MENZIES: Don’t infect yourself with the Book Count reading goals this year

Image: My bookshelves. How many have I read?…that’s another story.

This is not a New Year’s Resolution column. If there’s change in your life worth making, get going, don’t wait.  

Start right now! 

However, there is a reason why we start thinking about Goals when the calendar turns. 

Some of those Goals may include the timeline of a year, so it’s natural when Jan. 1 hits to say I’m going to lose 20 pounds this year, or I’m going to learn a new language, quit smoking, etc.  

For me, I’ve been infected by the long-standing benchmark of reading 50 books in a year. This is a common one for readers. 

It roughly equates to one book a week, which should be a long enough period to finish 70 per cent of the books that are your coveted “To Read List.” 

The goal is lofty for my reading habits and one I’ve never fulfilled. It’s not one that I’m inclined to cheat with either. I certainly could read 50 books if I go back to my old Hardy Boys collection. Heck, Archie counts right? 

Here are my reading habits: Guns-a-blazing through January into February. I’m gulping through books early. But there will be at least a two-month period where the list absolutely stalls. 

I’m hot and then cold. 

I start with a sports or music biography. Easy-peasy. Back into the rhythm. A short novel from a favourite author: gimme Vonnegut, gimme Camus, gimme Salinger. 

Now we’re ready. Then we pick a big boy next. Heavy, physically and intellectually. Dostoyevsky. Pynchon. A great tome of a book. (This is not a humble brag I swear). 

And this is where the goal falls apart and I feel this sense of shame or loss. It’ll be another year not hitting that goal. 

There becomes this BOOK COUNT pressure, finishing a short book fast. Pounding through books, for some invisible score that doesn’t matter to anyone, and really doesn’t affect me in any tangible way, except for this unachievable goal of 50 books in a year that I’ve foisted upon my psyche for the past 10 years.

The good vs great

But why do I feel this way? 

One of the reasons is this nasty habit of buying books. The weight of all these hundreds of books then carries a psychological load as well. 

Like the question, so when in the hell are you gonna read these books you keep buying? 

We simply aim too high for our goals at times. While it’s good to aim high, there is a dangerous tendency, while having your anxieties take hold for a moment, that you stop everything altogether. 

What’s the point? All the rumination leading to…a full and complete stop. 

We become undone and start to hate the thing we enjoy. We resent the good because it isn’t the best. 

Author Jim Collins when talking about businesses has this quote: “Good is the enemy of great.” He uses this to describe the complacency of not striving for more. 

When used personally, it has a way of creating resentment. 

Few things are truly great, so should we not still strive for good, should we not point our arrows toward the great and have our intrusive thoughts be damned? 

Of course. 

But it’s easier said than done. 

We have to take it easy on ourselves in order to make great change and achieve progress, and also remind ourselves why we put such a goal before ourselves. 

In this case, extract the value from your reading. It’s not a race, and I struggle with that. 

I’ll take my score of 20 in 2025, anticipating the great void of reading in the fall, and feel good about it.

At least, that’s the goal…