Thirty-seven books. Nine thousand two hundred and three pages. In 2025, I’d set a goal of fifty, which means I “failed” by thirteen books. Except I didn’t fail at all. I spent most of that year growing a human and then keeping that human alive, reading on my phone while nap-trapped under a sleeping baby.
I noticed what I did there. I made excuses. Justified myself. As if reading thirty-seven books while on maternity leave needed defending.
When did books become another metric to optimise?
Last week I wrote about capitalism demanding urgency in our TV watching, the fear that missing the Traitors finale by Monday morning means failing at cultural participation. Books are worse. Television discourse moves on. Reading, it feels, has built entire infrastructures of guilt.
Reading challenges. Annual stats. TBR piles photographed like trophies of future productivity. Yes, I made an Instagram carousel about mine because I love data and I contain multitudes, stuff can be two things. We don’t just read anymore. We perform reading. Log it, track it, announce it.
Edwin Locke and Gary Latham’s goal-setting theory, developed across decades of studies, found that specific, challenging goals improve performance under certain conditions. The goals need to be meaningful to the person, not imposed externally. The positive effects diminish when goals feel like pressure rather than motivation. A goal that becomes a should rather than a want stops being helpful structure. It becomes anxiety disguised as productivity.
I used to go to the library and pick up whatever caught my eye. A spine with an interesting colour. A title that made me curious. I discovered authors by accident, genres by wandering. Now I have pre-orders placed a year in advance. Books bought because BookTok told me they’d change my life. A physical TBR pile so precarious it constitutes a genuine safety hazard (something that causes countless mocking in my house).
In trying to read more, I drained reading of the aimless joy that made me love it.
This is how capitalism works. (Yes, another rant about capitalism.) It takes our pleasures and turns them into projects. Can’t leave anything alone. Can’t let us enjoy something without asking how we might enjoy it more efficiently, more productively, in ways that can be measured and shared and used to demonstrate our value as optimised humans. Rest becomes a self-improvement strategy. Fiction becomes research.
