Participating in the Trees of Reverie read-a-thon for the first time made me think about quantified reading. Why bother trying to reach a numeric reading goal? What’s the point of trying to read a hundred books for the Goodreads Reading Challenge? Shouldn’t the quality matter over quantity?
Quality vs. Quantity
Reading serves to expand our minds, is a great source of knowledge and also entertains. Of course quality should matter — you don’t want to add falsehoods to your arsenal of knowledge and a boring book does nothing to entertain. In that respect, yes quality does matter. At the same time, I don’t think it necessarily has to be quality versus quantity per se. Why not strive for both if you can?
After all, when reading is a hobby, how do you qualify quality reading? I don’t ask myself at the end of the year, “How was the quality of my reading?” I ask myself, “How many books did I manage to read this year?” I also consider how many of those books I enjoyed and how much I’ve learnt. That to me is quantified reading — a way to measure my hobby of reading.
Truth be told, I’m not even sure how to measure the quality of reading specifically. Am I comfortable when I sit down? Do I hold the book too tight or too loose? Is my flipping of the pages just right? Am I able to absorb the words and understand the meaning exactly as they were meant to be interpreted? These questions don’t concern me as much as what I gain out of the books I’ve read. And the more I gain, the happier I am.
The Measure of Hobbies
Perhaps my competitive nature and lifelong engagement in sports has fostered the need in me to quantify my achievements. When scoring goals in hockey, shooting hoops in basketball or gaining points in tennis, the quantity edges out quality. Quality makes for a great match to watch and a quality athlete tends to win more too. However, scoring three beautiful goals against a team that scores four less than enchanting goals still results in a loss.
Similarly, when I learnt to sew I obviously wanted to be able to produce quality results. But I didn’t want to take a year to sew a bag. I wanted to become faster, more precise and generally be able to increase my output. When it comes to reading, I want to be able to read more too. Of course I want to savour the words but I don’t want to read one book a month. I want to read all the great books that I get my hands on, hence quantified reading is a very useful measure.
Weighing Quantified Reading
In some ways, I suppose quantified reading could add unnecessary stress for some people. Knowing that there’s a specific number of books to be read in a given year could cause some to turn away from bigger books because they take much longer to read. Participating in a read-a-thon and wanting to read all the planned books could cause one to read the words without absorbing much of the content at all.
On the flip side, it can also be great motivator. I’ve been in a reading the funk for a few weeks already. And yet I’m already on my fourth book half-way through the Trees of Reverie read-a-thon. Wanting to read a set number of books also keeps me focussed on wanting to read. Increasing the number of books I read over the past two years caused me to delete game apps on my phone. I used to while away time spent waiting on games. Now I read because I feel I gain much more out of reading.
Are you for or against quantified reading? Why?
Confab ˈkän-ˌfab, kən-ˈ noun an informal discussion, often about a particular topic
Discussion posts are some of my favourite posts to read. New ideas get shared that way, or old ideas are revisited and given a new spin. And of course, I get to be my opinionated self as I hoist my views upon others, while pretending to be objective. Or maybe not. I do welcome alternate views and I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
Oh, I love this post! I, too, enjoy both quality and quantity. On the one hand, yeah I do want to savor the good books, the ones that remind me why I fell in love with reading. It’d be nice to take my time and just let it all sink in and enjoy the hours I spend with it. But I also want to gobble up all of the books I can get my hands on. There are just too many, and there is not enough time for them. And, I guess, I do kind of like measuring my reading progress. I like goals and challenges because they push me, not only to read more but to branch out and include books I maybe wouldn’t have read otherwise. I don’t really like the quantity vs. quality thing either, because it’s not that one of them is more or less better than the other. It’s about who you are as a reader. If you like reading 1 book a month, that’s totally fine. If you want to read 50, that’s okay too. You’re not defined by how much you read (though it can kind of feel like you’re always behind if you see so many bloggers with 100+ Goodreads challenges and people who seem to just inhale book after book). But we’re all different, and we read differently, and at our own paces. So we shouldn’t measure ourselves by others’ standards. But that doesn’t mean we can’t measure our own reading ability, whether that be quantity, quality, or both.
Great post! It’s definitely something to think about, and something I know we all feel and wonder about. :)
I feel like I’m on an endless quest for the next 5-star book. 2014 wasn’t a great year for quality for me. I didn’t even have a favourite book I’d read that year. 2015 is much better so far. I try to balance my quantity with quality by DNFing the books I’m not enjoying. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
I like the GR challenge because I can change it whenever. But I truly do get what you’re meaning by this. I sometimes wonder if I’d be feeling so underwhelmed these days by the books I read if I read less.
I’ve actually never thought about this? I definitely don’t have anything against quantified reading, but it does make me feel a little stressed sometimes, and I do care about the number of books I read. Though I think that for me I would still end up skimming a book or not fully reading it no matter what (especially during action scenes). That’s just the kind of person I am. However I do tend to find myself speed reading towards the end, but I think that’s more of a “I’m bored of this book and I want to start a new one!” mentality. Awesome and unique post Josephine!
For me, the Goodreads reading challenge is a way to motivate me to keep reading. Quality definitely matters (which is why I have no trouble with DNFing), but it’s nice to see that number there, for some reason. Numbers come back in quality too if you rate books — 4 or 5 stars means you’ve had a truly qualitative read. But I tend to strive for both because it’s part of the fun for me. :)
I struggle with this because I am naturally drawn to numbers, stats, and self-competition. Once I started counting the number of books I was reading, it became impossible not to strive for more, more, more. I do notice myself passing over longer books that I would really enjoy in favor of shorter ones that I might not (i.e. contemporaries over fantasy, my true reading love). At the same time, as you said, it’s much more difficult to measure quality. Even looking back at average ratings for the year doesn’t tell me much, because a 5-start rating might mean something different across genres or moods.
I’ve also deleted all the games off my phone, and I haven’t missed them. If I have free time, I would rather be reading, listening to an audiobook, or communicating with friends via Twitter, etc. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with games, but I would rather spend my precious time doing things that actually make me happy. In this sense, having a quantifiable reading goal in the back of my head really can be a great motivator and reminder.