It’s January 2026, and four girls who met through a book club are standing in the Barcelona cold. As you might expect, they are talking about reading challenges.
“I won’t be doing one this year,” says I. “I haven’t finished mine, and I feel guilty.”
In 2025, she read over 30 books. According to her Goodreads account, that amounts to around 10,000 pages. She is echoing something that has been bouncing around my head ever since the blue banner appeared at the top of the website. This year, reading challenges are out.
I set my first reading challenge in 2016, although Goodreads introduced the feature in 2011. Of course, yearly book goals existed long before that and will likely persist for years to come. In 2026, 15 per cent of Americans have vowed to “read more”. Anyone familiar with goal-setting knows what comes next. “More” must be quantified.
The concept of a reading challenge is not uniquely rotten. Who doesn’t want to read more and scroll less? Who wouldn’t welcome a system that promises accountability and self-improvement in neat, numerical form? For a long time, it worked for me. In fact, it worked for a decade.
But this December, looking at the brown progress bar stretching towards the finish line, I did not feel like I had taken time out of my day to read. Instead, it felt like I had raced to complete yet another chore.
I can think of two occasions when I woke up at 6 a.m. to read before work just to finish a book in time for book club. Twice, I found myself listening to audiobooks at double speed on my way to the office.
“Okay, listening at double speed is out,” concedes A., who is still rooting for reading challenges. “I mean, I’m listening to My Brilliant Friend at 1.5, but that’s just because the reader speaks so slowly.”
Despite my stats, the last year did not include much reading, but a lot of math. I’ve been calculating how many pages I had left, how many I had to read each day, and what percentage I had to aim for. I was constantly rushing to hit my goal.
Maybe I had set the bar too high, but that is the problem with bars. Once they exist, they want to be raised. If I promised myself twelve books ten years ago, it was only natural to aim for twenty, then thirty, chasing the thrill of visible progress.
Then I began to notice the behavioural shifts. Subconsciously leaning towards shorter, easier books. Staring at the percentage on the side of my Kindle like a lifeboat. Ignoring the book my friend claimed changed her life because it was 560 pages long. And always, always, reaching for my phone as soon as I finished a book, just to watch that damn progress bar move. Is that what I had in mind when I set my reading goal?
What sealed the coffin for me? Learning about the overjustification effect. A well-documented phenomenon in psychology that suggests offering extrinsic rewards for an already intrinsically motivated behaviour tends to reduce the intrinsic enjoyment of that activity. In short, I was actively making reading less enjoyable by attaching a reward to it. I had turned it into a chore.
Worse still, reading was only part of the problem. I was cheating myself out of the enjoyment of watching films (Letterboxd, 100 movies per year), walking around (WeWard, 10,000 steps a day), and writing (TickTick, 500 words per day).
When everything you once enjoyed becomes something you have to do, how are you supposed to have fun?
In horror, I realised that there was only one behaviour I wasn’t rewarding at all. And yet, it was the one thing that called to me like the Green Goblin mask in Spider-Man, the relief in a day spent ticking boxes. Doomscrolling on my phone.
No wonder it feels impossible to break the addiction.
Now, I do not want to dissuade anyone who has already set a reading challenge. It is a deeply personal choice, and if it genuinely helps you read more, then it is doing its job.
What I have realised is that when I scribble “read 30 books” on the first page of my journal, I don’t actually want to read 30 books. I want to take more time to relax, spend less time online, and learn something new. And I can do that even if the books I read are 27, or one really big, long one.
This year, I’m deciding to focus more on creating space to read. Picking up the habit of putting my phone away in the morning and at night. Devoting my energy to finding books that make me want to shut out the world and curl up under the blankets, the way I did as a teenager.
And yet, I am not completely cured. I will still track my books, rate them, and maybe, secretly, count them. But for the first time in ten years, reading won’t be a chore, but the hobby I’d always longed for it to be.
Following along with DWBC Curriculum!, The Sisterhood Trap?
Here’s your weekly recommendation: I was Caroline Calloway, by Natalie Beach.