What We Lose When We Gamify Reading

At the dawn of 2026, I spent an irresponsible amount of time cataloguing what I did in 2025. There are so many ways to aggregate a personality these days: Letterboxd kept track of how many movies you watched this year, Fitbit tallied the number of steps I took, the New York Times has the data on how many times I beat Wordle in three. According to Spotify Unwrapped, I spent most of last year listening to Talking Heads (and I did briefly hang my whole identity on this statistic). Even Discord chimed in to tell me my Top 5 Emojis used in 2025—my #1 was “ROFL Face”. However, as a writer and fiction professor, the biggest statistic that floods my algorithm every January is books: how many books did I read this year? What was your reading goal? Fifty books? One hundred? Let’s compare, and by that I mean: let’s compete.