Why I deleted my Goodreads account

If there was a free pizza at the end, maybe I would have thought twice

When I was a kid they had this summer reading challenge: the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program. The deal was, you set a certain number of books you wanted to read during the summer. If you met your goal, you would get a free (!!) personal pan pizza at the end of the summer. Something about the phrasing of “personal pan” always got me. It would be my pizza, and my trip to the Hut.

I remember the crinkled piece of paper where I kept track of each book I read by title and author. I also remember learning how to work the system a little: finding books with huge type, lots of pictures, and white space between the chapters. It’s not that I was trying to avoid reading. I loved reading, which is why I signed up for the challenge in the first place. But there was something about the added pleasure of writing a book’s title in the little provided box that rounded out the whole process: I had done it. That book had been read. There it was, in ink on the page, as satisfying as lining up my matchbox cars had been a few years earlier.

It was that same pleasure that brought me, and probably most other people, to Goodreads. The platform allows you to keep track of every book you’ve ever read in an easy-to-view online “bookshelf,” almost better (and certainly more official) than a real bookshelf. At the end of the year, it provides stats on how much you read. Like the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program, you can set reading goals and meet them. You can even select the particular edition of each book you read (something I was particularly persnickety about as a Goodreads user), so the cover of the book in your online shelf matches up with the specific one you read. User reviews and ratings populate each book’s page, and (unlike Amazon, which owns Goodreads) the reviews are on average pretty insightful. You can actually get a sense of whether you would like a book by reading Goodreads reviews—and then, when you add the book to your bookshelf, you can join the conversation.

So why did I delete Goodreads? Why, after more than a decade of use, did I get this sneaking feeling that it wasn’t good for me? That it was infecting my reading life, and making me make decisions I didn’t want to be making as a reader?

Reading became for other people, not for me.

It started when I realized I wanted to read certain books so that other people would see I read them. My Goodreads profile was public, which made every reading decision I made become a performance, rather than a pleasure. As we all know of social media, getting too focused on how your experiences come across takes away from the experiences themselves. (Cue the lines of Instagrammers taking selfies in front of the stunning waterfall without ever really looking at the waterfall itself.)

This affecting my reading in all sorts of ways. For one, I felt internal pressure to read certain books, in a “Have you read ___” sort of way—I wanted to be the kind of person who read good things, especially because I’m an author on Goodreads and people might associate my reading with my writing practices.

Even more, I wanted to be reading (and rating!) my friends’ books, because I want to support the writing of those I know and love. If I’m honest, though, there are so many books that people I know have written that I have struggled to find the time to read recently. It makes me sad! I want to read and support everything! But there is so much going on in my life right now that I have found it hard to read as much as I wanted, and I didn’t want to feel that self-imposed obligation weighing me down.

I love my writer friends whether or not I read their book yet, and I don’t want to rely on a performative social media presence to prove it. What I want to do is read their books to enjoy them, and partake in their particular consciousness, and not to prove that I’ve done it. Getting off Goodreads frees me to participate in my friends’ books (and all books!) the way I want to, which isn’t always the sanctioned, completist way Goodreads reinforces.

Goodreads doesn’t make space for non-linear, non-completist reading practices.

In other words, a major thing I felt like I was missing because of Goodreads was the ability to read a book partially! (Because I wouldn’t get credit for it on the site!) Or to set down a book I had lost interest in. (Because all I had to do was read just a few more pages, and I’d get the book on my shelf!) Or to dip in and out of books for years, maybe finishing them, maybe not. (It’s hard to enjoy that kind of reading process when your rubric is focused on completion!)

The truth, I’ve been a completist before Goodreads ever existed. Maybe it’s the Pizza Hut influence; more likely it’s the lingering perfectionism of a kid who always had to get an A. For a long time, I finished every single book I read, no matter how much I liked (or hated) it. It wasn’t the worst thing, early in my reading life. I learned how to appreciate literature I didn’t understand at first, and I trained myself to see the good in books that weren’t immediately appealing to me.

