Every new year I start to see posts in my socials like, “How to Read More Books This Year” or “I’m going to read more books this year than I did last year.” I have a few friends who set themselves reading challenges on Goodreads that they try to beat every year. One friend read 100 books.

That’s about two per week, if you’re keeping track.

I read a lot, too. I love reading. I read physical books, Kindle books, and books on hoopla. I’m in two book clubs with my local library.

But I don’t want to read a million books this year, and I don’t think you should, either, for three-ish reasons.

1. You Owe it to Science

When you read a bunch more, it throws off the numbers and our science becomes less useful.

According to the Pew Center, about 3/4 of Americans have read at least one book in each of the last four years.

The “average American” read 12 books last year. Think about that. Did you read 12 books last year? Well, if you’re one of my friends, you probably did. We’re a bookish lot. You can probably think of several people who did not get close to 12 books, though, unless they were students and “forced” to read them. So where does this number come from?

Well, the median number is 4 books. That means that when you list out each person’s answer to the question, “How many books did you read last year?” in numerical order, then find the number in the exact middle of the sample, you wind up not at 12 but at 4.

If the sample was 20 people, it might look something like this:

0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 13, 14, 21, 57, 100

This sequence does average out to 12, so you can see how the numbers can obscure the fact that here five folks didn’t read a book at all but five other folks read a bunch. In this sample, 75% of people read not 12 but six or fewer books.

Those top five readers are the most likely to try to “beat” their record, I’d guess, meaning the first consequence of reading more is that we’ll continue to see skewed numbers regarding American reading habits.

In other words, you Reading Challenge folks are enabling the non- and light readers to coast on our 12-book-a-year laurels.

2. You Owe it to Yourself

Now, do you really “owe” science anything? Probably not. I mean, you ought to be grateful to the scientists who discovered all the amazing things that keep you alive so you can read books, but that’s not enough of a reason to change your reading behavior.

If you’re a non-reader, you might feel like you should make more of an effort to read something this year, but you probably won’t do it for science. Nor should you.

Reading is about bettering yourself, after all. You read because you believe it will make you a better person—whether because you’ll know more or be more empathic or just be more relaxed.

Book Math

It’s certainly true that reading two books will do more to broaden your world than reading just one. But can reading 100 books make you 100 times broader than reading just one?

That seems unlikely simply because of the cost in attention.

Say it takes you two weeks to read a book of about 200 pages. At that rate you could reasonably expect to read 25 or 26 books in a year. Chances are that’s more books than you actually read in 2016, so it’s not a bad number.

Those crazy kids reading 100 books a year are reading about two books per week. That’s doable for folks who have no kids or older kids, maybe, or who only work one job, or who don’t even like movies or TV, but that’s probably not most of us.

Diminishing Returns

If your life is as busy as mine, the only way you could do better than 25 books a year is to read more quickly. But reading fast comes at a cost.

You cannot read deeply if you read quickly, which means you cannot reap the moral and emotional benefits of reading.

You cannot read difficult books quickly, which means you will probably not understand some of what you read or you will avoid difficult books in favor of easy books which, again, may be less impactful for your life.

There’s simply no reason to presume that reading more is better than reading better. I’d be much more impressed with folks claiming that they were going to slow down and read well, really try to get as much as they can from the books they actually choose to read.

We have such a dogmatic belief in the goodness of books we don’t realize there is a point of diminishing returns. If we found that watching TV dramas had similar effects on our empathy as reading fiction, we would not therefore jump to the conclusion that it would be good to binge tons of TV dramas at 1.5x speed.

At a certain point, it’s hard to believe you’re even enjoying what you’re doing anymore, much less gaining much advantage from it.

You can’t read it all, anyway, so choose wisely, then read well.

3. You Owe it to Authors

I have a lot of writer friends who post links to their guest blogs and essays and poems and books, and I save most of them with every intention of reading them. Sometimes I hop over right away to try to read the piece.

But if I’m in the middle of other work, chances are I’ll read so quickly that I’ll technically be able to say, “Hey, I read your essay. Really nice.”—but I won’t have actually encountered the piece.

Without encounter, there is no growth. Most authors write because they want to make the world a more exciting, more beautiful, more meaningful, or otherwise better place to live. Reading them quickly dishonors the work of writing that went into the piece.

If you really love an author, slow down. If you really want to respect the person behind any book, slow down.

 

We have enough pressures in our lives to “do more” as it is. Of all the places I don’t want to pressure myself, reading books is one of the most sacrosanct.

So, my motto this year is, Don’t read more—read better.

Image: Public domain via Pixabay (feature). Eli Francis/Unsplash (inset)