Every year I set a reading goal for myself, and every year I imagine a version of myself who is far more consistent than I actually am. Last year, the goal was simply ten books. I was already behind on this goal by the time summer began, and unless I truly enjoyed the books I read for class, it felt wrong to count them toward my goal. By the end of the year I had met my goal, but nine of those books came between May and August, when summer stretched out in front of me and reading was all I wanted to do. I would often choose books to add to my to-read pile based on what the next “must-reads” were: “The Wedding People,” “The Housemaid,” “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” and “The Song of Achilles.” The moment classes started up again, both the habit and the high temperatures disappeared. The books on my shelf — from “People We Meet on Vacation” and “Circe” to “A Little Life,” “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” and “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” — awaited an idealized version of myself to pick them up in the far-away future.
The idea of being a “reader” had weight: a consumer of printed goods, a part-time intellectual, a dabbler in literary arts. It felt like something that had to be proven in practice, in pages read and books finished. Online, I saw readers boasting of finishing fifty books that year, posting towering stacks of novels so there could be no mistaking them for anything less than a true reader.
Just as every hobby seems to develop its own hierarchy of dedication, reading appeared to have one too. The “real readers” devoured novels; they tackled intimidating classics and “must-reads” in their genre of choice, from “East of Eden,” “Stoner,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “Schoolgirl” and “Katabasis.” They carried around books from series like “The Lord of the Rings,” “A Song of Ice and Fire” or “The Stormlight Archive,” books heavy enough to double as exercise equipment, and I had been measuring myself against that version of reading. The result was an all-or-nothing mentality. If I couldn’t dedicate hours every day to reading, what was the point? If I wasn’t making visible progress through massive novels, I felt like I wasn’t really reading at all. I looked at my own habits — reading a chapter before bed, taking weeks to finish a book or abandoning titles that didn’t hold my attention — and decided they didn’t count as reading. If I wasn’t reading the way I imagined “real readers” read, then I wasn’t one of them.
It is a mindset that, sadly, seems to show up in every hobby imaginable. People convince themselves that they can’t call themselves runners unless they’re training for marathons, can’t call themselves artists unless they own expensive supplies and can’t enjoy a hobby unless they’re exceptionally good at it.
From a young age, I had always loved reading. I have vivid memories of reading time in elementary school, when I would race to grab one of the “Alice” series or a colorful copy of “Dork Diaries.” Years later, I find myself studying to become an English teacher, preparing for a career built around helping young people discover the same joy in reading and writing that first drew me to books. It feels strange to spend my days learning how to ignite a love of reading in others while struggling to sustain the hobby for myself. Reading has always been central to who I am, even if my relationship with it has ebbed and flowed over the years, but if I couldn’t find a way to enjoy reading outside of an assignment or a goal, how could I expect the students sitting in my future classroom to do the same?
What made that question so frustrating was that I maintained the want and urge to read — I just rarely finished anything. I would read three chapters of “The Silent Patient” before bed and find that I enjoyed my time doing so. Then midterms would arrive, paper deadlines would appear and life would simply get busy, as it does for many college students. A few weeks later, I’d find myself picking the novel back up only to discover that the momentum was gone. I couldn’t quite remember who Alicia Berenson was beyond the woman who shot her husband, whether Theo Faber had uncovered anything important or why I had been so invested in the mystery surrounding Gabriel’s death in the first place.
I got so used to this cycle that, eventually, I would set the book down “for now” and accept that I would likely never finish it. Sometimes life got in the way, but other times I simply wasn’t as interested as I had expected to be. I’d force myself through a few chapters, convinced that this would be the novel that transformed me into the kind of reader who effortlessly consumed books, only to realize I was reading out of obligation rather than enjoyment. I would tell myself I’d come back to it later or finish it eventually, but more often than not, I never did.
Recently, after a long stretch of not finishing much of anything, I read and genuinely enjoyed the playfulness and form of “The Body.” For the first time in a while, I found myself moving steadily through a book rather than setting it aside for “later.” What finally broke the cycle wasn’t my schedule nor my discipline. What changed was a simple spring class: ENGLISH 230, “Reading Literary Fiction/Non-Fiction: How to Break the Novel.” Throughout the semester, we read short novels and novellas, books I had continuously overlooked because I was convinced that longer books were somehow more legitimate, and that reading them helped maintain the image of a “real reader.” If a book could be read in a single afternoon, I previously assumed it couldn’t possibly leave the same impression as one that took me months to finish.
