Goals are for football, not reading

To rephrase an old ad, if reading isn't fun, why bother? (Image: Anita Jankovic via Unsplash)

Now that we’ve entered the last month of the year, many must be assessing their reading goals. Progress will be shared, praised, or belittled, and fresh targets assigned for the coming months. This sounds like homework to me. Goals are for football, not reading

To paraphrase the defunct slogan of a cigarette brand, if reading isn’t a pleasure, why bother? It’s necessary for students and others in academia and research to read a certain amount by a certain time – but not for everyone else, surely.

Reading goals are another example of how gamification is taking over our lives. People have maintained reading diaries and lists of books for a long time but in a digital age, there’s far greater emphasis on goals, progress, and sharing.

Gamification is being employed to control our actions across disciplines, writes Adrian Hon in You’ve Been Played. The use of points, streaks, leaderboards, badges, and rewards are some manifestations.

This tactic allows for “a constant intrusion into our private lives,” writes Hon. At one point, shortly after he settled in with a novel on his iPad, a notification appeared “congratulating me for meeting my daily goal”. Since he hadn’t set a goal in the first place, the app had defaulted to five minutes. At another time, he saw his nephew celebrating meeting his yearly reading goal, which by default was three books.

Some reading apps take this a step further with daily reading streaks, praising you for the number of days you hit your goal in a row. Others go the whole hog. Glose, an e-book reading app, uses a streak count, challenges, badges, and awards to make, in their words, “reading more exciting for everyone”. This, Hon wryly comments, “would be news to readers who find novels exciting enough alone”.

Reading targets have begun to loom large even for those who prefer books in print. If one headline announces “8 Reading Goals for Adults to Try This Year”, another one promises to reveal “11 Reading Goals for Adults in 2022”. When you don’t feel like opening a book, you can remind yourself of “The Importance of Setting Reading Goals to Increase Your Love For Books”.

One site even asks you to choose a reading goal, break it into smaller goals, set a deadline, establish a high bar – and then, almost as an afterthought, add an element of fun. Sounds like something Napoleon would have come up with, with a little help from F.W. Taylor’s principles of scientific management.

As a result, some readers become seriously invested in meeting their goals. One trick is to choose short books as deadlines approach. There are other means, revealed in this snatch of conversation recorded by writer Deepanjana Pal in her newsletter. At Mumbai’s recent Tata Lit Live Festival, she overheard a visitor saying: “I read [Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s] Funeral Nights and that’s like 1,000 pages, so that counts for at least three books.”

None of this is to say that motivating oneself or others to read should be discouraged. For the garden-variety reader, a little push and self-imposed or external prompts can mean the difference between a half-read book and one that is completed.

At other times, reminders to read across genres, discover translated work, or to consider authors who have been unjustly ignored create a richer reading experience. Habits that nurture such intrinsic motivations make sense.

When taken too far, however, goals feed into a utilitarian attitude of reading as simply a means of instruction or attainment. At a paradoxical extreme, this results in a frame of mind akin to that of Sam Bankman-Fried, the so-called crypto king.

“I would never read a book,” he said in a recent interview before his cryptocurrency exchange went bankrupt. He went on: “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you f**ked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

That succinctly sums up the mindset of those who put reading on the same plane as mandated exercise, diet or quarter-one results. The end is greater than the means, shortcuts are good, and an experience is relevant only if it results in tangible gains.

Within such a structure, it can be hard to justify an activity for its own sake. As Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing: “In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimised, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily.” One antidote is to lose yourself in a good book without racking up brownie points for doing so.