– Safaa Haania
King Midas wanted everything he touched to turn into gold. He thought it would make him powerful, but it destroyed the things he cared about most. Reading can be like that. It starts as curiosity, as a way to learn or escape, but when it becomes about numbers, how many books you have read this year, which classics you have ticked off, it loses its value. The joy isn’t in the pages; it’s in the tally.
Icarus is another example of how obsession can go too far. He had wings made of feathers and wax and was warned not to fly too close to the sun, but he ignored the limits because he wanted to go higher, faster, further. In the end, the wax melted, and he fell. The story shows how getting too fixated on anything, even something exciting or ambitious, can make you lose sight of what actually matters. Reading can be like that, too. When you focus on finishing books just to hit a number or to keep a streak going, you stop paying attention to the ideas, the stories, or what you are actually learning. The act of reading becomes vain, more about the proof you can show than the value it gives you.
In Victorian England, keeping a list of the books you had read was almost a social requirement. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you had to have read all the classics; not necessarily to understand them, but to show you had. Today it’s similar. Instagram feeds, Goodreads streaks, LinkedIn posts: the obsession isn’t knowledge itself, it’s proof of consumption.
I fell right into the trap a few years ago. I had a Bookstagram account where I would post a new review the moment I finished an Agatha Christie novel, share carefully staged photos of the cover, the coffee cup, the candle, everything. I was proud of the streak, the feed, the “look at all I have read” vibe. Looking back, I barely remember the plots. The thrill was in finishing and sharing, not in reading itself. The books became trophies, and the reading itself became secondary.
We’ve all seen it. Someone posts a photo of a stack of books with a caption like “50 books in a year.” You scroll, impressed, or guilty, but do you know if they actually remember a single argument from any of them? Counting books has become a way to look accomplished without actually thinking. And it’s tempting. I have caught myself doing it. It feels productive, but it’s easy to forget that the point of reading is to read, not to collect.
The obsession with lists and numbers turns curiosity into performance. It makes books objects of status rather than tools for reflection. That does not mean you should not read widely, far from it, but it does mean paying attention to why you are reading. Are you reading to learn, or are you reading just so you can tell others you did?
The problem is not with reading itself; it is with what reading becomes when it is measured. When every book is just a tick on a list, the pages start to blur together. Stories, ideas, and takeaways get lost under the weight of proof. Reading should change the way you think, not the way you appear.