But week after week, I logged onto Zoom having finished another book that could fit comfortably into my hand, and week after week I logged off, surprised by how much there still was to discuss, question and uncover within those short reads. “You Should Have Left” was the first time I began to suspect that I had underestimated what a short novel could do. What initially felt like a strange story about a house that seemed to distort space became a meditation on grief, disorientation and the limits of reality itself. Then came “We the Animals,” which captured the transition from childhood to individuality through short fragments of memory and moments that felt startlingly familiar. By the time we reached “The Vegetarian,” I had stopped paying attention to page counts altogether. In just 192 pages, this novel says more about autonomy, gender and social expectation than many books manage in hundreds more. The more we read, the more I became fascinated by how much variety existed within such a small form. “So Long, See You Tomorrow” transformed a simple story into a reflection on memory and the ways we reconstruct the past. “The Bluest Eye” carried a weight that felt far larger than its size — tackling poverty, race, beauty, family and gender with an emotional force that lingered long after I finished reading. Then there was “The Hour of the Star,” my favorite of the semester, a novel brief enough to finish in a morning before ever thinking about lunch, yet rich enough to turn me into a lifelong admirer of Clarice Lispector.
Since the beginning of May, I’ve read a total of six books. That number may not sound remarkable to someone who regularly tears through dozens of books a year, but for me it represents a complete shift in how I’ve interacted with my now dearest hobby. Meeting this goal has felt less like a measure of productivity and more like a return to something I had greatly missed. Through these books, I’ve gotten to step into perspectives far beyond my own, which feels both grounding and strangely refreshing in the momentum of everyday life. There’s a particular comfort in knowing I always have something waiting for me that I can return to and genuinely enjoy again, something that isn’t asking to be optimized or completed, just experienced. This year I raised my reading goal to an aspiring 15, expecting to fall short. But I found that before June arrived I had already completed nearly half of that goal.
As I approached the end of the spring semester, with longer days and warmer nights, what seemed to stay with me was not any single plot or character but the realization that for the first time, I wasn’t choosing books based on how ambitious they looked sitting on my shelf or how bad they made my shoulder ache when carried in my purse. I started reading works I might never have picked up before, adding titles like “Bluets,” “I Who Have Never Known Men,” “Almond,” “This Is How You Lose the Time War” and “Tender Is the Flesh” to my reading list through recommendations from friends and quick online searches. The class may have simply introduced me to shorter fiction, but it has forever changed the way I think about reading and what it can look like in my everyday life.
I still don’t know what this will look like once the semester begins again, when the days get shorter, my workload grows larger and my college life is fully back in swing. It is entirely possible that assignments, jobs and the general chaos of my usual life will once again compete for my attention. But for the first time, reading has no longer felt dependent on having large stretches of free time or the endless motivation. It feels portable; it can fit in any bag or simply my hand, and it fits into the small pockets of time that already exist in my day, whether that’s waking up a little before my alarm or finding myself with an unexpectedly free hour during my daily routines.
I’ve spent so much time hearing about and engaging in discourse around reading as though there is a defined hierarchy around it. Longer books are treated as more serious, more ambitious and more worthy of admiration in certain spaces. Yet the books that reignited my love of reading were not the ones that asked for the most hours. Reading finally became sustainable for me when I stopped trying to read like the people I once admired online and started reading like myself — where I could respect the reality of my life while still demanding careful thought, attention and exploration of new stories and voices from myself.
There seems to be no prize for reading books that don’t fit into my life, and I think a lot of hobbies suffer from this same problem. When we begin treating hobbies as competitions rather than sources of enjoyment or enrichment, they lose their romance. The people who spend the most money, devote the most hours or achieve the highest level of skill become the standard everyone else measures themselves against. In reality, most people are fitting their hobbies into the margins of their ordinary lives. They’re reading during lunch breaks, drawing in sketchbooks after work, gardening on weekends or learning instruments between other obligations — they’re just not posting about it or getting hundreds of thousands of views. When it comes down to it, their participation is not less meaningful just because it happens on a small scale.
Statement Contributor Aniyah Yoder can be reached at yoaniyah@umich.edu.
