On performative reading, reading goals, impossible TBRs, slow reading, and the quiet pleasure of not keeping score

Somewhere in the first bright days of January, when human beings are peculiarly susceptible to the belief that a new calendar has also supplied them with a new character, readers begin making promises.

This year, we shall read fifty books. Or seventy-five. Perhaps a hundred, while the new-year spirit is still afire and optimism has not yet remembered the importance of moderation. We shall finally conquer the books already waiting reproachfully upon our shelves; we shall read more classics, more translations, more nonfiction, one book from every country, twelve books by authors we have never read before, the complete works of somebody formidable, and that enormous Russian novel which has spent three years being moved from bedside table to bedside table with all the solemn ceremony of an heirloom and none of the inconvenience of actually being opened.

The intentions are usually excellent. Reading is one of the loveliest things a person can wish to do more of, and in an age which is endlessly inventive in finding smaller, brighter and noisier objects upon which to squander our attention, there is something rather hopeful in wanting to give more of it to books.

And yet, by August, a curious change has sometimes occurred. The fifty-book goal is no longer an invitation but an accusation. Goodreads informs us that we are six books behind schedule. The To Be Read pile, once a collection of future pleasures, has acquired the atmosphere of unfinished administrative work. A novel of eight hundred pages, which might once have inspired desire, now presents an awkward mathematical problem. One begins looking fondly at books under three hundred pages, not because brevity has suddenly become irresistible, but because December is approaching and Middlemarch, however magnificent, counts as only one.

A pleasure has acquired targets, statistics, streaks, monthly wrap-ups, spreadsheets, colour-coded trackers and annual performance reviews. One cannot help wondering when, exactly, reading became another thing we had to be good at.

When a Library Became a To-Do List

The phrase TBR pile is revealing in a way I am not sure we intended. There was once something wonderfully extravagant about possessing unread books. They represented possibility: an unopened door here, an unknown country there, some future rainy afternoon already provided for. A shelf full of unread novels was not evidence of failure any more than a pantry full of food suggested that one had been negligent in not eating everything immediately. Now the unread book has acquired a faint moral charge. It is something to get through.

We speak of “tackling” our TBRs, “making progress” on them, “clearing” our shelves and putting ourselves on book-buying bans until we have behaved responsibly towards the novels already in our possession. None of this is very grave, of course, and readers have always accumulated more books than time; but the language is striking. We have somehow taken one of the few forms of abundance which ought to be entirely pleasurable and made ourselves slightly guilty for possessing it.

Social reading platforms have made that abundance visible in unprecedented ways. BookTok alone now contains more than 80 million posts, while TikTok reported this summer that younger users increasingly discover books through the community; it would be foolish to deny how much good has come of this, when readers have found obscure writers, revived forgotten books, filled bookshops and discovered that an enthusiasm once enjoyed privately may be shared with thousands of strangers.

Yet abundance has its own peculiar anxieties. There is always another recommendation arriving before the present book is finished, another beautiful edition, another monthly list, another novel described as essential, devastating, life-changing or sufficiently addictive to be consumed before breakfast. The future reading life expands until no actual lifetime could accommodate it, and soon enough, the TBR ceases to be a promise and becomes a debt.

The Trouble With Counting Books

There is nothing inherently joyless about a reading goal. For some readers, a number is a small piece of scaffolding around an intention they genuinely value; twelve books may protect twelve evenings which would otherwise disappear into scrolling, while fifty may be perfectly natural for somebody who reads quickly and happily. Current reading culture itself contains both impulses: on Fable, the most common 2026 goal was a modest twelve books, while fifty was the second most popular.

The difficulty is not the number. It is what the number begins to do to the reading. An academic interviewed by ABC earlier this year made the useful distinction that numerical goals can motivate people, but may also turn recreational reading into something resembling work; readers themselves describe becoming conscious of being “behind”, even when nobody but an app is keeping account. On Goodreads communities, the consequences appear in more homely form: readers confess to choosing shorter books because longer ones threaten their yearly total, or to feeling anxiety over a challenge designed, presumably, to increase their pleasure.

Three slight novels may represent greater success than Bleak House. A book read quickly is statistically more useful than one which makes you stop every ten pages because a sentence has unsettled something you thought you understood. Rereading becomes almost wasteful, since one could be acquiring a new title instead. Poetry is inconvenient. Essays are difficult to count. A chapter read twice because it was beautiful has made no additional contribution to the annual total whatsoever.

The number knows that a book has been finished; it knows nothing about what happened while you were inside it. It cannot record the half-hour spent returning to one paragraph, the character who followed you into the washing-up, the argument scribbled furiously in a margin, the evening when twenty pages were enough because those twenty pages had required something more valuable than speed. It cannot distinguish between a novel swallowed in three distracted hours and one read over a month until its rooms have begun to feel oddly familiar. The fault lies scarcely with Goodreads; rather, we are the ones who ask it to pronounce upon whether the year has been well spent by basing our judgement on the number of books read.

Reading Has Acquired an Audience

Something else has changed alongside the numbers. Reading, once among the more private of pleasures, has become wonderfully social. There are reading vlogs and monthly wrap-ups, annotated editions displayed page by page, aesthetic shelves, reading journals, public ratings, live reactions, reading sprints, book clubs extending across continents and entire online friendships founded upon the discovery that two strangers possess equally unreasonable feelings about the same fictional person. Fable reported that 820,000 readers joined a new book club in a single year, while TikTok’s BookTok events now occupy institutions as august as the British Library.

This is not a corruption of reading; rather, it is one of its pleasures. Books have always wanted conversation. People lent them, argued over them, wrote in their margins, gathered in drawing rooms, joined circulating libraries and pressed novels upon reluctant relations with the conviction that affection would eventually overcome resistance. There is nothing especially modern about wanting somebody else to read the thing one has loved, but an audience changes the temperature of almost any activity.

