People stress about not having time to read—a fair complaint, but one that has a different tone when the subtext (or text!) is “I’m getting behind.” Behind on what, and to whom? Who is served by all this stress, by reading challenges and goals and lists and shelfies and book hauls? What is it for? What are we getting out of it? What difference does it make if you read a book that came out last week or one that came out last century?

This is also my problem with a bunch of social-reading sites (like Goodreads, StoryGraph, and Hardcover), which keep pushing you to set a goal for how many books you wanna read every year and month. Then, at the end of the year, they tell you how many pages you've read, supposedly to make you feel good or bad about it. I just don’t see the point.