My Totally Unrealistic Reading Goals for 2025

I don’t know why I do this to myself

“Man Reading” by John Singer Sargent, ca. 1904 (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Sometime between Christmas and New Year’s Day each year, I set a reading goal for the next 12 months. Most years, the goals are clearly unattainable, but you’re always more optimistic at the beginning of January than you are by February 15th. I reached exactly none of my reading goals for 2023, a fact I blame on my mother’s passing in January, a move to East Texas in June, and a general malaise from September until five minutes ago. I am confident (for no good reason) that 2025 will be better.

My family and primary care physician would say that my goals for the new year should have less to do with books and instead focus on silly things like stopping smoking and realizing that lifting a quart bottle of Wild Turkey does not constitute exercise, but they’ve been saying that for years. Turn the record over already; I am far more likely to finally make it past page 25 of Infinite Jest than I am to do either of those things. Besides, smoking and putting whiskey in my coffee are the only two vices I have left; if I gave them up, I would be so perfect that it would annoy even me.

But getting back to the reading goals, though I have finally given up on Infinite Jest (and Gravity’s Rainbow as well), that does not mean my goals for 2025 are easy; they most…