In this op-ed, assoc. culture director P. Claire Dodson explores the glut of 2025 reading challenges and obsessive Letterboxd movie tracking and what they say about how we engage with art.
In second grade, I became obsessed with Accelerated Reader, a computer quiz program started in 1986 to encourage students in the U.S. to read. Each book was assigned a point total, and the bigger the book the more points you had the potential to earn from the related reading comprehension quiz.
The problem was that my desire for points — and the colorful erasers and pizza parties they purchased — outstripped my reading abilities at the time. I knew the Harry Potter books (four of which were out at the time) had double-digit point values, and I was so consumed with earning points that I took all the quizzes without having read a single one, thinking I could guess well enough. Of course, I failed. (This was just before the movies came out.)
A year later, I read Harry Potter for real, and I’d grit my teeth as classmates took and aced the quizzes I’d already attempted. I vowed never to make the same mistake again; instead, I began to read voraciously, aiming to consume as much as possible (mostly easy stacks of children’s books well under my grade level) to maximize my point totals. I was high off the points, amassing hundreds, thousands, working my way up to the top of the reader lists posted every week. A frenemy and I raced each other through Black Beauty, each of us spurring the other toward more and more points. I read less for the pure enjoyment of reading, and more for the love of the game.
Did the intention matter? I was still reading, nearly every single day. Out of the point-scoring came a genuine love for losing myself in books that has stayed with me — even as I've read far less each year than I did while I was in school.
I think about Accelerated Reader every time someone posts about succeeding or failing in a hundred (or more) books-a-year reading challenges, or tries to argue on the internet that audiobooks or fan fiction don’t count when adding up totals, or otherwise puts rules or competition for reading out into the ether. I think about it when we log books in Goodreads or movies in Letterboxd — these platforms have become an extension of how we present ourselves on social media. A recent post on X pondered just how people have already watched 10 movies in 2025; the cynical, but perhaps at least somewhat true answer posited by another user: “Because they're not actually ‘watching’ them, it's just on and they log it for the sake of bulking their letterboxd stats.”
It can all start to feel a bit hollow. Like we've taken beautiful things — reading books, watching movies, engaging with art and culture — and turned them into just more extensions of our personal brands. More content to consume and, crucially, share that we consumed.
It's a question writers and educators have been mulling over for years: does gamifying reading help or hurt the broad end goal of having people read for pleasure and knowledge, en masse?
Alexandra Chiasson, associate chair of the Interdisciplinary Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality and teaching assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has taught introductory English and reading-intensive gender studies classes and has noticed specific ways her students talk about reading and watching movies.
“I remember one student saying something like ‘[Gen Z watches movies now] because they gave us a social media for it,’ talking about Letterboxd,” Chiasson says. “Honestly most of them just talk about how they wish they had the attention span to watch and read more. I’m not sure if it’s because they yearn to make 100 books in a year content, or if they want to impress me, or if they actually want to read books. I would be ecstatic if my students only read one book in 2025 as long as it challenged them and expanded their worldview."
Though the desire for reading as a form of self-improvement is there amongst young people, Chiasson says. “The idea is that they could always be better if they read more books and watch more movies, exercise more, eat better, and do a skincare routine. When I taught a literature course, I found out that at least five people in the class were listening to reading assignments as audiobooks at 2.0x speed. I was kind of horrified.”
We see that mindset reflected in social media challenges like 75 Hard, where participants are instructed to read 10 pages of a non-fiction book a day (specifically non-fiction, with an implied emphasis on self-help). Reading is not presented as something that opens you up to differing perspectives and encourages you to think critically and ask thoughtful questions about the world. Instead, it’s another tool to make you better in a capitalistic, productivity-obsessed way. It brings everything back to the individual: improve yourself, build a personal brand, make more money, be smarter, be healthier, be happier, and never slow down and think about anyone but yourself. And when you can’t, it’s your personal failing. You’re not disciplined enough.
There's of course so much larger context here: Attention spans are, anecdotally, getting shorter and shorter. Friends say they can barely watch a TikTok all the way through without scrolling; kids (and adults) reach for screens when they're bored instead of books or magazines.
Meanwhile, the political and social climate in the U.S. prioritizes quick and emotional opinions, overgeneralized statements, fear-mongering, disinformation, and anything that will polarize or provoke — anything that powerful people can exploit to grow their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. Over 10,000 books were pulled off public school shelves last year as part of ongoing book bans fueled by far-right meddlers and those who seek to reduce access to information, and especially stories about the experiences of marginalized people.
Simultaneously, the book publishing industry is continuing to flounder; editors are underpaid and overworked, nonfiction books go un-fact checked, and the most commercially viable stories (often the ones we’ve heard before) tend to prevail over riskier works. (Though independent publishers and booksellers work hard to bridge the gaps). In this ecosystem, maybe we should just be happy anyone is reading anything at all.
Ultimately, I don’t think a reading challenge is inherently bad, and it can be something that genuinely inspires people to pick up that childhood love for reading they may have abandoned as they grew up. During the early pandemic days, many people gamified reading just to have something to look forward to, seeking books as means of escape and entertainment in a crumbling world. BookTok, despite its ultra-commercialization by publishers and influencers alike, thrives as a way to share stories with each other.
As for Letterboxd and Goodreads — meeting, online or off, to discuss art you loved can be so beautiful when it’s viewed not as another way to compete or posture about yourself, but to actually talk about why something was created, what it means, what you loved or hated about it.
Accelerated Reader, for its flaws, spurred in me a love for stories that shaped my life and my career. Sometimes I still catch myself reading too fast, skimming over a page to get to the end of it, caught up in the urge to complete a story, to complete a goal. But there’s no point system in the real world, no big god of reading waiting to judge you for how much you read in 2025.
Take a breath. Read something for the pure fun of it — a fanfic or a hate-read essay or a classic work of literature (ever heard of The Odyssey?) or maybe even a well-researched self-help book (though please not Andrew Huberman or The 48 Laws of Power, I beg). Read a hundred books and watch a movie every day, if you like. Maybe challenge yourself not to post about it.
