Every January a large number of otherwise sensible people commit publicly to reading a specific number of books, and every December some of them report failure. I think the whole apparatus is doing harm, and I say that as someone who ran a fifty-book target for four consecutive years.
What the number does to the reading
It selects for short books. Not consciously — you do not sit down and choose the 180-page novel over the 700-page history because it moves the counter faster. But in November, behind pace, with a choice between two books, you reach for the one you can finish. I did this for four years and did not notice until year five, when I dropped the target and immediately started reading longer things.
It also punishes rereading, which counts for nothing in most tallies despite being, in my experience, where most of the actual value in reading lives. And it makes reading slowly — twenty pages a week of something dense — feel like a failure state rather than a method.
The thing it measures
Books finished. Which is a proxy for reading in the same way that miles driven is a proxy for going somewhere. It is not nothing — a person who finishes forty books has certainly read more than one who finishes two — but it is measuring the wrong end of the process, and the moment you optimise for it the correlation breaks.
What I do instead
Nothing, mostly. I keep a list of what I finished with a line about each, because I like having it, and I count nothing. If you want a target, make it time rather than volume — half an hour a day is a target that a 700-page book does not punish you for choosing.
The good year I had after dropping the count was twenty-six books. Four of them I still think about. In the fifty-book years I could not name four.