If you’re not an avid reader, you may be unfamiliar with the Goodreads Reading Challenge. Simply put, Goodreads is a platform to form book lists and share reading updates, and the challenge is a goal users can set every January 1st for how many books they want to read that year. It’s supposed to encourage users to continue reading, even telling them if they’re on pace, ahead, or behind throughout the year based on their goal. For nearly a decade since its creation in 2011, it did exactly that, but that’s been changing since 2020.
As TikTok’s popularity grew during the pandemic, so did the community on the app dedicated to discussing books, also known as BookTok. With its rise, came the rise of book-related influencers. By setting trends and promoting certain books, it’s clear that BookTok influencers have heavily affected the reading community, but one specific aspect is the Goodreads Reading Challenge.
Naturally, as a challenge centered on reading, setting goals on Goodreads is popular on Booktok. More importantly, it’s common to see Booktok influencers set goals of 100 or more books. That averages around 8-9 books per month or around 1-2 books per week. This is an ambitious goal, but many of these influencers meet or even exceed it. The downside of this has nothing to do with the reading goals themselves, but rather the influencers themselves. It’s common to see these Booktok influencers market themselves as “perfect readers.” So put together, the large amount of books they read and their depiction of themselves as proper reads end up enforcing the idea that the identity of being a reader is connected to the quantity of books read.
This is the core of the problem. As readers on BookTok internalize this idea, they feel the need to set higher reading goals. Then, to meet these goals, readers feel compelled to rush through the books they’re reading or read smaller books they’re not as interested in. Then, this spills over to Goodreads. When Goodreads users see their friends set and meet large reading goals throughout the year, they feel more compelled to do the same. In this way, readers not even engaging with Booktok are affected as well. The Goodreads Reading Challenge transformed from a motivator to read to just a record that proves how many books a person picked up in a given year. It’s a cruel domino effect that leads to one conclusion: people reading hundreds of books, without properly reading any of them.
It’s hard to assess the objective quality of a book, but it’s not hard to assess the objective quality of reading. If a person reads a book and comes to their own conclusions about it, they genuinely read the book. It doesn’t even matter if they even enjoyed the book, just the ability to properly process the book shows that someone genuinely read a book. So when people make the goal to read a large number of books rather than genuinely processing the book, the latter is forgotten.
This isn’t to say that the Goodreads Reading Challenge is a bad thing. It was created as a tool for readers, and when used in the way it’s intended, it actually does help readers stay motivated to read. While it may feel frustrating to not keep up with the reading paces of influencers, it’s important to remember how it benefits them. They’re reading large quantities of books to create content for their account, so they have to read that many books to maintain their position as an influencer. Above all, the fact that they read more does not make them ideal readers. If you genuinely take the time to read a book, then you’re a reader.
Diya’s Reading Nook is a biweekly series. Come back on Wednesdays for more!