This year, for the first time in my life, I signed up for a Goodreads challenge. I decided on the number of books I want to read over the next 12 months (a very modest 50, compared with someone else’s bewildering 300, which I saw float past on my newsfeed) and very quietly I am working towards meeting my target. I have never attempted anything like this before. Reading has always been a very personal thing, a topic to speak about only if someone asks, and I held the firm belief that challenges and targets belonged to my Peloton and not to my bookshelves. Now, however, I have a little percentage tracker on my home page, Goodreads friends applaud my progress each time I finish a book, and it feels … strangely comforting.
The games, challenges and competitions start with gusto in January. No sooner have we dusted ourselves down from everyone’s “best books of the year”, we’re thrown straight into a literary Alton Towers with an endless choice of book rides on which to hop. The Goodreads challenge is the most straightforward, and based purely on numbers, but elsewhere online you can commit to a month of reading stories set in certain time periods or in particular countries, books within specific genres, a year-long A-Z challenge with a selective version of the alphabet (they tend not to bother with X), or even novels only with yellow covers. My particular favourite is a form of book bingo, in which there are no monthly constraints, but you just need to complete all the reading tasks (for example, a book set in France, a book about vampires) in time to shout “Bingo!” very loudly into the internet before New Year’s Day.
This all sounds like great fun, but there are certain people who frown upon such frivolity (I’m guessing they are the same people who are alarmed by cracked spines and annotated margins). Perhaps they feel it diminishes the great art of reading in some way, or maybe they don’t believe that games and literature is a wise combination (try telling that to HG Wells, who enjoyed playing games so much that he invented one of his own and published a little handbook containing all the rules). Or maybe – and I say this very tentatively – they’ve fallen foul of a little book snobbery. The human brain loves a game. Scratch the surface and you’ll find that most people are very goal-focused, because reaching a specific target releases a healthy dollop of dopamine into our system and we start to become very pleased with ourselves. Reading 10 novels with yellow covers or working your way through (almost) the whole alphabet in book titles might seem superficial, but your prefrontal cortex is deeply grateful. Whenever I visit my Goodreads page, I feel extremely comforted by my little percentage bar. Even if the rest of my life is in chaos, at least my reading is on track.
While I believe these competitions are harmless, there is always the very real danger of reading becoming a competitive sport. A few years ago, when I worked as a doctor in the stressful environment of a hospital ward, at the end of a shift my mind felt far too full to do much reading. Getting through one book a month was hard enough, and if I’d happened to overhear someone was planning on reading 300 books in a year, I would have felt like a failure. But a harmless reading game might have given me just the distraction I needed – and there’s a world of difference between entering a competition and being competitive. There are other benefits to reading games, too. Some games concentrate on choosing only novels in translation, or spending a year reading books from writers of colour. We are usually creatures of habit, sticking to writers and topics with which we feel comfortable, but a reading challenge can help us step out of that corridor of familiarity – we might even find ourselves a new favourite author.
Along with most things in our lives, the landscape of publishing has changed significantly in the past few years. BookTok, reading challenges and book games are becoming increasingly popular, and while not to everyone’s taste, they are succeeding in encouraging more people to read, which is no mean feat in a world with so many distractions. In the same way that a YouTuber’s name on the front of a novel might prompt a teenager to step into a branch of Waterstones for the very first time, a book game on TikTok or Twitter could make an avid reader out of someone who hadn’t even considered picking up a book before. No matter what the game is, that’s got to be a win.
• A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon is out in paperback on 30 March (£8.99, The Borough Press). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
