In Defense of Voracious Reading

Every so often, I come across a repeated sentiment expressed by different people at different times. “It’s far more impressive,” they might say, “to read 3-5 excellent books well in a year, than to boast of reading 100-plus books.” While many people today are making Twitter threads tracking their reading through the year, or pursuing lofty Goodreads Reading Challenges in the double or triple digits, these folks see such speedy reading as indicative either of misplaced priorities or even of a failure to read well. If only a small handful of truly good books can be read well in a single year, are the people with long book lists simply poor readers, squanderers of their time?