But this habit has stuck around, and I realized it was eating away at my enjoyment of reading. Feeling like I had to finish books—reinforced by the Goodreads bookshelf—bogged me down for long periods in books I didn’t want to spend time with, and in places my attention had drifted away from. As a teacher, writer, and part of the literary community, I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that it’s much more fun (and much more educational) to encounter, briefly inhabit, and sometimes finish a wide breadth of books than to devote yourself completely to whichever thing you pick off the shelf first.

It’s so much more enlivening to allow myself to follow my interest and pleasure as a reader. And I don’t have to feel bad about not finishing a book: instead I feel good about encountering it and knowing it in some kind of way, even if it’s not in a completist sense.

Reading as a social performance can also take the fun out of reading.

Have you ever heard of the “overjustification effect”? That’s the thing that the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! challenge, and Goodreads too, accidentally bring to the table for readers.

In brief, the overjustification effect is what happens when you are rewarded for an activity you already like doing, and precisely because of that reward you lose interest in the activity. (Your attention, presumably, becoming more focused on the reward.)

I definitely experienced this in school growing up, where reading turned from a pastime I would spend endless hours doing into a chore that got me a grade. It took a lot of time to wrestle back my love of reading (and writing!) from the validation I got from those activities.

Goodreads feeds into the same cycle. When I noticed myself reading so that I could share that I read something—when I noticed myself wondering how my reading life would come off publicly—I knew it was time to pull the plug. It’s only been a few days since I deleted my Goodreads account, but already reading is much more of a pleasure, now that it’s for me.

All this stuff is tied in with Amazon’s treatment of the book as a commodity, not an act of communication.

A while ago, I vowed to stop buying books from Amazon. Was it because they are destroying the book business by negotiating impossible margins for publishers and putting independent, local booksellers out of business? Yeah, a little. Books are kinda my life and I don’t want to be part of the problem.

But I also noticed that the quality of books arriving from Amazon was astoundingly, consistently low. Major, popular books came in bootlegged-looking, POD printings with fuzzy ink that was difficult to read. Small press books were bent or blemished. The package wasn’t handled with care.

Contrast this with what I’ve experienced with small presses: my current subscription to Nightboat Books, for example, just arrived simply but beautifully wrapped in brown paper, inside a larger box, with a note about the books therein. I just got a rad sticker page from Two Lines Press, another press I subscribe to. The contrasts between this thoughtful, connective publishing practice and Amazon’s big business bleeds into Goodreads as well.

The Goodreads platform, that is, is part of the Amazon ecosystem. As I said earlier, its community insights and ratings of each book are admittedly helpful, especially because they didn’t originate with Amazon (who bought it in 2013). But Amazon’s toxic, commodified logic seeps into Goodreads. Books are often organized on Goodreads by the number of people who have read and rated them, for example, which marginalizes small press and less-popular books unnecessarily. The number of ratings and reads affect how the book looks to prospective readers, propelling feedback loops of popularity. If you’re an author, especially, this kind of stuff can be dispiriting: checking your Goodreads rating or number of reviews is an un-fun, un-helpful way to think about how your book is affecting readers.

As an author, I wanted to get away from that. As a reader, I do really want to support the books I love; I stayed on Goodreads for a long time because I wanted to rate books and signal-boost and be a part of the conversation. Many people do this and it’s a kind, communicative act. But in my case, I’ve realized my contribution to the literary conversation needs to come in more textured, less commodified contexts. I want to really share the books I love with the world—through teaching, word of mouth, real contact—rather than be another number in Amazon’s system.

The point is…

It feels better to me to be off Goodreads. My reading life (and, closely tied to it, my writing life) already feel more saturated, more present, more where I am, instead of being located on an online platform outside of me.

I feel more alive to the whole thing, which is what started me on reading in the first place. That initial pleasure—opening a book and being struck by the strangeness and love of it—is the one I want to keep listening to.