[bcbrown]

I was curious how one gamifies the printed page, and it turns out this article isn't so much about books as it is social media. Turns out, if you interview people who are obsessive about social media, you end up interviewing some pretty strange people:

> Internet culture reporter Kelsey Weekman was inspired by bloggers like Emma to “become a book person.” She’d read a few dozen buzzy books between 2017 and 2021. But in 2022, she tore through 390. By mid-May, she’d already made it to 200. She achieves such numbers by reading some six hours daily — before work, on her lunch break, as soon as she clocks out. “I’m a binge reader. Very obsessive, very intense. The same mindset that I used to have towards scrolling on the internet, I’ve replaced with books,” Weekman says.

> I don’t want to lose the experience of reading a book I’d never heard of but found on a stoop, or rereading a book even if it doesn’t count toward an annual goal. I don’t want every book I read to be a mappable point in the fated conception of me and what other things I might like (to buy).

> Perhaps I should try something: read a good, random book and tell no one.

Writing an essay about how you are disenchanted with your habit of using social media for performative reading, and ending by declaring you're going to read a book non-performatively, well, seems seems a little superfluous to the stated goal. You can just skip writing the essay and just read a book.

I don't doubt this person's experience, and perhaps this essay will give other people with similar feelings a useful nudge towards introspection towards the conflict between stated and unstated reasons for reading books, but reading this made me feel sympathethically icky.

And if someone wants a non-gamified source of inspiration for books to read, I cannot recommend highly enough a subscription to a literary review, like the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books.

[Arrath]

> I was curious how one gamifies the printed page, and it turns out this article isn't so much about books as it is social media.

I've a little exposure to gamified reading: Last year my girlfriend got sucked in to some reading app (from an ad on fb or ig), the gist being that it serves up chapters of (apparently) never ending romance novels, specifically crafted to drag the reader in and end each chapter on cliffhangers of one form or another to entice them to get the next chapter and continue. Naturally, it functions on in-app currency and gives you a certain number of tokens up front before you have to start paying in. And yes, she shoveled a good amount of money into it to gobble down chapter after chapter.

[esafak]

A good reminder that reading is not good per se; you could be reading junk.

[john-radio]

> And if someone wants a non-gamified source of inspiration for books to read, I cannot recommend highly enough a subscription to a literary review, like the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books.

I've found myself paying for a good bit more media and media curators since reddit sort of went down - The Guardian, the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast, and the sign language lesson system and YouTube channel Lifeprint.com. It's been really engaging and nice.

[AequitasOmnibus]

390 books in a year is an impressive figure. I have a hard time reading 12 books in a year. Somehow I think her definition of “reading” or “book” is different than mine.

[saberience]

I don’t imagine she’s reading Ulysses, Faust, or A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. Point being, if you read lots of trash yes you can put away lots of books in a year, but what have you learned or gained from that effort? Other than social media “cred”?

I think it would be more beneficial to read five really really good books per year and try to understand, internalize, and recall them.