Perhaps the most intuitive reason is the most common: Adding some structure to your reading life can be a way of making sure that you actually read. Why set yourself an unattainable goal? Why quantify your leisure reading at all? Still, the fact remains, more and more people are making reading goals that most of them will not meet. But Suzanne Skyvara, a spokesperson for Goodreads, told me that the company doesn’t have data on what affects whether someone completes the challenge, and declined to speculate, saying the site prefers to focus on the fact that people are reading at all. This could be because in the early days of the challenge, only the most hard-core readers were participating-Goodreads started actively promoting the challenge to its users in 2015. In earlier years of the challenge, those stats were sometimes higher-in 2011, 29 percent of participants finished the challenge, and in 2013, participants read 56 percent of the books pledged. In 2018, only 16 percent of participants in the Goodreads Reading Challenge actually completed it, finishing 21 percent of the total books pledged. (This number is skewed by some particularly ambitious folks-the majority of people pledged to read 1 to 24 books.) Other sites, such as Book Riot and PopSugar, have their own yearly reading challenges, and on Reddit, users strive for 52 books a year, one a week. This year, more than 3 million people have pledged to read an average of 59 books before the end of 2019. The Goodreads Reading Challenge started in 2011 and had 149,716 participants that year, according to the website. Though surely people have had personal reading goals for as long as there have been books, the book-tracking social-media site Goodreads seems to have institutionalized and popularized the practice of setting yearly reading targets. “I just want to keep challenging myself to read as much as I can.” Still, “I can definitely do 50,” she said. She hasn’t hit that number yet-she said she usually makes it to 45 or so. Every January, she logs into her Goodreads account and sets a goal to read 50 books that year.
#GOODREADS FREE BOOKS FREE#
Peters, now 31 and living in Swansea, Wales (though she grew up in the United States), started participating in reading challenges again in 2016, though no one is giving her free pizza for doing so now that she’s an adult. “When I was a kid, I read all the time, even if it wasn’t for school, so the idea of reading 200 books just so you could get a pizza was the best thing ever,” she told me. She remembers participating in Pizza Hut’s reading program, which still exists today, as her first experience with reading challenges.
When Stevie Peters was a kid, she used to read books for pizza.
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