Reading Trackers Destroyed My Literary Health
I have a war to rage against public reading lists (even as I continue to participate in them).
I tried to shift my mentality this year regarding public reading logs, and it changed my reading habits completely.
To start, I find habit forming and intention setting challenging on a good day; I’ve learned over the years that the way my brain operates, an all-or-nothing mentality creates an environment ripe for failure. And while failure is not necessarily a bad thing on its own, when it stops you from truly enjoying a thing you find to be a core part of your identity, well. You find alternate routes to success.
As an English teacher and a lifelong learner, I enjoy the act of reading and the accompanying literary criticism. I write in my spare time, as well — some of it like my current flash fiction series We’re Still Here, others are longer works — and I so love looking at writing craft and composition as well as simply being able to enjoy the escapism. I’m a diverse reader with a diverse palate. I can enjoy anything from a trashy romance (a junk food read, if you’re so inclined) to rather complex research texts, though I find hard sciences difficult to digest unless it’s broken down into layman’s terms. I oscillate between genres, trading lighter reads for heavier ones every so often. I can enjoy a cozy fantasy and then rip the Band-Aid off as I find narratives to make me cry. I love the chase of finding a book that makes me think, but I also value ones that play out like an action-movie. As with life, there must be a balance in everything, including the texts we choose to consume.
When I think about my TBR pile sitting next to my desk upstairs, I think about the digital one I keep on my phone — the ones linked to the likes of Goodreads or Storygraph, the ones we keep public for the sake of connecting to other readers or to the authors who produce the works we love. Sometimes those TBRs we keep feel like an endless to-do list; I know I felt this way during my university days. As I began teaching, it seemed there was always a massive rotation of novels to pick through, and I found myself comparing my own reading habits to the habits of others, always feeling like I was coming up short even as I slogged through the “Best Books of the Year”, which sometimes did not scratch the itch I so desperately needed to relieve. When I sat down to set my reading goals for the year in January, I found I would fall short of the mark. Every. Single. Time. And instead of adjusting those goals, of having grace for myself and my busy schedule, I weaponized a hobby I loved against myself.
I joined Goodreads over a decade ago, right as I entered college. I was excited at the prospect of being able to keep track of what I read, because I could then find that book I was just dying to recommend a friend. It was a place to share my love of the written word on a platform that I found familiar — I had already grown up in the forum spaces through my adolescence on Neopets and ProBoards, which I talk about in another essay — and so it felt like a natural progression. Platforms like Goodreads are, in essence, tools we use to log our reads and find similar titles to bolster our ability to read what we love. To have a shared community space online rather than in person, and the forums there haves their own cultural touchstones. I participated in them once in a blue moon, but I found comfort in connecting with other readers. Over the years, however, those tools transformed into a prison of a different kind. As I reflected on my reading habits over the last decade, I realized that the act of logging my reading in a public space has actually proved rather detrimental to my literary hygiene. Part of this, I think, is because we naturally compare ourselves to others — I’m not innocent from making these comparisons, of measuring my faults against the achievements of other people. It’s not healthy; all of us know this and we still subject ourselves to it all the same. I watched my raging “read” pile from my childhood turn into a steadily trickling stream.
The rise of social media has only exacerbated the epidemic of comparison culture, one that is kin with the hustle culture so prevalent in our society. A recent episode of Sounds like a Cult explored the cultish behavior behind the boom of #BookTok in particular, where many of the bookish influencers on the platform tout their reading lists, their favorites, and suggestions for their cult following(s). There is a huge benefit to having a large online community built for and by readers. One video can rocket an indie debut novel to a best seller list, and they can create reading communities across state lines or even across cultural ones. But the hosts of the show and the guests they interviewed also mentioned some of the darker sides of public reading lists: a homogeny amongst the titles which are successful, an “in-group” mentality when it comes to who reads what, and the most harmful (in my opinion): an emerging hustle-culture within communities of readers. I wonder sometimes if our obsession of publicly logging our reads has resulted in an innate competition for who can read the most in the shortest amount of time—not necessarily a readership built on community, but rather one built on who is most widely read. Has this impacted our ability to have conversations about complex themes? Irredeemable characters? The writing craft? I would say so.
Selling reading and readership identity to the youth of today is already a challenge. It is an act of rebellion in an age of information download — an act that takes time, patience, and imagination in a world built for instant gratification. And while I am guilty of listening to audiobooks on near double speed, this reading culture built upon consumption is ultimately hurting the industry. I’ve taught in classrooms where the majority of students claim that they hate reading or haven’t read a complete novel since elementary school. There is now increasing research on the phenomenon of college students entering their universities without having read a novel in its entirety, and I tend to believe that our general approach to education and building community with our young readers is partly to blame. There was a recent podcast episode of Plain English, that a good friend and coworker shared within our department about the rise of teaching novels piecemeal and in a multimedia fashion. The host, Derek Thompson, explores the reality of our reading culture today — while we see a boom in the reading community as a whole in this singular moment, the data suggests that leisure reading has decreased nearly 50% during this century alone. Of polled high school teachers, only 17% reported that books were the main focus of their English class, although other multimedia resources were used to deliver the rest of the material.
When I taught in spaces where reading was not an integral part of a child’s education or educational support from home was minimal (a reality, not a judgement), to focus was to find something they did like no matter the genre or medium. We sought out comics, how-to guides, and poetry, among other forms of writing that sparked my students’ various interests. One student would learn about investments. Another read The Lovely Bones after we talked through its sensitive contents. Several more would trade around a ratty edition of One of Us is Lying. And one told me Symptoms of Being Human made them feel seen for the first time. The difference between these gateway books and my own reading habits was that I was still updating my own public reading logs and comparing my own habits to others rather than focusing on the joy of finding something that actually sparked my interest. While reflecting on how I found new material to read, I found that personal recommendations from friends, librarians, and other readers were actually more beneficial to my overall literary health than using the apps.
And so, this brings me to my current wondering: how do we get back to a readership where personal curiosity and reflection is centered to our identity as readers? To read is to learn about and know yourself intimately. To reflect on your place in the world and your experiences within it. To understand it. To escape it, when necessary. To embrace it, even when it’s difficult. Everyone reads (or writes) for different reasons, and the more we approach the act of reading with curiosity, the more we will find to enjoy and discuss with others, to bridge the gap between us.
I don’t quite know what the answer is regarding tools like Goodreads or Storygraph and other apps like them — they have their own benefits and their owns pitfalls. But when I began regarding them once again as tools rather than a piece of social media, I found that I was much more likely to pick up another book directly after the one I just finished rather than worrying about filling out a review for public consumption. My reading logs now lined pages and pages of my writing notebooks — notes on craft, beautiful lines of writing, lists upon lists of what I have listened to, read, enjoyed, and will use to find the next read that touches my soul.
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