Goodreads has put out a New Year’s challenge, encouraging people to state how many books they’ll read in the coming year, hoping that going public with such a number will, like joining Weight Watchers, goad people to read more. I have no idea if this stated aspiration has any effect on how much people actually end up reading, but I am curious.

I looked at the numbers of books some of my Goodreads “friends” had declared they would read, and it set me to thinking. There was a huge range. Some people set a goal of 25 or 30 books, others said they aspire to read as many as 150 books in the coming year. Given all the books published annually 25-30 initially seemed like a paltry number, but then I realized that this meant reading a book every 2 weeks or so. That goal seems realistic—how many of us, even those of us who prize reading over many other things, don’t have many other claims on our time?

The people who set numbers as high as 150 gave me even more pause. Reading 150 books in 365 days means reading a book every 2.4 days. Perhaps reviewers do that. Or prisoners. Or people who have mastered speed reading techniques. I am envious. I would love to be able to read books that quickly. It is one of the major dismays of my life that I will never read all the books I aspire to read. Knowing this, I try not to squander my reading time on material I don’t find nourishing. If a book is not serving me after 50-100 pages, I will often abandon it.

While I love Goodreads and I applaud the way it, like Oprah Winfrey, supports a culture of reading, I wonder if the idea of racking up numbers of books is a good way to think of the benefits we get from reading. As Francine Prose says in her terrific book Reading Like a Writer:

“With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint.”

Later, she says:

“Skimming just won’t suffice if we hope to extract one fraction…of what a writer’s words can teach us about how to use the language. And reading quickly—for plot, for ideas, even for the psychological truths that a story reveals—can be a hindrance when the crucial revelations are in the spaces between words, in what has been left out.”

Everyone seeks something different from reading, but for my money, Francine Prose makes a perfect argument for slow reading, reading that excavates how the prose is put together. So, if you need an excuse for reading fewer books this year, here is a very fine excuse, as well as a worthwhile challenge!

Photo via Visual hunt

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