There’s something about the end of one year and the start of a new one that gets people absolutely slam dunk crazy about lists.
Top 5 Personal Achievements of 2025.
My Favourite New Songs of 2025.
Top 10 Places to Travel in 2026.
3 New Year’s Resolutions to Supercharge Your Life.
The internet is rife with this kind of garbage, positively brimming with the stuff. As we become increasingly surrounded by data and information, it feels like we have created a new need to document everything for posterity. To summarise periods of time and keep the data archived for future generations.
I’m not really hating on this phenomenon. I have to admit that as a numbers guy, I obviously enjoy Spotify Wrapped. I like watching Google Photos recaps of places I’ve been and people I’ve spent time with. So if I were to hone in on what really drives me up the wall, it’s the reading lists and the number of books people have read.
What began as a nice, educational challenge in third grade to try to read 20 books in a school year has now taken on a sickly, competitive, crazed natured that misses the entire point of reading. But instead of merely asking “who cares how many books you read in 2025?”, I’m going to steadily dismantle the entire idea of “number of books read”.
From a quantitative standpoint, all books were not created equal. Place The Great Gatsby next to The Count of Monte Cristo on your kitchen table and you’ll see what I mean. The former clocks in at around 200 pages, with the latter at a whopping 1200. Clearly, reading one cannot be compared to reading the other.
Ah, you may think, so let’s instead compare page counts. Six Great Gatsbys equals one Monte Cristo. Well, that doesn’t work either. Books are published with different numbers of lines per page, something I as a complete nerd have counted more times that I care to admit. It often ends up in the range of 32-40. Okay, okay, so we’re going to compare lines read now? No, of course not, because books are printed in different font sizes and page widths, leading to different number of words per line. Ah, you’ve got me. So it’s number of words read, and maybe you’ve heard that an average book is 80,000 words, and that starts to ring true and feel good. For the final time, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but life isn’t Wordle, and words come in all shapes and sizes too.
So it turns out that the only valid method of reading comparison is the number of characters (i.e., letters) read, and even then the real nitpickers out there will be up in arms about whether or not spaces are included as a character.
And if you haven’t gotten it by now, the point of this diatribe is not to encourage comparisons of how many characters you read in 2025, but rather to point out the absurdity of trying to compare how many books you read at all. The whole concept of reading comparison is predicated upon a misunderstanding of the point of reading.
Books, especially fiction, are not there for value-extraction and the supercharging of your mind in a relentless effort to transcend the rat-racing common folk and achieve unlimited wealth and eternal life. Would you prefer to watch Fight Club or just get the AI-generated bullet points that tell you the narrator is schizophrenic? Would you rather your NFL team win the Super Bowl or just be injected with a few drops of liquid that make you feel like they won? Would you rather eat delicious food or have an IV drip of required nutrients?
It’s not about the content that you have consumed, but rather about the act of consumption itself. Good feelings don’t last. A few days after your team does win the Super Bowl, people have moved on and now it’s about the draft, the trades, the predictions for next year. If you didn't enjoy each game and the highs and lows of the season, then sorry, but you missed out on all the fun. The enjoyment is in the journey.
And this is all common knowledge, but for some reason when it comes to books and reading, people have simply lost their way.
I’m intentionally not going to wax on about the benefits of reading, because that is just another exercise in value-extraction and optimisation. If you’ve read a good book before, you know what did it for you, and it’s probably worth doing again. Just read a book and have fun, and see what happens. (If you need somewhere to start, go with City of Thieves by David Benioff. I read it in November and think it has the perfect length and punchiness to grab you by the collar, while also not being a soulless page-turner.)
So enough with the reading comparisons, the must-read lists, the shaming of those who have read fewer books than you, or the lauding of those who have somehow read 130 in a year. Just read because it’s fun, and everything else is a bonus.