has reading become competitive???

hello every and welcome to another chatty video this is one of those videos that you put on in the background while you get ready in the morning or you clean your room or something today I'm gonna be talking about competitive reading has reading become too competitive have we somehow accidentally made it a sport this is kind of a feed on from another video I made earlier this year actually I can check when I did it it was in October or when I was October last year I thought it was this year no it was a whole year ago I made a video called not a proper reader and I really I really enjoyed making that video because it was like this confessional it was talking about how I don't feel like a proper reader because I don't think I read as much as everyone else is reading I don't feel like it's the only thing I want to be doing I have other hobbies and you guys responded really well to that video like so many of you people agreed and kind of were like yes these things needed to get off my chest um and so this kind of thought process doesn't stop once I make a video you know like I made that video and then I kept thinking about it still and so another kind of take angle I've been thinking about lately is the competitive nature of reading and years ago in 2012 you see all my videos are starting to they're melding together um years and years ago I made a video talking about how I hate reading challenges and what I mean by that because there's now at the time at the time there was only one reading challenge it was the 50 book challenge and that's what everyone tried to do now the idea of a reading challenge has totally changed like there are books to Graham challenges there are like readathons which didn't exist back then on booktube so what I was talking about then was this idea of everyone like deciding at the beginning of the year I'm gonna read X numbers of next number of books 50 bucks 100 bucks and then the goal the imperative becomes to read that number of books it doesn't become to read it doesn't matter like if the books are good or not or one thing I often see that I think is really interesting I'm not judging people when I see it find it like fascinating at the end of the year I see so many people like making to be read videos and they're like oh I'm trying to read a bunch of short books um graphic novels poetry collections to try and catch up on my reading challenge and I'm like just read the ones you want to read whatever you want to read like don't feel embraced but don't feel attacked by it and recently I swear my favorite booktube channel right now is Mercedes this channel I just mentioned her in my last video and I'm mentioning her again because she made a video that was about like falling out of love with reading and in that video she talked a lot about kind of the impact that book two has had on her reading and she just did a follow-up to that video and it made me think about this more and in my last video last week I talked about competitive reading so let's let's just jump into it and after this preamble I don't even know what I'm talking about um so reading when I think about it outside of booktube like if I pretend a book to never existed it's not a thing no one knows about it which for a lot of people they don't know about it right but let's pretend it doesn't exist reading is a very solitary thing in my head yes absolutely in a way it's like a huge connector of people we're all reading the same books in a way right like there is only an X number of books that we get to pick from that get published so we all walk into a bookshop assuming like it within countries and what gets translated I know I'm making a generality here okay I know don't get finicky on me so like I know but generally like we're all reading from the same books and it's it is a great communicator a great connector but apart from the fact that we're sharing ideas in that way it's a very solitary thing you know you go to the book shop usually on your own and you browse or the library you go and you just like picking out a book maybe on an e-reader you pick a book you buy borrow or lend it and then you go home and you read it on your own of course there are exceptions right reading books to your kids reading a book with your partner etc etc but let's just admit that for the most part it is a solitary experience when before booktube it remained a solitary experience afterwards as well I would often tell my mom about the book and I've told this story many times on booktube but like it got to a point where I would like read a book have to tell my mom the entire plot of the book which would take me like an hour and then tell her my thoughts on the book so that we were on the same page right and that was fine like before but it was it was a lonely kind of thing and I didn't mind it was totally fine but then booktube and similar communities like books to graham and book blogging but I'll just talk about book 2 because that's what I know they make them these community events suddenly reading isn't lonely at all like it's the opposite of lonely I make a video but a book thousands of people see it and talk to me about it and if they've read it they tell me what they thought um and it went from being a solitary thing to a community thing and there's so many positives to that but there's also negatives right and I think one of the negatives is that it has become a competitive sport so here's my thesis that by Nature by just the nature of being a part of a community that revolves around an object in this case books you start to compare and contrast your interaction with the object with other people's interaction of the object and