‘Last year I read 137 books’: could setting targets help you put down your phone and pick up a book?

BookTok influencer Jack Edwards motivates himself with reading goals – and he’s not alone. Authors and avid readers discuss the rise of metrics, and reveal how many books they finished last year

Every January, thousands of readers log on to Goodreads, Instagram or TikTok and make the same declaration: this is the year I read 50 books. Or 75. Or 100. Screenshots of spreadsheets circulate, templates for tracking pages and percentages are downloaded, friends publicly pledge to “do better” than they did last year. What was once a private pastime is announced, quantified and, in some corners of the internet, judged.

The appeal is obvious: in a distracted age, reading can easily become crowded out by work, screens and fatigue. Literacy rates in the UK are stagnating: in 2024, around 50% of UK adults read regularly for pleasure, down from 58% in 2015.

As the UK launches its National Year of Reading, a steady drumbeat of commentary has framed the decline of book culture as a civilisational crisis. Columnists have painted lurid pictures of a post-literate society, in which the shrinking cultural centrality of books represents a slow unravelling of the habits that once underpinned modern public life. In this context, reading targets promise discipline and a sense of progress.

But do yearly reading goals actually help us read better, or do they risk hollowing out the very activity they claim to protect? As reading is increasingly tracked and performed online, there is a growing sense that a solitary pleasure is being reshaped by the logic of metrics and visibility. In a culture that counts steps, optimises sleep and gamifies meditation, the pressure to quantify reading may say less about books than about a wider urge to turn even our leisure into something measurable and, ultimately, competitive.

For Ayesha Chaudhry, who co-runs the Instagram account @between2books, this online book culture has become alienating. “The numbers I see online are wildly unsustainable,” she says. “I used to set huge targets – 70 or 100 books a year, written out in my diary. Then I’d get to December, feel guilty, and stare at all these empty spaces on the page.”

Last year, Chaudhry decided to purposely slow down, reading just 10 books – the fewest since childhood – and considers it one of her most satisfying reading years. “I actually sat with what I was reading, and also turned it into something more interactive,” she says. “Most of those books came into my life through conversations, recommendations from people I met on holiday, or listening to an author at an event. They became social experiences rather than items to tick off.”

The shift, she says, has eased both pressure and overconsumption. “I was buying books to meet goals, then feeling anxious because they weren’t read. It became a loop.” Now, her aims are non-numerical: exploring authors’ backlist titles, genres outside her comfort zone, and more time spent thinking rather than counting.

According to philosopher C Thi Nguyen, author of The Score, the phenomenon Chaudhry describes sits within a much wider cultural shift. In his book, Nguyen explores how modern life increasingly gamifies ordinary activities, showing how metrics and scoring systems can distort our experience of what we value.

“Gamification is when you take a natural activity, such as reading or communication, and explicitly apply game-like design features – scores, levels, streaks – to motivate people,” he says. The danger, Nguyen argues, is “value capture”: the moment when rich, complex experiences are flattened into numbers that begin to stand in for meaning.

“It’s very hard to share something like ‘this book changed me’ in a way that’s publicly accountable,” he says. “But it’s extremely easy to share that you’ve read 100 books. So the number becomes a kind of social currency – even though it doesn’t track what mattered.”

From step counts and calorie trackers to follower numbers and productivity dashboards, modern life increasingly rewards what can be measured and compared. “Large-scale data systems are built around what’s easy to count, not what’s genuinely important,” Nguyen says. “Curiosity, delight and genuine meaning cannot survive translation into a spreadsheet.”

That is not to say that voracious reading is always fuelled by an unhealthy desire for self-optimisation. Ella Risbridger, author of In Love With Love, represents the opposite extreme. Last year, she read more than 1,000 romance novels while researching her book, but deliberately refuses to track them. “I try to avoid anything that makes reading feel like maths,” she says. “Reading is where I go to escape targets.”

Journalist and author Afua Hirsch’s experience also illustrates this tension. As a judge for major literary prizes, she has spent years reading under intense deadlines. “When I was judging the Booker, I had to read about 150 books in five months,” she says. “It was literally a book a day.”

