Stop counting your books and start actually reading them, you heathens

If you haven’t heard about the latest trend in online book culture, count yourself lucky. The trend is known as “gamification.” Gamification is what happens when people take the design features of games — things like goal-setting, badge-earning, and stat-keeping — and apply them to an activity that has never previously been viewed as a game, and that can only be cheapened and trivialised if it’s treated as one.

Such as reading. At the start of each new year, there’s a flurry of activity over at places like Goodreads and BookTok. Users come together to share their reading goals for the forthcoming year. They set themselves numerical targets, called “book counts.” They download special apps to track and share their progress.

What do the book counters count, exactly? Debate rages about what the most useful metric of weekly reading performance is: the number of books you knock off, or the total quantity of pages you burn through. Either way, it seems that many book counters soon find themselves failing to meet their reading goals, perhaps because they spend so much of their free time going online to talk about their reading goals.

What’s the go here? Isn’t the internet satisfied with having wrecked all the other things it’s wrecked? It’s already destroyed the recording industry, and sucked the life out of the movie business, and turned American politics into a freak show. It’s even succeeded in giving pornography a bad name. Must it now stick its beak into the sacred act of reading too?

For hundreds of years, humankind managed to get an awful lot of books written and read without the aid of the internet. After all, reading is an uncomplicated business. All that’s needed is a book, plus a literate human being who wants to read it. When people genuinely like reading, their “book counts” will tend to increase naturally over time.

Nor does the raw number of books a person reads tell you much about their general level of intelligence. A person who walks 10,000 steps a day will be fitter than a person who walks 10. But a person who reads 200 books a year won’t necessarily end up smarter than someone who reads 20. It depends what books they’re reading, for one thing. It also depends on how smart they were to start with.

A weird paradox seems to be in play here. People around the world appear to have noticed, all at once, that their addiction to electronic devices has shrivelled their brains to the size of dehydrated peas. But instead of remedying this problem by simply picking up a book, they seem to feel that the very devices that desiccated their brains in the first place can somehow play a useful role in reconstituting them.

Apparently there are even such things now as “BookTok influencers”. These improbably young litterateurs, who look a lot better-groomed and more snappily dressed than any fair-dinkum book-lover I’ve ever met in real life, have the temerity to dispense reading advice on a platform whose average user can burn through more than 200 different videos in thirty minutes.

There are many modern absurdities we all have to cop, whether we like them or not. But when I hear the phrase “BookTok influencer”, I must draw my own personal line in the sand. Taking literary advice from a TikToker is like taking advice about interior decoration from someone who’s just burned down half your house. It’s like getting a lecture about the importance of biodiversity from someone who’s running a casino on the site of a former rainforest.

I think it’s time that we serious readers and writers cut a deal with the YouTubers and TikTokers. I think it’s time we told them: If you leave books and reading alone, we’ll let you have everything else — the dance crazes, the eating challenges, the videos of cats being startled by cucumbers. If you stop telling us how to read books, we won’t use our literary tastes and standards to pass judgment on all the brain-dead nonsense that you get up to.

We won’t tell you that if you’ve seen one person miming a song while driving a car, you’ve seen ’em all. We won’t point out that the concept of a “reaction video” is inherently moronic, because any person who’s reached the age of 40 without having heard, say, Stairway to Heaven, is not worth hearing from on any subject at all, let alone on the subject of that song.

And we won’t point out that TikTok is aptly named, because its name mimics the sound a clock will make when counting off all the seconds of your life that will go away, and never come back, every time you sit down to watch a 15-minute video compilation of people eating gummy bears.