes a reader think deeply and widely cannot possibly be consumed in such a manner, one supposes!).

Novelist Geoff Dyer hopes to “fill in some of the glaring gaps” in his reading this year. “I didn’t read Vanity Fair until the pandemic (fun!) and only got round to A Tale of Two Cities a few months ago (wasn’t worth the wait). Then there are the year-on-year failures: Proust, The Brothers Karamazov. These suckers stay on the list perpetually but the chances of their ever being read diminishes with each passing year. I suspect they serve as a kind of symbolic, high-quality shorthand for everything else I won’t get round to (and, by extension, the futility of all human endeavour).”

Then there is the question of whether, and how, to track your reading. The two big digital catalogues are Goodreads and Storygraph (my preferred choice). For decades, Dyer has kept lists of every book he reads and films he sees in the cinema in a Ryman D6 diary. In October, he learned that the stationery company have discontinued the product. “This is a devastating blow and one I may never recover from. It could spell the end of my intellectual life.”

Novelist Kit de Waal chooses not to physically track what she reads. “I had to move house six years ago from a big Victorian villa with books in every room, hundreds and hundreds. The book purge consisted of me looking at each book and if I couldn’t remember the story in detail, if I couldn’t remember the end, then it had to go. It wasn’t a good plan because there were only about 30 in the ‘to go’ pile, so clearly my reading record is very much alive in my head and heart.”

However, she thinks a reading journal is a good idea in principle. “The person we are at 20 when we read Jane Eyre is not the person that re-reads it at 60. I’d love to know what I first thought of the madwoman in the attic, and whether or not I was on Rochester’s side in his deception. Certainly, now I think I see it clearly but in another 20 years I may change my mind again.”

I enjoyed Pretentiousness: Why It Matters by Dan Fox. I am a guilty user of the word pretentious, which the book methodically rebukes over its hundred-and-something pages. Art moves forward because people aspire to things they are not (I certainly feel this as a writer). It’s also a word with deeply classist roots, made even worse by the fact that its meaning is often unclear. Instead of saying pretentious, I now think of other words which more accurately describe why I dislike something, such as vapid, poorly written or ugly.

I hadn’t really thought about “climate fiction” as a genre until this year, but like many others at the moment I loved Orbital by Samatha Harvey. Private Rites by Julia Armfield was also one of my favourite reads of 2024 – wet, sad and spooky. What more could you want!