My Reading Note
A spreadsheet once tracked my TBR pile—columns for genre, length, publication year, and a rating for how excited I was. Fifty books read that year, and I could not remember what any of them had given me. I spent more time updating the spreadsheet than absorbing what I read. That was when I started wondering if the system had gotten in the way.
For many readers, reading goals begin as a way to bring order to an overflowing TBR pile: a target number for the year, a challenge to read more classics, or a system to track progress. However, the system expands to fill the space it was meant to organize. What started as a simple structure soon generates its own momentum, demanding maintenance and feeding on the time it claims to save. The goal becomes the focus while the actual reading becomes secondary.
What happens when a reader stops setting goals? The TBR pile becomes what it always was: a collection of possibilities rather than a list of obligations. A book gets picked up because it calls; another gets set aside without feeling any guilt. Reading then becomes slower and messier, but also free of the need to optimize. This is not simply reading less without any goal, but reading differently with an open mind.
The year I stopped tracking my reading goals, my milestone dropped from fifty books to twenty. But I remember more of those twenty than any of the fifty.
Goal-Driven Reading as a Managed System
Goal-driven reading borrows a productivity model from contexts where measurement and value align: a runner’s mileage marks progress toward a race, a professional’s billable hours convert to income. Reading offers no such alignment. A reader who completes fifty books has performed fifty acts of finishing, but finishing is an administrative achievement, not a literary or intellectual one. The goal-driven framework thus rewards the superficial over the substantial: the shorter book over the longer, the familiar over the difficult, and the book that can be finished quickly over the book that demands sustained attention.
This misalignment in reading goals produces three specific failures:
- Selection distorts toward efficiency: Shorter books are easier books to finish. Books that align with established expertise also begin to look more attractive than those longer (and more difficult) unfamiliar works. The reader optimizes for completion rather than engagement.
- Pace overrides absorption: A book scheduled for two weeks receives two weeks regardless of its density, its demands, or the reader’s capacity to process it. The goal creates a deadline where none needs to exist.
- The experience becomes self-monitoring: The experience becomes self-monitoring: the reader reads with one eye on the text and the other on progress. Am I on track? How many pages remain? What will I read next to maintain momentum? This divided attention undoes the very immersion that reading promises.
Five Philosophers Reconsider the TBR List
The goal-free approach finds philosophical precedent in thinkers who questioned whether productivity and value align. Let us use some of their thoughts as lenses when looking at reading goals.
Seneca: The Restless Round of Empty Business
Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life (De Brevitate Vitae, 49 AD; trans. by G. D. Williams, 2003) argues that life is not short; we make it short by wasting it. His target is not idleness but its opposite: those held by “the kind of diligence that busies itself with pointless enterprises.” The goal-driven reader commits the same error. Tracking, logging, and counting consume the very time they claim to organize. “It’s not that we have a short time to live,” Seneca writes, “but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it’s been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested. But when life is squandered through soft and careless living, and when it’s spent on no worthwhile pursuit, death finally presses and we realize that the life which we didn’t notice passing has passed away.” The reader who mistakes activity for achievement ends up with neither. The annual reading count becomes one of Seneca’s “pointless enterprises”: a form of busyness that mimics productivity while delivering nothing of what reading promises.
Montaigne: On Reading Without Obligation
In his Essays (Essais, 1580; trans. by Charles Cotton, 1685-1686), Michel de Montaigne describes a relationship to books defined by curiosity rather than obligation. He reads in fits, returns to familiar passages, and sets books aside without compunction. “I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself by an honest diversion,” he writes; “or, if I study, ‘tis for no other science than what treats of the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die and how to live well. … I do not bite my nails about the difficulties I meet with in my reading; after a charge or two, I give them over. Should I insist upon them, I should both lose myself and time; for I have an impatient understanding, that must be satisfied at first: what I do not discern at once is by persistence rendered more obscure.” This is not laziness but a recognition that difficulty may signal incompatibility rather than inadequacy. The TBR pile, in Montaigne’s model, is not a list of obligations to be conquered but a collection of potential companions. A book set aside is not a failure; it is a conversation that has run its course.
