Several recent lists of January resolutions and self-improvement plans have included the injunction to read more, to set goals of minutes or pages alongside goals of steps walked and calories not eaten.
I understand that many people enjoy “gamifying” daily life, though for me quantification only makes a potential failure of every moment, movement and mouthful. But even if you are, or think yourself, unharmed by the measuring and counting of the body, I’m troubled by the idea of a similar approach to our relationship with art.
Setting “reading goals” assumes that reading is both good for you and not innately pleasurable, like flossing your teeth or cleaning the bathroom. You’ll be glad you did it afterwards.
There seems to be an assumption that this kind of “healthy” reading involves books rather than newspapers or websites or Substacks, certainly not social media. I haven’t seen the same rules suggested for listening to music or going to the theatre or cinema or art gallery, much less gaming, and I wonder if that’s because of the association of reading with formal education.
Here’s why you should never set ‘reading goals’ in an effort of grim self-improvement
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The idea that reading is innately virtuous, other than religious material, is modern. The first mass-market secular prose in English was travel writing and what we would now call ‘self improvement’, books instructing working-class readers in the ways of the middle and upper classes they might hope to join.
As literacy increased and print technology facilitated access to books, reading opened up the world and facilitated mobility of all kinds, some of them threatening to old orders; it’s not unreasonable to compare the disruptive potential of books in the early modern period to those of the internet now. Stories of all kinds also came in print form, but the novel as modern readers would recognise it established itself in the 1700s, and was particularly associated with women, as both writers and readers, from the 1770s onwards.
We have forgotten most of those early female novelists, but there was a colourful and sexy Gothic much like today’s “romantasy”, and Austen was not the only woman writing literary fiction; try Frances Burney for a darker approach to similar stories.
Eighteenth- and 19th-century sermons and parenting handbooks plead with parents not to allow young women to read fiction in much the same way that their modern equivalents agonise about the effects of gaming: novels will give young readers unrealistic and dangerous ideas, especially in relation to love, sex and marriage, and turn their heads away from constructive participation in the real world. (I told my kids about this comparison early in their teens. This was a mistake: every time we set boundaries for screen time, they pointed out that we were under the same pointless delusion as 18th-century patriarchs.)
There was particular hand-wringing over the privacy of novel-reading: a family gathering around the fire to listen to Father reading aloud was one thing, a girl hidden away in her bedroom breathlessly devouring romance quite another. Again, the comparison with our modern anxiety about gaming and screens in bedrooms suggests itself, which is not to say that either Victorian or modern parents are wrong.
There are, of course, many different kinds and ways of reading: for instruction, for escapism, for wonder, to see ourselves in reflection, to see points of view we don’t meet in daily life, to experience beauty.
[ Lovely places in Ireland for bookworms to curl up and readOpens in new window ]
Some of them often do require a measure of willpower. I don’t always feel like the reading I am paid to do when I write a review or research a project, and I know my students don’t always feel like doing the reading that will challenge their assumptions or underpin or undermine an argument. Reading should sometimes be work the same way that thinking should sometimes be work. We’re not doing either properly if it’s always easy. But as a writer, as a novelist, I jib at the idea that reading, especially fiction, should be undertaken in a spirit of grim self-improvement.
Read for wonder, for joy, for sorrow. Read because books change your mind and your world. Read for comfort in affliction and affliction in comfort. Read because you can’t stop, because you know pain, because you know delight, because the book is difficult or alluring or both at once. But don’t read to tick a box. That’s what your tax return is for.