so if we're talking about books and we all are subscribed to a bunch of booktubers and you start watching there NOLs and seeing how much they read you suddenly feel like that's how much you're supposed to read or yeah you you read five books last year and you thought that was great that's the most you've ever read and then you go and watch some people's Channel and they're like I had a really bad reading month I only read six books and you're like what um I think I think it is it does become like a sport sort of it does um there's like teams of different types of reading and different genres of reading and we have this kind of for me the biggest thing okay the biggest thing is the scoring it's like getting a goal every time you finish a book and it becomes more about scoring the goal then it is about the journey um it becomes more about taking off that number how many books did I read this year how many as opposed to I read really good books this year etc etc um one thing that I think about often it's like what would have happened if I'd never joined booktube and they don't say that because I don't want to be a part of I love to but everyone thinks these things right you always think about the alternatives in life what what would have happened and I think that my reading would be totally different I I have I've made videos about this in the past and Mercedes recently talked about this too in this video that I did in October 2016 I called myself a public reader and I think that that's a really apt term for what we're doing on booktube because we've taken this personal solitary experience and decided to share it outside of our confines and what it does is it makes it a performance right it creates a per uh there's a performativity that comes along with sharing everything you do in a certain activity it doesn't it does not mean that it's fake there's performativity in everything you do just like by leaving your house you're suddenly performing but like in a specific community it suddenly does become a bit of a show and for the most part I don't mind I love it that's why I'm still here if I did a tit I would have left um but I love it so I'm here and I love seeing what books other people are getting I love seeing the books that my friends love this is like one of my favorite things when a booktube that booktuber that I really love makes a video or an Instagram post and says that they just they just read a new favorite book it fills me with such excitement I can't even explain like it's kind of bizarre like why do I care what other people's reading but I do recently um my friend max from welldonebooks who was a fantastic Instagram I'll link him down below he just finished a book Oh what was it called the nightingale I think it's called the nightingale and he loved it and I was literally so happy but so happy that I remember this you know I love that it's a community event but with the scoring of how well you're doing how many pages have you read this year how many books have you read this month um I think it does become a bit competitive one thing for me that I've really noticed um it there's lots of deer like it's not you know the sports metaphor you can only go so far I think it'd only take me so far but like yeah there's different like minigames within it and one of those things that I struggle with is this competition to be relevant in what you're reading does anyone else feel this I'd really love to hear if other people feel this there um when I when I started booktube I basically became aware of so many books I used to just go to the book shop look around find a book or two or three go home read those books and then that was it I didn't really learn about other books other than going to the book shop and now once I learnt like join this community and everyone's talking with all these books and um being a part of the community and searching out new books I there's now book buzz book hype and certain books become more popular than others which is natural and I feel like I have to read them like I have to read them or I'm a bad person or I'm not a proper reader or I'm not competing well enough in the in the environment um a couple examples of this are when to implement rishi by Sanju and men on and the hate you give by Angie Thomas these are books that I genuinely like I'm being honest with you I'm opening an honest channel here I genuinely feel bad that I haven't read them not because I particularly want to read them not particularly because of anything other than I feel like it's making me look bad that I haven't read them because my community has read them for the most part and like I was so excited about when dimple Mary she like super pumped I probably should have brought it down it's up there somewhere um what I was really excited about it and I read like 150 H pages of it or something and I wasn't liking it I wasn't liking it like that's just honest I just wasn't enjoying it it wasn't what I wanted it to be it wasn't something I was enjoying for what it was and before booktube I would have just been like huh what a shame and returned it to the library or like gave giving it to a friend or just left it on my shelf you know I would have moved on but because I'm in booktube I feel like no everyone's talking about this book everyone loves this book I need to finish it um the hate you give is a similar example but with a different kind of set of expectations it is a book I definitely want to finish I do want to read but I started reading it and then stuff happened like I went traveling and I couldn't take it with me and so I was like okay I'll read it when I come back home and by the time I came back home I kind of felt like