A RANT ON READING

“Will my buddies on BookTube think I’m weird if I try this obscure 1920s Polish classic nobody else is reading?”

Why do people count the number of books they read every year? Looking around at the people on Goodreads, YouTube, Bluesky and wherever, they clearly aren’t doing it for the same reasons I am.

I never used to tally how many tomes I got through, and that really is the ideal state : completely unconstrained and unaffected by anything external. To just read whatever takes your fancy, whenever and wherever you want.

I started counting when I heard the shockingly small number of books the average person reads in a lifetime. Given the vast array of stuff I’d like to get through, I thought I’d better read a bit more. After finding I was only consuming about 25 books a year, I settled on a yearly goal of 40 to increase the amount I could squeeze in. And that just about works out for me, although I do have to make sure the lengthy difficult books are balanced out by a few shorter ones. That’s already a compromise, I know, but it seems to work fairly well.

“Another three graphic novels like this and I’ll have read more books than all of my circle on Goodreads.”

My natural predilection is for long books - things you can get completely immersed in. The longer you spend with a story, the more you live it and the longer it stays with you afterwards. For me, most short books just don’t have much of an impact for this very reason.

I recently ditched X for its sucessor, Bluesky, and there I subscibed to some bookish feeds. People were talking about their year in books, and I was reminded again how much my reading proclivities are at odds with the majority. Not that that’s a surprise, since going against the grain in practically everything in life seems to be the norm for me.

I hate to say it, but the truth is that most people are shallow, conservative, sheep-like and petty when it comes to reading. There’s no getting around this. What do I mean? Well, most people only read recently published ‘flavour of the month’ books. Whatever is the current hit in each particular genre. Most people rarely, if ever, read books in translation. That’s a whole world of great literature excluded. If they dare to venture into the classics, it’s a few predictable tomes (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, etc). They like audiobooks (passive, less effort), graphic novels (easier to consume, less effort), modern books (simple vocabulary, familiar settings, less effort), short books (less effort). Anything that they can quickly add to their tally. And that’s important, because telling the world on social media that you read 150 books in 2024 is what it’s all about, isn’t it?

“Well fuck me, who’d have thought that the 13th century Welsh epic The Mabinogion was such a hoot?”

Now I’m not criticising people for their tastes in literature. What you like is what you like. If you get enjoyment and fulfilment from it, that’s fine, but it’s the same depressing issue we find with music (and, I suppose, almost everything else) - there’s a huge world out there to explore, so why play safe and stick to your narrow lowest common denominator path? Don’t be so fucking lazy and beholden to your social media peers. Try different things. Try something that wasn’t written originally in English, or within the last fifty years. Try something that all the people you follow on social media aren’t reading. You never know, you might learn something.