Why I Refuse To Track How Many Books I've Read

I recently started wearing my 3-year-old Apple Watch again because I wanted to return to running. For the first two weeks, everything went well. I tracked my runs with the watch and gloated over my 14-day streak. But around the one-month mark, I found myself going for runs to close the rings. My run streak overshadowed the joy of breaking a sweat first thing in the morning, and before I knew it, I started dreading my morning runs.

The same goes for a suite of other apps I have on my phone. One app wants me to track my expenses daily, while another screams at me for not practising my French on time. And just before I head to bed each night, another app wants to log my mood so they can recommend the right meditation for me. In this day and age, the ideal human is indistinguishable from a mechanistic robot. There seems to be a fetishization of data to the point where obsessively tracking our progress becomes the end in itself.

But there’s one area of my life I never tracked: how many books I’ve read every year. People routinely ask for my Goodreads account, but I always end up drawing a blank while leaving them twisting and turning in frustration. So, before these people start throwing eggs and rolling my house, here’s my justification for not tracking my reading progress.

A Workaholic Culture

I recently wrote a piece on why people are obsessed with taking photographs when they’re travelling and I’d like to expand on one of the points. Susan Sontag, in her book On Photography, wrote:

“The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.”

For Sontag, photographing temporarily reduces the chaos of “not being at home”. It’s a familiar act in uncertain times: “Stop, take a photograph, and move on”. And sometimes photographs, like obsessively tracking our daily habits, become ends in themselves. Furthermore:

“The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic—Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun.”

This excerpt is very illuminating because it points out the relationship between our work culture and our obsessive urge to document everything. In the context of travel, documentation takes the form of photography. In our downtime outside of work, documentation urges us to track our sleep, diet, exercise routine and mood. We turned life-enriching habits into another form of work out of the guilt of not working, which certainly applies to reading.

Reading is a non-linear pursuit.

Progress tracking is usually linear; sometimes, tracking things like our exercise routine makes sense if we don’t get carried away by data alone.

But reading books is a non-linear pursuit. No amount of data can capture the qualitative experience, and sometimes, one excellent book is worth more than ten mediocre ones. On top of that, good books are supposed to disorientate us and challenge our perspectives. And in the face of this disorientation, just like snapping a photograph, marking a book as “read” on Goodreads soothes and exempts us from sitting with the confusion for a little longer.

Yet, the true value of reading lies in the space of sustained engagement. This unique window of cognitive strain and curious probing cannot be tracked, monitored or quantified.  And to make space for this kind of deep engagement is to risk not being traditionally productive (you only read 1 book this month?). Yet, the rich intellectual reward is beyond anything that can be measured.

Conclusion: I read them really, really well.

I want to end this post with a story to bring this point home.

In a clip from the 2002 documentary on the French thinker Jacques Derrida, the philosopher invited the crew into his new library. The shelves reached all the way to the tall ceiling, and they were stuffed full of references, journals, and a few vampire novels Derrida hadn’t read yet. When the interviewer asked the philosopher if he had read most of the books from the shelves, Derrida chuckled and said no. “I’ve read maybe three or four,” he said, “but I read them really, really well.”

Derrida published over 40 books in his life, and while the story of him only reading three or four books isn’t completely accurate, it does reveal a crucial principle of reading. A survey of Derrida’s works quickly revealed that there are a few thinkers he returns to again and again: Freud, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. To people’s surprise, no philosopher is ever acquainted with the entire body of Western philosophy. Still, all of them found their way to the frontiers of the discipline through engaging with different books.  

Similarly, in our personal lives, we don’t need to read through an entire bookshelf full of New York Times Bestsellers or use quantity to justify our progress. Sometimes, reading a few life-changing books really, really well is enough for living an enriched life, and there’s always space to read more without the burden of hitting a goal.