Un-quantifying my reading
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.
Swann's Way
I rarely thought about the number of books I'd read until I discovered and started using Goodreads in high school.
Being able to record which books I had read and wanted to read was great. But I started measuring and focussing on quantity. Both the number of books and to a lesser degree the number of pages.
I'd look at my timeline and think I've had a good or bad year based on these numbers. Even now, when I look at my reading history, I felt like I need to justify why the count is particularly low in the last few years.
When I started reading In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, I loved the book but the denseness of his prose and the length of his sentences slowed me down. This created a sense of dissatisfaction and anxiety because of my unexamined expectation that I needed to read it faster. That it didn't make sense to spend three months months reading a six hundred page book.
Fortunately, my eagerness to understand and enjoy the book was stronger. As I mentioned in Proustian Sentences, when I looked for advice on reading Proust, the key piece of advice I found was to read Proust a few pages at a time, reread it, and just sit with the words, ideas and narratives and let our own thoughts and memories bubble up. I decided to restart the book and read it over six months.
This pressure to read quickly was stopping me from starting several books I was interested in, more than the the complexity of the books themselves. Understanding this and deliberately un-quantifying has allowed me to start reading books that I'd been putting off, especially non-fiction.