Hirsch describes this kind of reading as both a privilege and a strain. “Your brain becomes like a computer. You’re processing, and that’s stressful, especially when something is beautifully written and you want to linger.” After such intense periods, she often needs time to relearn how to read for pleasure.

Nguyen is careful not to dismiss metrics altogether. Used lightly, he says in his book, scoring systems can be useful, giving people a clear goal and immediate feedback. After all, we are in a moment of genuine concern about literacy. With reading levels falling among children and attention spans fraying across all ages, numerical goals can be the first step on the ladder. “Metrics can help people get started,” he says. “But ideally, they’re temporary scaffolding. You need to develop your own reasons to read.”

Reader tracking platform StoryGraph, the fastest-growing rival to Amazon-owned Goodreads, was built in conscious opposition to the competitive reading culture increasingly fostered online. Founded by Nadia Odunayo, the platform positions itself as reader-first, data-light and deliberately flexible.

“Before I built the product, I spent months just watching Bookstagram,” Odunayo says. “A lot of people were stressed by social media and the sense that reading was a competition. I didn’t want to build something people would burn out from.”

Instead of focusing solely on the number of books completed, StoryGraph allows users to set page goals, time goals, or habit-based challenges. Page goals avoid incentivising short books, Odunayo says, and allow for books abandoned partway through. “If you read 50 pages, that effort matters,” she says. “You’re not punished for curiosity, or for reading War and Peace.”

The platform also foregrounds non-numerical challenges: reading across cultures, genres or identities; working through prize shortlists; only reading books already owned. Many are open-ended, deliberately resisting the pressure of annual completion. “You could be doing these challenges for the rest of your reading life,” Odunayo says.

The tension is clear: reading goals promise incentives in an era of distraction, but they also risk importing the logic of productivity into one of the few remaining spaces of offline pleasure. As Nguyen puts it: “Reading goals can be good starters, but if the number remains the reason you read, something has gone wrong.”

Running the numbers

Authors, a bookseller, an influencer and a librarian tally their 2025 reads

Derek Owusu author: 38 books
I didn’t read a book until I was 24. When I discovered reading, it was for pure pleasure. I read at my own pace and reread freely. I don’t usually track the number of books I’ve read, and even worrying about whether I’ve read “enough” irritates me. If I’ve read five books, who cares? I’m baffled by people being impressed or unimpressed by reading totals.

The only goal I set is if I really like an author, I’ll read their back catalogue. I don’t count how many books there are, I just keep going until I get tired. I want to improve as a writer, so I read with that in mind too. But when I’m writing it’s also paradoxically harder to read at all, because I become tunnel-visioned and I don’t want to accidentally plagiarise anything.

Rereading is a big part of how I read too. People say you can’t judge an album after one listen, but a book gets one read and a definitive verdict. Nabokov said: “One cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” The first time, you learn the texture; the second time, you see the craft.

My opinions change with every reread. Last year, I reread The Fall by Albert Camus and thought, “Why did I love this so much the first time?” It’s probably because I was in my early 20s and very angsty. I reread F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby every year: last year I didn’t like it much; this year I thought it was amazing.

Chrissy Ryan bookseller at BookBar: 145 books
Last year was the first time I set a reading goal: 100 books. I thought it was achievable and would keep me focused, especially if I hit a reading rut. When you work in books, a rut can spiral into, “Do I not love books any more? What if I can never read again and this is my whole career?” The goal helped, but only because I made a rule: if I started stressing about numbers, I’d stop.

Owning BookBar has changed how I read. I’m usually buying three to six months ahead, and I try to read as much as possible in that window to know what I’m stocking. If a book is pitched as “big and buzzy” and I’ve read it and didn’t enjoy it, I might not buy it. Conversely, sometimes I miss a book and read it later, such as The Correspondent by Virginia Evans – I wish I’d caught it earlier because I loved it and it sold really well.

Some of my favourite books I read last year (which are actually coming out this year) are I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder and Frida Slattery As Herself by Ana Kinsella.

