Depth in reading matters more than breadth
Social media and recommender systems are aligned to show you the new, shiny books. Given how fast-paced everything is, keeping up with the influx of new literature becomes an insurmountable chore. Personally, this has led to general anxiety about my growing TBR list and subsequent FOMO. The same can be said about any piece of content in general - text, audio, or video.
Reading challenges on Goodreads and its alternatives incentivize the number of books read. Better metrics like retention and practical utility are ignored. A quick search reveals several guides on how to read more1. Productivity guides encourage readers to try and extract more value from the multiple books they read at the same time2.
The compulsion to be well-read stems from a social heuristic that equates intelligence and wisdom with the volume of books read by an individual. While social media faces scrutiny for hijacking attention, the same cannot be said for attention squandered over multiple books.
As Alain de Botton writes
[The] exhaustive approach to reading does not make us particularly happy. We are drowning in books, we have no time ever to re-read one and we appear fated to a permanent sense of being under-read when compared with our peers and what the media has declared respectable3.
The solution is to drastically reduce the number of books passively consumed. Circle back to titles you've read and loved. This removes the anxiety of the never-conquered TBR list while creating space to revisit books with genuine personal value.