How Yearly Reading Goals Can Actually Hurt Your Love of Stories

Annual reading goals are helping to kill reading, and if we don’t adjust soon, we could lose this very dear joy.

I didn't set a reading goal until this year. However, I heard about them back in 2020, at the start of my freshman year in high school, and at a particularly vulnerable time in my life. The boy who introduced me to yearly reading goals was aiming for 100 books a year, and despite loving books, I definitely didn't read that much. To avoid competition and my ultimate defeat, I avoided setting a goal or recording the books I'd read entirely.

By the end of 2025, I was starting to get back into reading, so I set a relatively attainable goal of 25 books to motivate myself in 2026. Though, for clarity's sake, I use Fable instead of Goodreads. And I won't say it hasn't worked! We're about 3/4 into the year, and I've read 18 books; that's about right. However, it's had other, sneakier effects. . .

The Negative Effects:

When I have begun to fall behind, I feel this sense of anxiety and obligation. Whatever book I had been looking forward to reading at the time suddenly became an unwanted chore. Because I avoid responsibility like the plague, this causes me to procrastinate and then read the majority of the book in a large chunk to get it done.

This procrastination and then speed reading to catch up has made reading much less enjoyable for me. It's also made it significantly more difficult to glean anything of value from the material, because I'm spending less time absorbing it.

Having a goal has also steered me back to the very thing I was avoiding by not having a goal in 2020: competition. This time, there's no one directly peer-pressuring me. Instead, it's my own mind, comparing itself to other readers online who read 50, 100, and even 150 books a year. In some ways, this has made reading more of a performance than a beloved hobby.

And while I don't struggle with this particular issue, Donna Huber, or Girl Who Reads, described increasingly lofty goals in her post titled "Quality vs Quantity: Setting Your Yearly Reading Goal." Each annual objective was an attempt to beat a personal record, encouraging her to read shorter, easier books, just to make the count.

The Fix:

Luckily, the solution isn’t just “don’t set goals,” because they serve a genuine purpose! They do get people out of slumps, and they help new readers get started.

The solution is to set a different goal. This idea is one I got from a post on Medium by Elisabet Calas called “Pros and cons of having a goal for the number of books to read per year.” She suggests tracking reading time as opposed to amount. That way, you build a reading habit without rushing.

But how do we know it’ll motivate the same as a finished book?

Fortunately for you, I have good reason to believe in this approach: I did it for nearly five years. The charter school I attended 2nd - 7th grade had one homework requirement: 30 minutes of reading every night. Let me tell you right now, I had no problem meeting it. It might even be a factor that helped grow my initial love of reading to its current form.

Homework

For this reason, I will spend the rest of the week, possibly longer attempting to read 30 minutes a day every day. I’ll encourage you to try as well. If you’d like to hear about the results, sign up for post notifications and my newsletter at the bottom of this page.

Tell me in the comments: What has been your experience with yearly reading goals? Have you run into any of the issues I described?