Emerson: On the Scholar and Books
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (1837) warns against the substitution of reading for original thought. “Books are for the scholar’s idle times,” he declares. “When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.” The danger is that a man may become a mere bookworm, a collector of others’ thoughts rather than a thinker himself. “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.” The goal-driven reader, tracking numbers and accumulating titles, falls into this trap: he mistakes the quantity of what he has consumed for the quality of what he has understood. Emerson’s remedy is to make reading serve thinking, not to let it replace thinking. “The scholar loses no hour which the man lives.” To read without becoming a mere receptacle for other men’s thoughts requires the courage to trust one’s own mind. “He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles.” The reader who abandons the count does not read less; he reads in a way that leaves room for his own thought to emerge.
Schopenhauer: On Reading and Thinking
Arthur Schopenhauer’s “On Reading and Books” (Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851; trans. by Mrs. Rudolf Dircks, 1897) warns against the confusion between having read and having understood. “When we read,” he writes, “another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process.” The danger is that reading becomes a substitute for thinking. “The person who reads a great deal—that is to say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk.” Many, he observes, “have read themselves stupid.” The accumulation of books does not produce wisdom; it produces a mind overstuffed and unable to digest what it has taken in. “For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read if one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.” Against this, Schopenhauer proposes what he calls “the art of not reading”: the discipline of turning away from what does not merit attention, of reading only what is lasting, of refusing to mistake the purchase of books for the acquisition of their contents. “One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.” The reader who abandons the annual target makes room for a kind of reading that leaves traces: reading that pauses, reflects, and allows what is read to take root.
Bacon: Of Studies and the Uses of Reading
Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Studies” (1625) distinguishes among the ways a reader may approach books. “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested,” he writes. “That is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” The reader who chases a number, who measures accomplishment by titles consumed, makes no room for this distinction: he treats all books as something to be swallowed, moving quickly to the next without chewing or digesting. Bacon warns against the very tendency that goal-driven reading encourages. “Reading maketh a full man,” he grants, but fullness requires the leisure to digest, not merely to accumulate. “Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books; else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things.” The reader who abandons the annual target returns to Bacon’s hierarchy: some books tasted, some swallowed, a few chewed and digested—each given what it deserves, none treated as merely a number to be logged.
The Myth of the Finished TBR Pile
The idea that a TBR pile can be completed is a fantasy. No matter how many books are read, new ones arrive, recommendations appear, and new releases demand attention. The pile replenishes itself. This is not a failure of the system but the nature of reading.
Readers who abandon goals discover something unexpected: the pile becomes a resource instead of a burden, a collection of possibilities rather than a list of obligations. The books wait patiently and do not judge.
I wrote this piece after realizing my book pile is not a project. It is simply a reminder that there will always be more books than time to read them. Looking at it now, I feel something the spreadsheet never gave me: the pleasure of not knowing what comes next.
I selected these three old posts from the archive because they represent the problem this new article solves. In “TBR Books Explained,” I defined the TBR pile and offered strategies to manage it, but I stopped short of questioning whether the structure itself (lists, tracking, goals) might be creating the pressure I was trying to relieve. The article on “Book Log” addressed the tracking impulse behind reading goals, the very impulse that later made me wonder if I was spending more time updating spreadsheets than absorbing what I read. The “DNF Book” article introduced the freedom to abandon books, a concept that aligns with the goal-free reading I now practice. Together, these three posts trace my own journey from managing the TBR pile to questioning why I was managing it at all—a journey that led me to ask what happens when you stop setting goals entirely.
Further Reading
Building an antilibrary: the power of unread books by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ness Labs
Set a reading goal: Thoughts about the anti-library idea, TBR lists and book influencers by www.ihanna.nu
How on earth do I reduce my tbr list to a readable amount in my life time? on Reddit
