Buy books. Read books. Track books. Update apps. Repeat.

BookTok and Bookstagram, Goodreads, Fable, Story Graph are brilliant and have benefits like all social media: the connection with people from all around the world to discuss books, finding books and authors, poets you would have never encountered and all of the author events that are now available, and yet…

All of these apps are so entrenched in data and algorithms that I fear we are becoming fixated on showing off to the world, ‘look at how many bookshops I’ve visited!’ ‘look at how many books I’ve read this month!’ And don’t get me wrong, I do this, but recently I found myself, almost skim reading a lot of books just to make sure I finish it within the month so that I can include it in my wrap up or rushing through books to get ahead and stay ahead of my yearly Goodreads target. And the publishing industry is capitalising on this and our desperate need to perform churning out list after list of ‘must reads’ and ‘prize lists’ and ‘books you’ll regret missing out on’. I can’t keep up and it’s beginning to take it’s toll.

It’s an odd juxtaposition that I find myself in: wanting to consume literature and not wanting to.

I have always loved reading (anyone who knows me will shout that, never mind agree) and yet I find myself yearning for the naivety of my youth where I would read for the sake of reading and not for the sake of reading, tracking, updating and sharing. I yearn for a time and place where I don’t feel this immense pressure to finish within a time frame or update my reading apps as soon as I am finished.

And this is not me saying that I think reading is becoming performative, read what you like when you like how you like, but I fear reading is losing that pure joy and innocence as it becomes more and more data driven in this digital age.

Social media has always been a sharp and cutting double edged sword, but I find myself becoming more and more disillousioned with it.

Will I delete all of my apps? Maybe. Should I delete them? Probably. But will I then be missing out? Definitely.