We don’t need a book club ‘challenge’ – what happened to reading for fun?

How many books did you read last year? Does a page count as one side or two? Can you still add it to your list if you listened to the audio version? Should you withdraw all privileges until you’ve reached the last page of Prophet Song?

As an author and a reader, I belong to several online book groups, and this year, more than ever, they appear to be dominated by “reading challenges”, such as the one launched by megalith book site Goodreads. Rather than just reading a book and returning to discuss it, participants are encouraged to take a “challenge”, ploughing through a certain number of books in a year and ticking them off like a laundry list. People worry about not finishing a novel as if it’s a GCSE set text, and fret about “dropping below my average” like timed marathon runners.

It seems that reading for pleasure is no longer enough. Like almost everything else enjoyable, books are now units to be joylessly chomped through, turning the escapist fulfilment of reading into a process of clocking in and out.

Transforming activities into “challenges” has boomed in the past decade due to the prevalence of fundraising on social media. The late-capitalist model of donation requires that you “do something” in order to persuade friends and colleagues to fork out for charity (ideally the “something” must be reasonably difficult or unpleasant).

The idea gained traction in 2014, with the Ice Bucket Challenge – a summer of young people filming themselves chucking a bucket of iced water over their heads and posting their waterlogged shrieks online to drum up likes and donations. 

Started by three young American men living with ALS – amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive neurodegenerative disease – the challenge raised over $115m for the ALS Association, and sparked at least 115 million copycat “challenges”.

A decade on, however, challenge fatigue has overwhelmed us. Eager to maximise donations, almost every charity now exhorts its supporters to take a walking challenge (“10,000 steps a day for a month!”), running challenge (“couch to 5K!”) swimming challenge (“swim the channel at your local leisure centre!”) or hiking challenge (“virtually hike the Appalachian trail from your lounge!”) – and by now, I may not be alone in hurriedly scrolling past yet another excitable promise to do something fairly normal and slightly exhausting. 

It’s not just charities, either – in a culture where almost every organisation must jostle for position, funding, visitors and clicks, public bodies from libraries (summer reading challenge) to councils (recycling challenge) to tourist information (litter-picking challenge) are eager to sign up members of the public who might spread the word. 

But if everything becomes a challenge, nothing is. How hard can it be to walk every day if you have a dog, or read a few books in a month? Most of us are loath, in a cost of living crisis, to donate hard-earned cash to a friend who is doing something they’ll probably quite enjoy for a few weeks. Even if they’re not asking for money – and, like the reading challenge, simply engaging to prove themselves – why bother?

Most people across the world find life enough of a challenge as it is – affording to feed a family, finding a job, overcoming ill health – so to turn the things we can enjoy into yet another opportunity to amass points and approval seems a peculiarly elite approach to existence. 

It’s not a surprise that the mass-challenge concept largely began in the US, where hard work and self-improvement have become shibboleths, whether that means raising a barn or graduating from MIT. Being able to quantify everything you achieve is essential when life is viewed a series of mountains to climb – buying a house, getting a promotion, writing a bestseller – and the subtle, inbuilt competition of social media has only intensified the urge to prove oneself to onlookers, both real and imagined, over and over again.

Many will say “but I like to challenge myself!” I would ask, do you really? Or is there a voice in your head, constantly questioning your worth, looks, intelligence and fitness, that urges you repeatedly to take the “challenge” of proving you’re good enough at reading, running, drawing, swimming, or living?

If there wasn’t, I suspect we wouldn’t feel the need to tick off books and walks like a never-ending to-do list. We’d just read and walk and enjoy it, the way we used to, before we stopped doing things for fun, and turned them into yet another miserable form of measurement.