IN 2016, Goodreads surprised me with an e-mail informing me that I had written so many reviews—393, to be exact—I was in the top 1 percent of contributors to the site. Looking at the golden “Top 1%” graphic at my work desk, I was certain there had been a mistake. I’d only been trying to pass the time. That I had made that prolific top 1 percent didn’t seem right.
But very little did that year. I was in my early twenties then. My grandfather was dying. I was working sixty hours a week across two jobs, and I was a poor fit for one of them, where I was expected to nod along while my fellow administrators talked badly about the students. Toxic as it became, I refused to quit because I thought all adult jobs came with office politics. As a first-generation college graduate, I didn’t know any better alternatives existed. Spoiler alert: My life, as it was, proved unsustainable. It would take me two more months to figure that out, time I would fill with reading still more books.
That year reading was my primary mechanism for coping with my disillusionment. Reading was a pleasurable means of avoidance: If I was completing an average of two books a week, I didn’t have time to think about how unhappy I was. Mix that with the labor of two jobs, and I was booked—pun intended—every waking minute. I read anything I could get my hands on, including childhood favorites, the classics, and the majority of my library’s comic book collection. I read Primo Levi one!—and passages with symbolism I didn’t understand. Then I reviewed each book on Goodreads. When one book reminded me of another, I’d review both, and my review count would climb. Though Goodreads is a public platform, I didn’t intend for other people to read my reviews. Unlike many of its users who court an audience, or those who misuse the site and “review-bomb” books to decimate their ratings, I didn’t use enticing GIFs, images, fancy formatting, or fake accounts. I wrote for myself, without agenda. As you might expect, I didn’t get a lot of engagement, but I wasn’t looking for likes. I was just trying to track my reading—and keep busy, to avoid acknowledging how disenchanting real life had become.
