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Against Counting the Books You Read
(www.theatlantic.com)
The discussion of fiction books! Please tag spoilers and follow instance rules.
I don't think there's anything wrong with keeping track of what you've read but that often seems (to me) to lead to things like 'reading challenges' etc.
I remember back on the corporate alien site on r/books some OP proudly relating how many books they'd read this year and the whole thread became this game of one upmanship of who'd read the most books, who could read the fastest, targets for the upcoming year etc etc. Not one comment mentioned if they'd actually enjoyed any of these books.
When the fuck did reading become a competitive sport? Honestly, my single aim when reading is to enjoy the books I read. If a book takes me 2 days to read or 2 weeks I don't give a shit. If that means I read less books that year then so what?
So, yeah, record them by all means, review them on a BookWyrm instance by all means but beyond that, just enjoy the book with no pressure.
Yeah, I’m a competitive person by nature and I have to force myself to not keep track of how much I read. It’s silly, I like reading, I see no added benefits to reading “more”, I’d rather read more interesting things, even if slower. But if I keep too much track of my Goodreads account, I start competing with myself from last year and… it makes no sense! But little numbers growing is such a primal push.