oh I need to restart it and so it just got interrupted that's not a big deal for me like before booktube I would have just been like Oh Cal restarted in a few months or I'll pick it back up there was no race to a finish there was no oh god there's this competitive edge that if I don't read it now I'm not relevant anymore I won't be on top of it anymore and I still to read it I still want to finish it but I feel like because I haven't read it fast enough in the year that came out in the months after it came out I'm not good enough and those are some of the negative effects from it becoming a competitive sport and so I guess the solution to it right don't go to if we talk about problems we have to talk about solutions I guess the solution to it is just deciding not to play into that dialogue but it's really hard I find it really hard when I watch like wrap up after wrap up of people being like I only read seven books this month and I only read one because of school or because of life or because I have other hobbies and I'm like hi oh my god I'm not doing good enough I'm not doing good enough in this sport I didn't want to compete in you know what I mean I find that really interesting for me the benefits of book two outweigh the negative obviously but I still think these are productive things to think about and talk about because they do affect the ways that we read like if this is our passion I find it super interesting to talk about the ways that it's being affected um yeah competitive reading there was definitely another angle I wanted to take on it um why don't thing that I do think is really interesting he's like how do i phrase this I've seen on Instagram okay yes this is cool this is good I want to talk about this so I saw an Instagram I follow a lot of books to Gramm accounts because I love books to Graham I don't do it myself um because my Instagram account is just personal photos of me but I do do a lot of book mail unboxings on my insta story if you're interested in that little plug but I really follow a lot of Instagram accounts books agree my really enjoy them and one thing I saw recently was super interesting saw this person who said I'm rereading this book I know I shouldn't be because I have so many books I should be reading now she did not mean school like she didn't mean that she should be reading for a school or something she meant that there was new books that were more pressing there was like for me I just read a lot into it you know and I I kind of felt like what she was saying and it could be wrong but like I do I get the sentiment a lot not just on this person but like everywhere there's a sentiment like I shouldn't be spending my time rereading books I shouldn't be spending my time taking breaks from reading I shouldn't um blah blah blah because I should be staying on top of the current trends reading as much as I possibly can and making sure that I hit these goals before the end of the month or year and it's like whoa when did we all decide that we wanted to get into this kind of competitive thing because that's not the kind of reading I like it's not I loved rereading books I've talked about this a million times on my channel I swear I before book dude okay there's such a divide like I genuinely tell everyone this I'm always like okay well before book - and then after booktube there's like a split in my life 16 year old me didn't know she was making a huge decision but she was um before booktube at least half of my reading was rereading I loved rereading books adored it because for me that's the point of reach like what are we it goes down to every single person on this one right like I can only talk to my own experience it goes down to every one of us why did you read Christ oh it's got it's gotten spicy in here why do you read because I read to find favorite books that speak to me that I can then revisit I don't I don't want to read a new book every time I want to go back like that's why we're digging right I feel like when we read we're digging we're digging for gems when we finally find a gym we don't just go that was great and chuck it into the dirt pile again no we put it aside to revisit that's how I feel about it and after booktube I have not done that as much like I've done it a bit because I'd like literally tricked myself into doing it at a certain point I made a rule that I start the year off with a reread because it was like the only way that I would do it trying to trick myself by making it a challenge on booktubeathon by doing this by doing that like tricking myself into rereading because I know I love it but the pressure of the competition that gets built around reading stops me from doing it I don't do it I keep thinking I could reread Animal Farm for the seventh time or I should probably read that book that I haven't gotten to yet and I'm like not gonna be on top of it anymore I'm not relevant anymore I think the problem not the problem a problem or thought to consider is the medium of reading itself so if we're talking about music or movies totally different conversation because if and I don't want to like quantify numbers first of all I don't think I could properly do it when second why I don't think it's useful but like if we say um I kind of fast reader is reading around fifty books a year let's just say that number just so that we can have a number but I really think it's arbitrary um if like a a person who's really devoted a lot of time to reading it's reading fifty books a year how many movies can you watch in a year like how many movies does an average person watch what in a year you could you can watch so many how many times have you just like watched two movies in a night I do