Why Does Everyone Want to Read Fewer Books This Year?

What was it about 2024 that burned us all out? And how do we break free?

Is it just me, or does it feel like the intention at the top of every avid reader’s list is to read fewer books this year? I’ve seen person after person — including me — say that they’re hoping to spend 2025 reading more slowly, more intentionally, more carefully, more backlist, fewer buzzy new releases. They feel like they’re stuck in a cycle of reading to finish books in order to get to the next one sooner, rather than reading to read.

Of course, I’m talking about folks who already read a lot of books. Many people who currently read a handful of books (or no books) a year want to read more in 2025. And that’s fantastic; the world is going to need more readers over the next four years and beyond; not fewer.

But for those of us who’ve turned books into our entire personality (especially online), gone are the days of using your book count as a badge of honor. Gone are the Instagram posts giving people your best tips on “how to read more.” Gone are the days of setting your annual book goal higher and higher each year. Nowadays, everyone I know either sets theirs well below their typical pace, or sets it at 1, or doesn’t set it at all.

It goes beyond wanting to read what we own because of money or shelf space, which isn’t new. We’re finally tired of the book PR machine, and we’re ready to reject the ways it influences our choices.

But why do we all feel this way at the same time? What was it about 2024 that burned us all out on gobbling up new releases?

Most people who pay attention to literary prizes agree: Last year was one of the best prize-list years in recent memory. There was (finally) a healthy mix of big-name authors and new-to-us titles nominated, and the lists had a lot of overlap, especially between the Booker Prize and the National Book Award. That meant we were all talking about the same books together, which made the community feel even closer-knit than usual. The frenzy was palpable, and the fervor was irresistible.

The problem, I think, was that the handful of books that dominated the conversation — primarily James and Martyr! — dominated it in a way I’ve never seen before. No other books could even hold a candle to those two in terms of showing up on my Instagram feed. And it feels like I don’t know anyone who didn’t read them both — and enjoy them!

Excellent community, excellent books — aren’t those the ingredients for a banger reading year? So why did we all feel like ours were just…okay?

Were all the other books published last year legitimately mediocre? Many, sure, but not all. Did we all read James early in the year and then spend the rest of 2024 hoping something else would measure up? Maybe. Or was it just too much of a good thing, where the balance tipped too far toward community frenzy, and too far away from everybody finding their own way to a favorite book to champion?

That’s definitely part of it. I had a ton of fun reading all the same books as everyone else, but it was like pizza. No matter how much you love pizza, eating too much of it doesn’t feel good. And now we all need a detox.

But of course, that’s not the whole story. Capitalism and consumerism did its part. The publishing industry — especially the big five — wants us reading all those books they spent gazillions of publicity dollars promoting. They want us setting our annual reading goals higher and higher and higher and higher. In fact, they depend on it.

And as

Petya K. Grady

wrote in her recent newsletter on reading in the age of digital abundance, I think many of us have “reached complete and total book consumer overload.”

That comes with complicated feelings, at least for me. I care deeply about books, and I want the publishing industry to stay hale and healthy. I want independent bookstores to reap tons of sales from extremely hyped books. I want authors — particularly those with historically marginalized voices — to keep getting big book deals. And it makes me feel good to support those things with my voice and my wallet.

But at the same time, I do want to get off the consumerism treadmill — or at least slow it down. I want to use the library more, especially in this era of book banning. I want to buy second-hand, especially in this era of climate change. I want to read what I own, because past-Deedi knew those books would be winners. And I do genuinely want to read slower and read better in 2025.

Here’s where I tell you that I actually managed to do this once before. In 2020, when the world shut down, I read 150 books, up from my usual ~100. In 2021, I read 160. I assumed, wrongly, that once the world started to open up again and the pace of life returned to “normal,” my book count would drop back down. Instead, the TBR snowball kept growing, the pressure to finish this month’s list because I already had a full list ready for next month never let up, the pace of life did increase, and my anxiety was at an all-time high.

I got lucky — my eventual readiness to do something about those unhealthy reading habits coincided with the publication of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, which allowed that book to legitimately change my life. So that’s when my therapist and I devised a plan: not a reading goal, but a reading cap.

In a move that felt drastic at the time, I decided that I was going to put a hard cap on my monthly TBR. For me, the magic number was 10. I knew that if I read more than 10 books in a month, it meant I was neglecting other things like sleep and exercise and time with my family.

And you know what? It worked. These days, I’m back at a much more comfortable and sustainable (for me) 8–10 books a month. Which is why this year, my goal isn’t to read fewer books, exactly — it’s to shift the mix within that comfortable number I managed to find.

I tell you this because I know it isn’t easy to read less, to resist the pull of publicity dollars and frontlist FOMO. And I learned the hard way that it doesn’t happen passively. We have to do it on purpose. Maybe that means you use hard numbers, like I did, or maybe your version of “on purpose” looks very different.

Either way, I’m rooting for you.

And I hope we all have our best reading years yet.

— Deedi (she/her)