Once reading can be displayed, it can also be compared. Shelves become evidence of taste; totals become evidence of discipline; annotations may demonstrate attentiveness; difficult books may carry a little intellectual glamour, while owning the correct beautiful editions suggests something about the sort of life conducted in their vicinity. Even the reading slump, that perfectly ordinary period in which the mind refuses every book offered to it, begins to feel like a condition requiring immediate repair.

It is possible, amid all this visibility, to become faintly self-conscious about something which once required no witness at all.

Am I reading enough? Is my taste adventurous enough? Have I read the book everybody is discussing? Should I be annotating? Ought I to remember more? Is listening to it cheating? Does rereading count? Why have I only finished eighteen books when somebody on the internet has finished one hundred and twelve and apparently also maintains employment, friendships and healthy skin? Questions like these start to flood your mind, and the looming sense of inadequacy takes on a more menacing shape. There is always somebody reading faster than you. There is, however, also somebody reading more slowly, though they are less likely to have made a reel about it.

The Slow Readers Are Beginning to Rebel

Which may explain why one of the more interesting reading trends of 2026 is not concerned with what people are reading at all, but with the manner in which they are doing it.

Everand and Fable have identified a growing slow-reading movement, with readers discussing smaller goals, books deliberately savoured rather than raced through, reading away from notifications and a desire for deeper engagement instead of higher volume. Their mid-year analysis describes it explicitly as a reaction against towering TBRs, streaks and the culture of reading quickly enough to keep producing new things to say about what one has just finished.

There is something almost comic in having arrived at a historical moment in which reading a book slowly requires a movement. For most of literary history, slowness was simply what books demanded. A Victorian novel might arrive in weekly or monthly installments in magazines spread out over a year or two; its first readers could not binge the remaining chapters because Mr. Doyle had not gotten to write them yet. And so the reader had to wait on tenterhooks to know what will become of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson next. A long novel was not an obstacle to one’s annual total because nobody had told the reader an annual total was required. People reread because books were expensive, access was limited, and because the distinction between having finished a book and having exhausted it would have seemed obvious.

I would not romanticise this past too much. There is no particular virtue in being prevented from acquiring books by poverty, nor is a nineteenth-century reading habit automatically nobler because it involved more patience. Modern readers possess an abundance our predecessors would have envied bitterly.

But abundance has perhaps made dwelling more difficult. The moment a book ends, another is waiting, and behind that another, until lingering begins to feel inefficient. We finish a novel which has moved us and almost immediately open an app to decide what comes next (i’ve been guilty of this plenty of times, I’d know). The afterlife of the book, those few hours or days in which characters once remained undisturbed in the imagination, is interrupted by a recommendation engine with excellent efficiency. Slow reading could restore the possibility that not every pause requires filling.

But There Is No Moral Prize for Reading Slowly Either

There is an obvious trap here, and literary culture has fallen into it often enough to deserve suspicion. The moment we decide that reading rapidly is shallow, slow reading becomes the newest method of being virtuous. Then somebody will inevitably announce that they read only one novel a month but properly, perhaps with a fountain pen and a grave expression, and we shall have succeeded only in replacing one competition with another.

Some books should be devoured. There are novels which almost resent sleep and others which invite a slower courtship; there are weeks when five books disappear and months when the same one remains beside the bed, not from any defect in either reader or book but because life has entered the room and declined to leave. Rereading counts, if one requires it to count at all. A hundred books may be read with intelligence and twelve with distraction.

The point is not that one pace is morally superior, but that pace ought to belong to the reader and the book, not to the scoreboard.

This is what I like about the present resistance to performative reading when it is at its best. It does not ask us to become more serious readers; it asks us to stop demanding that reading constantly produce evidence of itself.

Perhaps a Hobby Is Allowed to Be Useless

The larger difficulty may be that we have become uncomfortable with unmeasured pleasure. Work has productivity systems. Phones report our screen time with the grave disappointment of a governess. Language learning has streaks; meditation has streaks; habits have trackers; leisure becomes “self-care”, which grants enjoyment the dignity of sounding medically advisable.

Reading has been remarkably easy to recruit into this world because books already possess cultural prestige. One does not merely enjoy them; one is supposed to become better through them: cleverer, calmer, more empathetic, more articulate, more informed, less distracted. All of these things may happen, and reading deserves every serious claim made for its value, but sometimes one may also read because it is raining, or because the house is quiet, because one wants to know who committed the murder.

It is a sad world indeed where leisure is treated as if it were a small dessert which responsible adults may have once the kitchen is clean and every email answered. If pleasure must wait until everything is finished, pleasure may wait forever. Perhaps this is what slow reading, beneath all the language of intentionality and digital detoxing, is really reaching for: not slowness itself, but permission.

Permission to read the long book even though it will ruin the monthly statistics; to abandon the acclaimed novel which has become a private feud; to spend three weeks in Middlemarch without apologising; to reread something instead of expanding one’s literary horizons; to own books which remain unread because a library is allowed to contain a future; to finish twenty books in a year and remember fifteen of them with tenderness.

There is no certificate waiting at the end; and there needn’t be one. For all the splendid things reading may teach us, its oldest magic is simpler. For a little while, consciousness is permitted to leave the narrow room of itself and enter another mind, another house, another century; and if we come back having read only seventeen pages, with the annual target no nearer and the TBR no smaller, it is possible that nothing has gone wrong. A book is not always a task awaiting completion.

Sometimes it is merely somewhere to stay awhile.

Written by Nishat Hossain. I write about books, culture, everyday life and the questions that make each of them interesting. For commissions and collaborations, visit my Work With Me page.