I got a Kindle in university since it was somehow cheaper for me to get a Kindle plus the four books I needed for a class than it was to buy the four physical books from the school’s bookstore. One of the features there was to track your reading on Goodreads. I had something like two friends on there,so I thought what the heck, let’s sign up, I’m young and haven’t thought about the consequences of sending my data everywhere for no reason.
I signed up, so it tracked my kindle reading for me. A bit later I had a fun time going through my small book collection and adding what I had, even though I hadn’t kept many books after moving out from my parents’ place. And I had more fun going through my memories of various Star Wars books and fantasy books I read in my adolescence and filling in a quick star rating for each. Finally, as I got more into reading again post-university, I enjoyed writing little reviews of how I felt about each book that I finished, a quick 5-15 minute reflection on the characters, the plot, the themes, whatever jumped out at me. I’ve since left Goodreads for Storygraph, and will probably leave Storygraph for Bookwyrm, but I’ve kept up that short review at the end of each book as a nice way to reflect on my reading time.
Of course, the bigger list that I have on these book trackers is my to-read list. It is unwieldy. A monstrous backlog of literature the likes of which can hardly be scratched, let alone slain. It is a hydra of desire, for every book I finish can handily be replaced by two or three more.
It is, in a word, pointless. Do I browse it to find my next read? No, I mostly read based on whims. I pick something new out of my collection, or I scroll through what’s downloaded on my kobo, or I browse the shelves at my local library. Tracking things I might possibly read is clearly pointless.
For a while - probably two or three years - I was tracking how many pages I read each day, and how many pages I would read over the course of a year. It allowed me to see some interesting graphs and trends, but is there anything to do about the fact that I read less in March of 2023? Does it mean anything? No, not really. I’ve done it for ages, expecting my brain to come up with something, but it did not.
Even the simplest views fail to deliver effectively for me. My “currently reading” list is constantly 3-7 books long, only one or two of which I’m actively trying to read. I don’t know that I have ever picked my next read off of my “up next” list. And how useful is it to say that I got a book, read 20% of it, didn’t care enough to finish it, and dropped it when the library due date came up after renewing twice?
No, the only look at my reading life that has any real use is the past. What have I read, and what do I think about those books?
Reflection is difficult with our modern consumption habits. When I finish a youtube video I’m immediately scrolling through the recommendations for the next one, with even less thought if I’m swiping through shorts. My streaming services all send me into the next episode of a series as soon as I finish my current one, sometimes catching me off guard because I just had it on in the background and I’m confused about the theme music starting again. I can probably count the number of songs I’ve actively listened to this year on both hands despite Medieval Lofi being on for several hours a day.
We live in a very black and white world. Greys are divvied up into camps by algorithms and pit against each other in a context-limited rapid-fire of words, and these fights are summed up by video commentators hyping up the events for view counts and ad money. Books remain grey. Art, in general, tends toward shades of grey. By reflecting on our personal experiences with works of art - and especially, in my case, with books - it helps to remind us that these middle grounds exist, and that they are worth thinking about, and that black and white can’t reflect a real experience.