It’s a new year and that means I missed my 2024 reading goal by twelve books, ten of which meet arbitrary criteria some internet lady told me to do, which total another 8500 pages. This is pretty typical for me - I read a lot, I read a variety of stuff, but at the start of the year (or sometimes a few months in) I set some goals on numbers of books or pages to read, or join a challenge to read certain books, or write down some other personal goal around reading, and I basically never meet all those goals.

But I keep doing it. I’m plotting out this year’s challenges and books already. I like doing it, even though that background anxiety that maths out how much I need to read each day to meet my goal is probably bad for me.

goals are smart

If you’ve been around business or management people a bit you may have heard of S.M.A.R.T. goals - goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. It’s such an over-explained and over-presented concept that it feels like nonsense after a short period, but I find it’s a good way to structure my hobbies in a way that actually encourages me to do something about them.

For reading this often comes in the form of yearly challenges. Last year I said I would read 104 books, 30,000 pages, and I followed along with the 52 book club challenge to have something more specific to guide some of my choices. I ended at at 92 books, 21,675 pages, and completed 42/52 prompts in the book club challenge.

Now, if you take this seriously, it looks a lot like failure. I am nowhere near my page goal, and I’m arguably not that close to the others, either. But I find that the final number just puts a point on it - a specific and measurable point - that isn’t actually the goal. Rather, my goal is to read a bunch and to read different things, and all these challenges just help me navigate my way through that instead of reading another dozen mediocre isekai light novel series.

For example, one of my favourite reads this year was Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. It’s a brilliant family saga about a Korean family moving to Japan in the midst of the Japanese occupation of the peninsula. It won a bunch of awards. It recently got a TV series. I’ve been meaning to read it for years. Why did I finally pick it up? Because the chapter headings have dates, letting me check off #45 on the 52 book club list. Otherwise who knows when I would have remembered it existed?

It also doesn’t include all of my reading, and I don’t mean reading social media comments like some people seem to consider the same as a book. I mean that I don’t track web novels that I read, like Shadow Slave, or scanlated manga that I read, or essays, or short stories. I read a lot outside of the scope of these tracking apps, so being short in some respects doesn’t bother me too much. Like, 1000 chapters of Shadow Slave is probably in the ballpark of 4000 pages, but hell if I’m going to figure out how to translate that into Storygraph.

i can reflect and stuff

I set my goals based on what I did the previous year and what I expect my next year to look like. The last few years I’ve actually crushed my book goals, but it was partly due to reading a bunch of shorter novels, graphic novels, and manga. And to be clear, I really enjoy all those things, but if I exclude graphic and light novels I come out with 41 books. So about two-thirds of my reads were what I would generally call “easy” books that I can bang out in a short time frame and don’t usually need to think too hard about. Really, the number is probably higher - A Witch’s Guide to Fake Dating a Demon is fun, but not really on the level of Keeper’n Me in terms of literary engagement.

This year I wanted to read more challenging books. Sure, I need a break and read a lot of easy stuff too, but last year I found that even when I got away from my comfort genres I ended up focusing on easier reads, anyways. This year, even if my proportion of “easy” reads didn’t change a lot, my “hard” books were more varied and challenging. A lot more political works, a lot more literary works, a lot more philosophy.

If I don’t set these yearly challenges I don’t really care to reflect on the stats. I only made these adjustments to my reading habits because, at the end of last year, I saw that if I wanted to set a goal I needed to think more about what goal made sense. If two-thirds of my books read are likely to be comfortable, easy works, what do I want to read in the rest of it? And so rather than picking up anything that seemed interesting and easy for my challenges, I read Ulysses, Kairos, and Pachinko instead.

As a bit of an aside, I did read some relatively difficult books in 2023 as well - 2666 by Roberto Bolano being the biggest example - but generally I feel like I focused on more thoughtful reads last year, which is probably a major contributor to my lower book and page count. The edition of Ulysses I read is 515 pages, but god knows how many hours I spent chunking through it a percent at a time.

variety is important

I’ve well established at this point that I read a lot of short, simple slop. It’s sort of impressive how much of that can fill in gaps in a reading challenge - I feel like most isekai are trying to be a hybrid genre nowadays, easy checkbox - but there are limits to how easily I can fill out a challenge without going outside of my comfort zone a little.

For example, I don’t read all that many books with weddings in them. Even romance books hardly ever end in a marriage from my experience. So I dug around for something to read and - ah, of course! - Shakespeare’s comedies usually end in some sort of marriage. So, since I was going to see The Tempest in the spring, I also popped open my copy of the play to read it through. And it was fun, and I probably wouldn’t have thought to read any Shakespeare this year otherwise.

Finding books to read is too easy, in a way. My to-read list is apparently over 700 books long. But a lot of that is stuff that I naturally gravitate to, something I’ll just grab off a shelf and read for shits and giggles. I think reading is important because of the variety of perspectives and experiences you can see through books, and I think that I really have to make an effort to get that value out of reading as a hobby. Sure, there’s nothing inherently wrong with reading 104 isekai light novels in a year, but I certainly got more out of Less is More, a book on capitalism’s growth imperative, that I did any of the I May Be a Guild Receptionist, but I’ll Solo Any Boss to Clock Out on Time volumes I read.

i do not have all the time in the world

Now, I am under no illusions that I will ever finish off my to-read list, not the least because it is obviously incomplete because I own a bunch of books that aren’t on it. But there are a lot of days where I don’t really feel like reading much. I play a video game or watch a show or something instead. This is fine, it’s good to relax, but it’s also easy to let myself slip into a habit of not reading much. This is less fine to me.

