Reading [X] Books A Year is Weird

These days I can barely mow ruck my lawn without seeing multiple people talk about how they plan to read X books this year, or recommending extra short books so that people can hit their goal of Y, etc.

What the heck is going on here? Why are we consuming books like a key-wielding teenager shotgunning down cans of Keystone Light?

The obvious bit here is that the absolute greatest books of all time can’t be pulled down in one hit as if you were slamming down a bottomless two liter bottle into a stale gravity bong. The best books often take a month or more to read. I’m talking, you know, I’m talkin’ Odyssey I’m talkin’ Iliad I’m taking that one Dan DeLillo one with the garbage trucks I’m talkin’ Divine Comedy I’m talkin’ The Holy Bible I’m talkin’ Infinite Jest do you feel me? None of which anyone would ever read if they were focused purely on maximizing the quantity of their book consumption.

Even switching to, like, a word-count goal instead of a book-count goal doesn’t really fix this because the good stuff is often dense. It took me a country minute to get through The Crying of Lot 39 and that one’s only about as thick as four postage stamps.

Look, so, okay, don’t worry — we’re going to fix this, alright? Right now.

What you want to do instead of striving for this goal is to just read my books, again and again, over and over, and maybe even buy a new copy every time to keep that fresh-paper smell going, and/or to patronize every individual book shop within an hour of your domicile, and if your friends are like “Hey can I copy your second copy of New Oslo? I hear it’s pretty tight.” you can be like “Nawh, buy your own.” and when they’re like “Really?” you can hit ‘em with “Okay look buy your own first one but I’ll let you borrow one of my copies for the reread” because by the time they go for the reread they’ll see it they’ll get it and buy their own second copy instead. People are going to love you.

Glad we’ve figured this one out. Nice work, everyone.