Apparently ‘read more’ is a common New Year’s Resolution. A whole lot of readers set goals and sign up for challenges these days. People see reading as virtuous; an hour spent reading makes your more deep and intellectual than an hour spent scrolling Instagram or rewatching The Office.

I suppose that could be true. Reading more might do you a world of good. I know a dozen or more people who read 50 or more books a year, though, and seen many more online, and most of what they read isn’t very deep or intellectual. Most of them seem out for sheer quantity, counting short stories and audiobooks they play on their commutes, and reading mainly light, quick books to pad out their numbers. I don’t want to knock anyone’s hobby–if turning books into a numbers game makes you happy you should definitely do that–but I’m not sure that kind of reading is really more deep and intellectual than rewatching The Office. In fact, I’m pretty sure The Office is more deep and intellectual than many fantasy and romance novels I’ve read over the years.

Even if (especially if?) you’re reading really classic, intellectually exciting material, reading for a goal can feel like a chore instead of a hobby or pleasant intellectual exercise. As much as I loved college, I don’t really miss the constant deadlines they set on my intellectual development. Too many lofty goals can suck the fun out of lifelong learning, making it just another way to force more productivity out of ourselves.

Of course, for some people the goal is not sheer numbers but something ambitious in a different way. For these people, there are dozens of challenges to undertake. Reading challenges can sometimes encourage you to expand your reading horizons and try new things, but a shocking number of them aim for a book per week. You could cover a lot of ground that way but I’m not sure how well you’d really process all that new stuff coming at you. I can read a book in a week easily, but I’d like the option to sit with it longer than that, especially when I’m aiming to expand my horizons and understand a new point of view. I’m all for reading projects–I thoroughly enjoyed working through the “gothic reading list” I set myself a while back, and I’m still working on my Nobel project–but I’m not sure I’d like them as much as an intense group challenge. Then again, I’m quite the DA recluse; more social readers might love the group dynamic.

That said, I don’t think goals and challenges, even really ambitious ones, are all bad. It’s easy for hobbies and self care to fall by the wayside as life gets busy and stressful, and for some of us reading and study are an important source of meaning and comfort. If setting a reading goal helps you make time for reading, or helps “give you permission” to read by making it feel productive, that’s a great thing. Even if you don’t reach that goal you can look back at the end of the year and remember the good times you had trying. Plus, if you’re someone who tracks their reading through Goodreads or the Storygraph or some such, it can be fun to look at your stats. The Storygraph gives you all sorts of graphs and pie charts–my pie charts say I like my books dark, slow, and classic.

Storygraph will probably ask me to make a reading goal around the New Year; it did when I joined over the summer. I more or less randomly told it I wanted to read 10 books for the year, and since the year was half over it promptly started telling me I was way behind in my goal. I’m terrible at recording what I read but I’ve managed to input 11 books now, so my app is no longer disappointed in me. I can’t decide whether I should set a new goal when it asks or fly solo the way I’ve traditionally done. What say ye? Are goals a great source of motivation or a millstone dragging me down? Should I find or create a Dark Academic reading challenge? What do you do?