If my goal is to read 104 books in a year, that means I’m trying to read two books a week. This is a lot of books. It is a lot of reading. If I want to come anywhere near that I need to actually make an effort to set aside time for reading, and I need to actually stick to that as much as I can. Sure, playing Hitman for three hours is fun, but it doesn’t get me anywhere on my challenge, so maybe I’ll read a chapter and then I can go play video games.

I have finite time in my day, in my year, in my life. I love reading, and I have a lot of books I want to read, and a lot of things I want to learn, and a lot of things I want to get better at. Setting these goals, putting myself on these time crunches, is a way to squeeze a bit more out of life than I naturally tend to do. I fancy myself a smart person, but I like to spend my time doing dumb nonsense instead of using my noggin’. If I’m going to pretend my brain is functional I’d better use it for something more interesting than gacha games and re-reading Mashle.

on a related note, streaks

Up until a couple of weeks ago, when I was just busy all day and forgot to even pop open a book on my phone, I had about a 200 day reading streak. That’s at least 1 page every day for 200 days.

Like with my 382 day Duolingo streak, this isn’t really much of an achievement. There are some very half-assed days in there. There are probably a few cheat days in there where I counted insomnia reading at 4am as the day before. Certainly, a lot of those days involved me reading a light novel on my phone during my pre-bedtime bowel movement and checking off that 5 minute 2% progress as if it mattered.

But the thing is that keeping that streak up means that I’m keeping up a daily habit of reading, and I’m trying to make it easy to check that off which means I’m trying to make reading easier for myself.

I’m always reading a few books. Usually a physical book or two, plus something on my kobo, plus a book that works well on my phone. And that last one is really what keeps my reading. I can read a few minutes in a grocery line. I can pop it open during a work break. I can read on the toilet. Rather than social media, if I just need a few minutes of break time I open the kobo app on my phone and read some generic nonsense that I can pick up and drop mid-sentence without losing a beat.

This may sound like it goes against my other notes about challenging myself and reading a variety of things, but no, it helps a lot. When I sit down to read, when I’m really in the mood, it will almost always be something better than my phone slop. I rarely spend my half hour before bed, or my morning coffee time, or my evening free time, reading the same thing I read during a poop break. I’ve done that. I can do that whenever. When I’m really sitting down to read, that means I’m reading something bigger, something I want to focus on, something that really presents me with something new and interesting. Before I started my phone reading habit I would need to choose whether to read something easy or challenging when I sit down to read; now I have them split as different activities for different times, but I’m always doing some sort of reading anyways.

what next?

I already said this, but I’m already working on this year’s goals, despite mixed success in past years and despite the fact that I don’t really care about the numbers. It makes me more thoughtful about my reading, therefore it’s worth it.

And my thoughts are that I buy a lot more books than I read. I like books as decoration, as an expression of self, as just a nice vibe, but also I like being able to talk about my books if people ask about them. A number of years back a guest was looking over a shelf and asked about a few books, and I had read none of them. It felt a bit embarassing. I’ve since read all those books and have bought a heck of a lot more. I have collections and series that I haven’t even started, and some that I started, loved, and never continued.

So my plan is to set goals around the books I already own. I’m following along with the 52 book club challenge again, plotting things out based on the contents of my shelves. Some of it requires a bit of thought or research, like finding a book that has an audiobook with multiple narrators (ended up with 1984, which I somehow have not read yet) or finding a book with a short final sentence (I flipped to the back of a few books, eventually pulled down Chainsaw Man: Buddy Stories and counted a four word sentence, perfect!). Others are very easy - I just walk over to a shelf and decide that Herbert can be a first name, so I’ll read Dune.

So far I only have 3 books on my list that I’m planning to get from the library (two of them because I already have them checked out), and there are another 3 that I’ve sourced from places like Standard eBooks. I also don’t own a book released in 2025 yet, so we’ll see how that pans out. That leaves 45 books for me to read right off of my shelves, which seems like a solid start. Many of them are pre-selected so I can narrow my options and make choosing my next book easier, but if my mood changes later it’s easy to swap them out, and there are plenty of fairly generic gaps to fill in as I please.

Number-wise, I’m setting my goal at 104 books again - that’s finishing the 52 book club challenge, plus about 52 manga volumes which I also own too many of. I set the page goal at 27,500, a tad less than last year. I want to read longer books, but I’m not sure I’ll have the energy for a large number of exceptionally long books, so if half my reads are manga volumes around 200 pages this goal suggests most of my other books should be over 300 - not long, but not exactly short, either. This feels pretty reasonable.

wow what a ramble

That went on much longer than expected, but altogether the point is that I like to set goals because whether I meet them or not it makes me sit down and think about what I want to do. And I suppose I ended up barfing a lot of those thoughts out through my keyboard, so I hope it turned out at least mildly interesting.