If you’ve stuck with me in this column, you know that I have often recommended various reading challenges to encourage us all to read outside our comfort zones, to read more diversely, and to find a new topic to learn. I believe I offered several to choose from at the start of this year or end of last year. I’ve even created my own reading challenges for a couple of years on my blog.

As is my habit, I would go through the challenges I decided to do for any given year and try to find books that would fulfill each task. I always find some great books that way. It’s interesting to me to see what I initially thought I’d read as opposed to what I actually read at the end of the year. Then, over the past couple of years, I noticed something different.

Reading, the activity I love above all things, had started to completely stress me out.

Not the act itself, but the endless choices. I had so many unread books that I couldn’t decide what to pick next, so I dithered for days between books, paralyzed by an indecision that was stealing my joy.

Eventually, I realized that I wasn’t reading for pleasure anymore or reading to learn something. I was reading only with the goal to hit an arbitrary number that I had picked based on whatever reading challenge(s) I wanted to do. Reading had become competitive, and I have never been a competitive person.

Cue my booknerd-angst. In a burst of quasi-panicked self-discovery, I realized that I didn’t actually want to do reading challenges anymore. Aside from being turned off by the competitiveness, it also felt performative. But how could that be when I loved learning about new books so much? Did not reading 100 books a year make me a bad reader? How could I be a real reader if I wasn’t wrapped up in some reading challenge or another? I told you I had angst about it.

What I eventually realized was that reading dozens of books a year might help me knock down my TBR faster, but what good did that do if I couldn’t remember a single thing about a book I’d just read? Sure, I was reading fast. I was reading a ton of wildly diverse books. But as soon as I put the book down, my brain did a big memory dump and I instantly forgot what I’d just read. Note that I didn’t say, “As soon as I finished the book.” No, it was literally as soon as I put it down to go do something else. I could be in the middle of a book and not be able tell you most of the character names or major plot points. And that was for books I was actually enjoying! If it was a bit of a slog to get through or wasn’t grabbing my attention fully, I would have been hard pressed to tell you even the title or author. It started to feel like there was no real difference between reading a book and forgetting it and not reading it at all. My “read count” might have been ticking up to 50, 80, even 100 books a year, but in actuality it was more like four, the ones I remembered because I loved and engaged with them so strongly.

I don’t think it was entirely coincidental that I was concurrently learning more about slow living and trying to apply those ideas to my life. Perhaps it was the cognitive dissonance between trying to live a slow life and also trying to burn through dozens of books a year that made me rethink my approach to reading. Mostly, it was the fact that I didn’t like reading books and then forgetting them instantly. But just like the newly apostatic, I still felt guilty about what I viewed as abandoning my beliefs and goals and the stress of it, even though it was entirely of my own making, caused me to start avoiding books altogether. At the same time, I stumbled across a couple BookTubers who reminded me that it is ok to read slowly and engage deeply with a text, to savor it, to take notes about it, to analyze it. They talked about many of the practices and habits that I used to rely on while reading, which I had fallen away from in the frenzy of reading challenges. One of them, Eddy Hood from The Read Well Podcast, even has a motto that I thought was helpful: “Read slowly. Take notes. Apply the ideas.” That simple statement kick-started me, and it felt like I was getting permission to read only twelve books a year, or six or even just one as long as I engaged with it and got something out of it. Or rather, it reminded me that I can give myself permission to slow down.

Ironically, since coming to the realization that reading challenges had become bad for me, I’ve read more books, and more deeply, than I had in the last couple years. I’ve found my joy in reading again. I’m building my new habits, or rather reviving my old ones, to think more deeply about what I read. I don’t mean that I feel the need to analyze some beach-read-brain-candy kind of book that is supposed to be read in a weekend and then passed along and never thought of again. I mean getting back into more challenging books like classics and nonfiction, maybe even some philosophy here and there. Writing down new vocabulary words, looking at the rhetorical devices used, finding symbolism and imagery, highlighting favorite quotes, disagreeing with parts of what the author says, and thinking about what I’m learning from each book. I remember why I got literature degrees in the first place. I remember why I love reading. I remember that I believe reading well is better than reading quickly.

Now if I could only find my little sticky book tabs…