Against Counting the Books You Read
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Last year, I read something like 40 books, not counting all of the titles I picked up and abandoned out of disinterest, the ones I half-skimmed for work, or the advance copies I read 20 pages of. Depending on your point of view, that number may seem impressive or underwhelming. It’s much higher than the average number of books read yearly by American adults, according to Gallup, but it feels lower than I’d like, and might be lower than you’d expect from a professional journalist on the literary beat. But I also maintain that this figure doesn’t offer any real insight into my 2023 reading habits—and that in 2024, we should all consider dropping the “books read” metric entirely.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- What to read if you want to reinvent yourself
- “Reasons to Live,” a poem by Ruth Awad
- It’s time to take another look at parole.
- The multiplying ‘Philip Roths’
What does 40 books even mean? I could have read three long classics and three dozen middle-grade chapter books. Should that number include online multimedia works such as Jon Bois’s sci-fi football epic 17776, which I revisited this past summer? If I excluded it because it technically isn’t a book, how would I justify that decision when plenty of the traditionally published novels I read—Tamsyn Muir’s fantasy space opera Gideon the Ninth, for example—are its clear cousins in style, substance, and genre? And my number of titles says nothing about how they might be categorized, their publication date, or how difficult they were.
Number of pages read is a slightly more illuminating figure, one I’ve seen my friends and colleagues share over the past week. (The StoryGraph, a Goodreads competitor growing in popularity in my circle, tracks reading in this manner.) That number includes the reading you did in books you didn’t finish, and better balances the effort of completing five Moby-Dick-size volumes against 25 The Great Gatsby–length novels. But some books’ language is simply denser and more demanding than others’. I’m currently speeding through Stephen King’s famous brick It, because King’s prose is self-consciously propulsive and straightforward—as in much genre fiction, the point is to find out what happens next. But when I read Justin Torres’s National Book Award–winning fever dream, Blackouts, I had to linger on each passage, trying to pull meaning from carefully redacted pages and vague conversations between characters. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, his novel in academic monograph’s clothing, required more interpretive work on my part than did Kristi Coulter’s memoir of working at Amazon, Exit Interview, though I enjoyed both immensely.
Quantifying my reading, whether by titles finished, pages read, or another metric, doesn’t capture the quality of my attention to each book. In 2024, that’s what I’m most concerned with, and logging, rating, and sharing on the social web might pull my focus away from the moment and back to my phone. As the year begins, my tentative plan is to keep jotting down titles chronologically in a simple notebook. And instead of trying to hit an arbitrary number of books read, or giving myself rules about ones I didn’t finish, I’m going to try to read more widely and with more curiosity: more nonfiction, more new-to-me authors, more classic literature, more of the books that remind me why I love my job. What works for me may not work for you—but I’ll invite you to join me in focusing more on what and how you read, instead of how much.
What to Read
On Beauty, by Zadie Smith
The patriarchs of two insular, upper-middle-class families, Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps, have been at each other’s throats, academically speaking, for years. Their intellectual feud centers on Rembrandt’s self-portraits, but their disagreements run much deeper: Howard is white and liberal, an atheist, and a supporter of affirmative action, whereas Monty is Black and conservative, a devout Christian, and believes that affirmative action is insulting to minorities. Jerome, Howard’s eldest, interns with Monty in England and falls in love with his family, and particularly his daughter, Vee—an affair that ends embarrassingly for all. When the Kippses then move to Wellington, Massachusetts, just a couple of blocks away from the Belseys, and Monty begins teaching at the same university where Howard is a professor, things get more complicated. The men butt heads over university policies even as their wives become friends, and their daughters eye each other suspiciously while taking similar classes. Although each family has tender moments and elements of happiness too, you may well be relieved that you are part of neither. — Ilana Masad
From our list: Six books to read during a stressful family holiday
Out Next Week
???? Unshrinking, by Kate Manne
???? Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, by Kohei Saito, translated by Brian Bergstrom
???? Ædnan, by Linnea Axelsson, translated by Saskia Vogel
Your Weekend Read
Maybe Don’t Send That Voice Note
The key to using voice notes gracefully, then, might be finding the right time and place. They seem to work best when the subject is idiosyncratic—and decidedly not urgent. Recently, my dad sent my entire family a clip of him mumble-singing, “Oh I love it and I hate it at the same time,” from the hit song “Daylight.” I appreciated the message even though I had no idea why he sent it: Its pointlessness was the point, captured perfectly by a voice memo. Sometimes, in a group chat, a friend’s personal psychodrama is most compellingly relayed with the rhetorical flourishes of a recording. Natahlia Carr, a copywriter living in Atlanta, told me that her friends sometimes send clips of themselves laughing in lieu of a less vibrant “lol.” Plus, voice notes have practical benefits. They cut out the trouble of scheduling a time to call for those who want to hear their friends’ and family members’ voices but live in different time zones. And for people with certain disabilities, voice notes can be a more convenient way to send and receive messages.
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