that often because it's not that hard right I love movies I'm not saying that they're not hard to make and I'm not saying that they're not like complex to enjoy not at all I'm just saying like literally timewise if we just look at the time um two and a half hours imagine if you could read every single book in two and a half hours what a dream that's a dream world to me but anyway like it becomes completely different because in the movie realm you can watch all the new popular movies if you really want to if that's what's to you to stay relevant you feel like you need to go watch these movies it's not that much of a time suck you're like okay I'll just spend one day a week catching up on popular movies great you're covered but I'm reading it doesn't work like that like some people will read 20 like last year I read 26 books I think for 24 I forget I completely forget but like I read something in the 20s there's like 20 relevant books you know and I mean like if I was trying to stay on trend I could have just read the 20 most popular books that year and that's all I read I wouldn't have had time to read my own books like the things that interest me the random things that interest me my school books that's another whole factor let's chase that for a second like having this whole competitive reading thing completely disregards the idea that some years are different than others par example um I'm currently doing my masters I have no time for reading like no I have no time for reading and if you've just given birth to a child you're not gonna have any time for reading or maybe you will because you're a special case like maybe you find it a great part of like I don't know being a new parent I don't know what I'm talking about anymore but like somebody else might be like no personally I wasn't able to juggle reading and being a new parent you might not be able to juggle reading and being a student or reading and doing the new job or reading and moving like all of these things can impact people a lot and once we start to put these pressures on ourselves we start to make each year seem like it's a reset and it's gonna be the same as last year you should be able to read the same amount of books every year that doesn't make any sense every year is very different I think about that sometimes um one thing that I've often seen people talk about and I think right now there's a bit of a conversation going on about it in booktube these Goodreads the impact of Goodreads I love Goodreads um before I wish I'd had Goodreads my entire life because it's like a dream for cataloguing books I know like I can see exactly what I read in 2016 20 15 14 13 12 you know for the six years that I've been doing this more than six now like I can see every book I've read and a little maybe just a sentence or maybe just a few stars or maybe a whole review of my thoughts I love that um so for me Goodreads is not a part of my problem with this sort of thing but the challenge is there like 50 books Reading Challenge thingy and you know what's funny you know I'm such a hypocrite you gotta admit these things to yourself sometimes like I every year set my reading challenge to one because I just want to read you know it's kind of I want I liked clicking on that button on my Goodreads profile so that I can see the books that I read so that's why I don't put zero or something but I just one book that's all I just want to read like I just care about reading but I mentioned that I'm a hypocrite because literally I was thinking before I was like should I set my challenge to a hundred in 2019 forward planning here 2018 I'm doing my masters all the way until August so I'm like I won't be able to read that much but then 2019 I really want to get back into reading maybe I should set it to a hundred and that could be my whole point of my year I don't like Ariel you're falling into this trap Ariel you don't care how much you read you just care that you're spending time reading and reading your favorite books and find a new favorite book you know one problem I have and I've also talked about this in another video is that I used to really get a lot of young adult and now I do I stop I read like 50 percent of my reading is young adult that's still a lot of young adult but I read other things and first of all negatively affected the channel that's for sure the people they aren't watching as much anymore but secondly apart from that whole crisis it's not as trendy you know like especially on booktube like if I'm like I would like to read this non-fiction book frida kahlo no one's like yeah I can't wait people are like okay you do that and it's really funny because like I did it on Goodreads I did like an update on I'm reading Turtles all the way down boom hundreds of likes and then I'll like update on one of my school books and people like to likes 3 likes or I'll update on a random non-fiction book or an adult book and it's just like 20 likes and like I it makes me not want to read the things I want to read because I know that my audience doesn't want me to read it I think we're branching into a new topic should we just do weekly rent because this is fun for me I would love to hear your thoughts on this kind of stuff because I find it super fascinating this has been a crazy long video and I genuinely have to go do homework Goodell so got to try and read a novel tonight try my best try my best okay I don't think you guys enjoyed this video and I'll see you my next one [Music]

Channel: Ariel Bissett

Views: 87,145

Keywords: arielbissett, ariel, bissett, books, book, book review, booktube

Id: nsI9gBIp6uo

Length: 25min 44sec (1544 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2017