Karly

I love reading and always have. Long before there were reading trackers, reading journals, monthly wrap-ups, five-star rating systems, colour-coded bookshelves, and enough reading challenges to fill several lifetimes, I loved reading because it was one of life’s simplest pleasures and because, for most of my reading life, nobody expected me to turn it into a project. I read because I was curious, because I wanted to know what happened next, because a cover caught my eye in a bookshop, or because somebody whose taste I trusted pressed a novel into my hands and insisted that I simply had to read it. Reading was something I did for enjoyment, which sounds almost embarrassingly obvious when written down, yet the longer I spend in online bookish spaces, the more convinced I become that we’ve somehow complicated a hobby that was never supposed to be this stressful.

Spend enough time in the online book community and it quickly becomes apparent that reading is no longer just reading. It’s a goal, a challenge, a lifestyle, a personal brand, and occasionally what feels suspiciously like a second job. We’re encouraged to set annual reading targets, track every page we finish, monitor our progress through multiple apps, create monthly statistics, curate aesthetically pleasing bookshelves, stay on top of new releases, and somehow keep up with the endless stream of recommendations that appear on our feeds every day. None of these things are inherently bad, and I am certainly not above admiring a beautiful bookshelf or feeling pleased when I finish a particularly ambitious book, but I do wonder whether we’ve accidentally imported the logic of productivity culture into a hobby that was supposed to offer us an escape from it.

Reading has always carried a certain cultural prestige, which probably explains why it’s so vulnerable to this kind of thinking. Unlike scrolling social media or binge-watching reality television, reading is still considered one of the “good” hobbies. It’s educational. It’s enriching. It’s self-improvement disguised as entertainment. Because we view it as virtuous, we seem incapable of leaving it alone. It isn’t enough to read books anymore. We should be reading widely, reading intelligently, reading diversely, reading the classics, reading contemporary fiction, reading translated literature, reading prize winners, reading whatever everyone is talking about online, and preferably doing all of this quickly enough to maintain a respectable number at the end of the year.

The result is that reading can start to resemble homework, except this time we’re the ones assigning it to ourselves, setting the deadlines, and feeling guilty when we inevitably fall behind. Many readers speak about their towering TBR piles with a level of anxiety that feels remarkably similar to the way people talk about unfinished work projects. Every month brings a fresh collection of anticipated releases, every social media platform reminds us what everyone else is reading, and every reading challenge seems designed to convince us that there is always more we should be doing. Books that have survived for centuries somehow end up competing with books that came out last Tuesday, and there is often an unspoken pressure to keep up.

Perhaps nowhere is this more obvious than on Instagram, where reading increasingly appears to be as much a visual activity as a literary one. I enjoy a beautiful photograph as much as anybody else, but there are moments when it feels as though the presentation of reading has become almost as important as reading itself. The carefully arranged stacks of books, the matching coffee cups, the annotated pages displayed at precisely the right angle, the immaculate reading journals, the colour-coordinated shelves, and the endless stream of aesthetically pleasing content can sometimes create the impression that being a reader is less about engaging with literature and more about cultivating a particular image.

The irony, of course, is that reading is fundamentally a private activity. The books that have mattered most to me were not read in aesthetically pleasing circumstances. They were read in waiting rooms, on long journeys, during difficult periods, late at night when I should have been sleeping, or on quiet afternoons when I simply had nothing better to do. They involved dog-eared paperbacks, library books with mysterious stains, cracked spines, and stories that arrived at exactly the right moment. None of those experiences would have made particularly compelling content, but they are the reason I fell in love with reading in the first place.

What concerns me isn’t that readers enjoy documenting their hobby, because honestly I enjoy seeing people talk about books, but rather that the language surrounding reading increasingly sounds like the language of productivity culture. We talk about reading goals, reading output, reading efficiency, reading slumps, reading challenges, and reading habits. We measure ourselves against numerical targets, compare our progress to other people’s, and often seem far more concerned with how much we’re reading than whether we’re actually enjoying it. It is entirely possible to spend so much time thinking about reading that we forget to enjoy the act itself.

This is something I’ve become particularly aware of over the past few months. Thanks to a rather unwelcome encounter with trigeminal neuralgia, I’ve found myself living a slower life than I originally planned. Illness has a way of exposing the limits of productivity because there comes a point when your body simply refuses to cooperate with your ambitions. During that time, I found myself returning to books not because they would help me meet a goal, complete a challenge, or stay on top of the latest releases, but because they offered comfort, distraction, companionship, and occasionally a reason to focus on something other than my own face trying to stage a rebellion.

I wasn’t reading to become a better reader, broaden my horizons, hit a target, or keep up with whatever everyone else was discussing online. I was reading because I wanted to know what happened next, which feels like an absurdly simple reason until you realise how often that motivation gets buried beneath expectations, statistics, and pressure. It reminded me of the relationship with books that I had as a teenager, when I cared far less about whether a book was impressive and far more about whether it was interesting. I read because I was curious. I read because I enjoyed it. I read because stories were fun. Somewhere along the way, I suspect many of us have forgotten that these reasons are more than enough.

None of this is an argument against Goodreads, reading journals, Bookstagram, reading challenges, or any of the countless ways people choose to engage with books. If those things genuinely enhance your enjoyment of reading, then they are serving a valuable purpose. The problem arises when they begin to replace enjoyment rather than support it, when the numbers become more important than the books themselves, or when reading starts to feel like another area of life that must constantly be optimised.

Perhaps that’s the real issue. Reading is one of the few hobbies that people still insist on turning into self-improvement, and while there’s nothing wrong with learning from books, not every novel needs to make us smarter, more cultured, more productive, or more interesting. Sometimes a book can simply be enjoyable. Sometimes the greatest thing a story offers is a few hours of escape from the endless pressure to optimise every aspect of our lives. In a community increasingly obsessed with goals, challenges, statistics, aesthetics, and keeping up, that feels like a surprisingly radical idea.