Reading is pleasure and work for me. As a bookshop, you’re taste-making: you’re saying, “We endorse this.” That creates pressure, which can become suffocating. So, in December I stopped reading ahead and read purely for pleasure, and it reminded me why I love it. I’m trying to return to classics and older books more this year too, because having a greater understanding of literary context makes me a better bookseller.

Jack Edwards book influencer with 1.5 million followers across Instagram and TikTok: 137 books
I set reading goals that feel achievable. Last year, my goal was 100 books and I read 137. The point isn’t competition; it’s noticing how I spend my time. How much did I read last week versus how much time did I spend on my phone? The latter becomes about how you’re perceived; it turns toxic.

One of the ways I’ve managed to build a career out of this is by gamifying it – I realised that numbers make things more clickable: it’s the reason people love listicles, that number is satisfying to us. But, for me, reading has always been something I really enjoy, and you have to make sure you’re only competing with yourself rather than doing it for other people.

I think of reading like going to the gym: you train endurance and strength. It’s not just how long you read, but how long you can sustain focus and critical thought. The brain is a muscle, you build it over time.

I’m naturally a slow reader and I like lingering over books. I read with a pen in hand, underlining and marking passages. If someone pulls a book off my shelf, the markings show my path through it. The book tells the author’s story, but it also tells the story of me reading it.

Two of my favourite books I read last year were Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, which I thought was such a fun exploration of internet culture and the loneliness epidemic, and Gunk by Saba Sams, an amazing novel set in a nightclub in Brighton about an unconventional family dynamic.

My goals now are mostly non-numerical. After studying English literature, I realised how narrow the canon can be, so I prioritised literature in translation, and I fell in love with Argentinian horror and Japanese and Korean micro-studies of character. This year, I’m reading more African writers and exploring the continent’s literary heritage.

Olivia Young-Thompson librarian: 45 books
Last year, I read about two or three books a month, but I didn’t set a target. I also started writing my own book, and when I’m writing I find it hard to read much. One hobby replaced another for a while, and that’s fine.

My reading was a mix: tiny charity-shop paperbacks, big novels, classics and “fluff”. My favourite books from last year included Katherine Arden’s Winternight trilogy, which I loved because it felt cold and wintry during a hot summer, and also some nonfiction, particularly Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted.

Working as a librarian, I actually don’t feel huge pressure to read hundreds of books, though it helps to know about the prize winners, as that’s what people often come in looking for your thoughts about.

Some people read 100 books a year, and if you can do that, wonderful. But if you can’t, you shouldn’t be seen as any less of a reader. I think the competitive side of reading mostly exists online.

There’s also a difference between racing through novellas and spending weeks with War and Peace. I hate fast fashion and fast anything, and I’m scared books are starting to fall into that category too. I’ve gone back to rereading books I loved as a child – it’s like re-listening to a favourite album. Forgoing that pleasure just to add another number to a tally feels pointless.

Jan Carson author: 300 books
I read for about four hours a day. It can sound shocking, but reading is my job. That time includes reading for pleasure, for content that I’m teaching my students, articles I’m writing and proofs I’ve been sent.

I don’t read in four-hour chunks. I break it into an hour in the morning, an hour in bed, and I read on the treadmill or exercise bike. I keep a book in my bag, so if someone’s late for coffee or I’m stuck on a bus, I read, which pulls me away from doomscrolling. Short stories are perfect for those small windows of time.

I keep a semi-private Instagram to track what I’ve read, but it’s just for me really. A lot of my goals are non‑numerical – for example, this will be my seventh year of reading an author’s entire canon in chronological order. That doesn’t have to be an overwhelming goal: in 2020, I did Agatha Christie, which was a lot of books, but for Toni Morrison it was only 11. You see writers grow into their voice, which is heartening in a publishing culture that venerates the perfect debut.

My favourite books last year were Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man and Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. I try to read across genres and I’m not a snob about what I read, either. Some authors slow you down and reward attention, such as Marilynne Robinson and Hilary Mantel. I’m also drawn to older writers such as Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble; the sentences move at a different rhythm. I spend a lot of time talking about books with friends – I love that communal argument and exchange.