For one virtuous, ambitious month in 2016, I logged each book I read in a journal, hand-wrote a few hundred words of reflection (from one entry: “Felt a bit Canlitty, in that it set itself narrow parameters”), and assigned each book a rating out of ten, down to a single decimal point. At that point, I was in grad school. I began the journal after the semester ended in April, when I finally had time to read for pleasure again. (I was also trying to impress the man I’d recently started seeing, an inveterate note taker who keeps a handwritten list of what he reads.) Ultimately, I moved away from such lengthy annotations, because they encouraged me to nitpick for flaws—case in point, “a bit Canlitty.” But the impulse to keep a list remains.
The urge to track our reading habits is never so strong as it is near the turn of the year, when cultural forces press us to revise ourselves. Like the things we eat or the ways we move our bodies, the books we consume get talked about as yet another avenue for self-improvement. We look back on how many we got through, what gave pleasure, and what incurred disappointment. But with the proliferation of apps and tools that record our reading has come the question of whether all this self-surveillance might harm more than it helps.
