On Reading Goals, BookTok, Tracking & Mapping
I attended an author panel at this year’s Ohioana Book Festival, during which one author mentioned that she has been logging every book she’s read for over thirty years. Thirty years! I’ve only been faithfully keeping track of what I read for about two years. I started simply because I was part of a discussion about annual reading goals, and not only had I never thought about measuring such a thing, I had no idea how many books I actually read in a given year. Should I? It feels like I’m reading all the time, but maybe being glued to the internet is lulling me into a false sense of achievement? I’d never set a formal reading goal, but I was pretty confident I’d be able to perform better on a reading goal than a gym goal, so why not.
Reading goals became a tad more en vogue in no small part to the pandemic resurgence of reading as a non-contagious solo hobby to revive, and the expansion of a reading community on social media, particularly on TikTok, where book-related content tends to be known as BookTok. There’s certainly nothing new about communal reading initiatives–as an Elder Millennial I fondly remember my Book It! pins and the Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizzas our schools plied us with for hitting a reading goal. Every summer the local metro library kicks off a Summer Reading Challenge with prizes for kids (and sometimes adults) to keep up reading after school lets out. But the internet being the internet, it’s way easier for things to get…weird.
The Great BookTok Divide
If you’re just thinking about setting a reading goal, might I suggest avoiding the stressful side of BookTok (that fortunately did not linger in my algorithm long) where people share exhausting “tips and tricks” for maximizing page and book counts and is every bit as irksome as any other competitive fandom. If you’re playing audiobooks at 2–3X speed, or intentionally grabbing short comic books–not for an affinity of the art or medium, but just to count it as “done” — are you genuinely getting anything out of this?
There’s been quite a bit of consternation about BookTok in general:
- A general annoyance that the seemingly shallow “aesthetic” of being a reader is more important than actually reading–just a different flavor of “lifestyle influencers.”
- How industry-funded influencer ads fuel an algorithm which unduly propagates arguably garbage recommendations in a way that is fundamentally different from more easily identified (and ignored) paid marketing.
- How viral trends like crying on camera erratically push decade-old books back to best-sellers (not to mention ratchet up the content creator’s view count).
Do I sometimes look down my academic elitist nose at a trope-filled pop-culture book championed by a model-like influencer with perfect hair and perfect teeth in a carefully curated outfit waving a latte around? Sometimes, yeah, sure. That’s one of my lesser angels. But in an era of renewed zealotry towards book bans and right wingers defunding public libraries–I’m going to suggest that on the whole, any enthusiasm for books and reading is a net gain for society.
Once you get past That Side of BookTok, there’s some good conversations happening about whatever topics you want to learn about, and I’ve found some excellent recommendations, folks reading snippets aloud and talking about the research they’re doing as professionals or citizen scientists. There are very serious conversations about the various forms of oppression that still plague our society, the dark histories behind current policies and current events, and with the critical, multi-faceted, and nuanced debate that quite resembles classrooms I’ve been in.
I can’t count the times I’ve seen folks reference a book I read few years ago that made me crazy mad — The Color of Law (2017), Richard Rothstein’s thorough history of de facto and de jure segregation in America that goes so much deeper than redlining to the intentional design of bridges that prohibited public buses from passing to the history of zoning laws. Yes, people are very much chatting about zoning law on TikTok, so don’t let any stodgy old Senator who doesn’t know how a personalizing algorithm works tell you it’s all teenagers in booty shorts dancing.
I picked up Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid from seeing it frequently referenced–a detailed history of how the medical experimentation on black enslaved people, prisoners, and the impoverished is so much a deeper part of medical history than just Tuskegee. A challenging read for the heartbreaking depth of cruelty, but incredibly important for facing the institutionalized disparities that remain today.
And there’s plenty more rabbit holes to visit in the great unending process of understanding how we got here, and just maybe, how to get to a better place.
Why even set a goal?
Personally, when I thought about setting goals for reading, and thus to start tracking my reading, I had a few objectives in mind.
Reduce screen time and reduce short-form time.
I appreciate the irony, given how this conversation started on social media for me, and how I’ve found some genuinely good-quality short form content that pointed me in the direction of research and publications I may not otherwise have heard about. But like most things, everything in moderation. Short-form is an excellent appetizer, but needs a heartier meal. There’s a worrying tendency for folks to feel like experts after a handful of videos, blog posts, or podcasts, and parrot back the talking points of reviewers without bothering to examine the primary sources to know if they’re credible, thorough, or were accurately interpreted. Committing to a whole book gives time to get more familiar with the subject and an author to assess reliability; and for better or worse, the sheer labor and difficulty of getting a book into publication is a steeper barrier than anyone with internet access.
