The Gamification of Reading
or why I won't be participating in the Goodreads Reading Challenge next year
I graduated this year. Yay! I also started a job this year. Oh!
Kind of a mixed bag - 2021 - I would say.
But I did read more books than I ever have. I set a goal for myself at the beginning of the year - to read two books a month - two weeks per book - that's two Saturdays and two Sundays in my mind. Enough time. And it was. I read thirty-one books this year. To be honest - a lot of them were the Maigret stories by Georges Simenon. And a lot of audiobooks. Like a lot. Like too many. Some people may not consider listening to an audiobook as actually reading it. But I don't care. I am real cool that way.
I achieved this great wonderful amazing feat by tracking the books I was reading on the barely usable - how-is-a-website-owned-by-the-largest-company-in-the-world-this-bad -Goodreads. And I am kind of disgusted with the idea of a Reading challenge now. I am disgusted by this attempt at the gamification of reading books.
Now this paragraph here is not me backtracking but just clarifying certain things. Gamification works - for sure. At least it works for me. I have used several productivity/gamification/habit tracking tools, apps, websites and combinations thereof to nudge my behaviour towards more productive and healthy directions. And it has worked. It has also, clearly worked for my reading habit. Without the 'social' pressure that comes with not wanting to fail at a publicly declared goal, I would not have read as many books. Not because I don't enjoy reading ... but because I am more lazy than I enjoy reading. You know what I mean?
But still, reading is sacred to me. It has sustained me through difficult times before. It is life-affirming for me. And to do it for fake internet points on a website that barely works and that almost no one I know uses ... is disgusting to me. Have I told you how disgusting I think it is? It is. It is disgusting to me. But I get it. It works. It is fun. But I find it disgusting.
I am also deeply uncomfortable with the fact that someone could go through my Goodreads shelf and find out about my political leanings or other aspects of my value system. Before reading became an online-social activity, I was open to such scrutiny of my bookshelf only by invited guests to my home - people who I wouldn’t mind knowing about my beliefs and values. (Not that just because I own and or have read a book - I ascribe to whatever the author believes in, or is thought of as believing. That’s a conversation for another time. But you know what I mean). But now my Goodreads shelf is open to the public. And the internet knows what I thought about this book written by this pundit, or that book written by the talking head for this camp of politics. Icky isn't it?
I know I can set it to private but the website is so damn bad I don't have the patience to dig through the settings.
For the next edition - I might try and put down my thoughts on Top 10 book lists and the ‘bibliophile’ sub-culture on the internet, specifically booktube .
Image:
Johannes Jansson/norden.org, CC BY 2.5 DK <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/dk/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons