When did reading become so competitive? How to avoid the pressure to read even more books next year

It’s the beginning of a new year and all I can think about is the number 11. It’s haunting me: a reminder of exactly how many books I fell short of completing the 40-book challenge I set myself for 2025. Back at the start of the year, reading 40 novels honestly didn’t feel like that much of a feat for me. As a child, I was an avid reader, tearing through books as soon as I could get my hands on them and rereading my old favourites (hello, The Twilight Saga) in between. I suspect I still read more than the average person does: mostly on my 45-minute commute to work but also on holiday and in the evenings before bed. Yet every year, my January resolution list includes the same command: read more.

And I have. I may have started slowly, but during the summer I read heavily, inching my way up my friendship group’s Goodreads ranking. However, by October the realisation set in that I was barely halfway there with less than two months to go. That’s when I started to get competitive. 

I’d force myself to finish a book I wasn’t enjoying just to check it off my list, eyeing up the shortest novels on my shelf, thinking: I could finish both of those off in one day if I tried really hard. I was consuming more, but enjoying it so much less, unable to savour the descriptions and quirky characters in the way I usually would. That’s when I realised I’d turned an activity I loved into a competition – one that nobody else was really playing.

Once upon a time, it used to be what you’d read that secured you ultimate bragging rights. I can’t count how many hours I’ve lost poring over ‘classics’ that I genuinely hated but other people couldn’t believe I hadn’t read. Now, though, it’s not just what you read, but how much and how fast. What’s more, in the age of (over)sharing on social media, the once personal and private act of reading has become public and performative. Booktok influencers share ambitious 100-title reading lists, updating their millions of followers daily on how their page count is progressing and, intentionally or not, making everyone else feel inadequate for barely squeezing 15 minutes of Kindle time a day. 

While this can motivate people to carve out more time to read, more often than not it exacerbates the dreaded feeling of ‘not doing enough’ of your favourite hobby and not having a perfectly curated shelf of intelligent, zeitgeisty reads. “Every December, no matter how much I’ve been on my A-game that year, I feel this subtle pressure to read more the next year,” agrees Stylist’s features editor Holly Bullock. “I’m sure it’s something to do with the comparison trap of scrolling through everyone’s end-of-year book stacks on Instagram but, as much as my TBR pile is growing, the amount of free time I have in an average week is unfortunately not.”

But when the act of enjoying a good book has become warped by the performance of consuming it, is it even pleasurable at all? Instead of savouring a novel, it feels more like frantically cramming before an exam. Ultimately, it’s doing ourselves – and the books we’re reading – a disservice. As Holly adds: “For 2024, my main reading goal is to give myself a break; ultimately, I think it’s often the pressure I feel to read productively that stops me from doing it at all.” 

I didn’t complete my reading challenge, which I have to admit hurts the overachiever in me. I’ve read some truly incredible books this year (False Idols, Skipshock and Permanence being just some of the highlights) that will stick with me for a long time, but others I barely remember having flicked through them so quickly. So in 2026, my resolution won’t be to read more but to read better – no matter how long it takes me.

Images: Getty