There’s several content areas that I have been wanting to really understand better–specific geographies and histories, certain time periods in history, certain sciences. Time to create some honorary elective classes.
Re-acquaint with Fiction
Trying to unpack why I can’t seem to get through a novel anymore, even though I used to love reading stories, and I have two hypotheses–out of practice and internalized capitalism. There was just too much academic reading to have much appetite for recreational reading across two Masters and then work. I feel like I can no longer visualize anything, and I’ve lost a lot of “willful suspension of disbelief” which rather removes all the novelty, enchantment, and comfort from fictitious environments. I can’t help but think I’ve lost some of my own ability to fantasize in the process.
Secondly, reading non-fiction feels like learning and learning feels productive and productive feels like an acceptable use of time. Reading fiction feels like a superfluous use of time and all the guilt that entails when we’re being constantly conditioned to monetize every last moment of our day. Level up your skills! Turn that hobby into a side hustle! Ugh. Nothing like “grind culture” to suck the joy out of entertainment, despite the science overwhelmingly showing how we need genuine breaks to avoid burnout.
Learning is, of course, a valid hobby, which makes differentiating the sensations a little more wonky. We do hard things, sometimes even boring things, to practice and get better at our hobbies all the time. Challenge and growth is a form of recreation that isn’t always what we’d call “fun” but is the motivation intrinsic or external? Am I reading this because I would take this class or lecture for sheer interest (internal reward)? Or am I reading this because I feel like I should, in order to be more productive for someone else (external motivation)? The former is arguably personal development, while the latter might qualify as professional development, but not a hobby.
What am I measuring?
Ok now that there’s a couple whys in play, what to track? As we know from the observer effect, watching something changes it. Am I tracking just the number of books? That might create an unintentional incentive for choosing shorter books. Pages? What about audiobooks? Am I tracking time? Not all time is equal — does the slow-reading before bed getting drowsy count differently than focused time? What if I get distracted or interrupted?
I decided to just track books, agnostic about written or audio formats, and to set a base goal that wasn’t so strict I’d feel incentivized to avoid the really long books in my To Read Pile for the “adverse effect” it would have on my count–the only reason for measuring at all is to keep some momentum and accountability towards my whys not to hit some magic number.
Because I had no idea how many books I read as a baseline, for 2022 I picked a very modest goal of 12 books–one for each month. I tend to pick some pretty hefty non-fiction that sometimes lingers awhile to get through, and I often have 2–3 going at once for different moods and attention capacity levels. I also satisfy my why goals in other ways, such as by taking classes or lectures (although this isn’t strictly always avoiding screen time) and knew I would need time for other forms of learning.
I ended up logging 67 books for 2022, so for 2023 I updated the numeric goal to 52–one per week. I just hit 50 this week in mid-May, so it seems I’ve consistently underestimated how much I get through without feeling “forced.” I do think the process of logging and the little blip of dopamine reward for doing so encourages me to reach for a book instead of my phone, or to listen to a book instead of music, more news, or a podcast.
Tracking & Mapping
After a bit of research and some test runs, I chose The Storygraph to track my reading, over Goodreads, just a spreadsheet, or paper log. I prefer to plan and brainstorm on paper, but in reality, I’ve had too many lost lists and forgotten or damaged notebooks to rely on paper, and a spreadsheet is a barebones minimum but isn’t super mobile-friendly.
The Storygraph is free on the basic level, has both desktop and mobile versions, and unlike Goodreads, is not owned by Amazon, but founded (and still owned by) a black woman in tech, Nadia Odunayo. It offers a slick, simple interface, offers some nifty charts and graphs about your reading habits, and just like every other platform offers you some AI/machine learning-backed recommendations. Unlike Goodreads, though, these recommendations are unobtrusive since it’s not connected to a platform that is definitely trying to sell you stuff. It can import your Goodreads if you already started there. Book Riot has a thorough review of the app and features here.
For mapping, I wanted to be able to visualize the relationships between the subjects I was studying, visually. For this I like Mural, which is a user-friendly mind-map “whiteboard” app with a robust free single-user version, which lets you download, export, share, and embed.
My classifications are coarse, because after all, isn’t everything kinda connected? Adding my reading (and lectures, or classes) lets me see visually how deep into a subject area I’ve made it, and helps me remember how resources related to each other. This doesn’t really serve any other purpose than a fun, casual, data visualization project as I think about the relationships between subjects and how they interrelate.
