i deleted goodreads

voicemail (4): a reflection on goodreads and my relationship with reading. plus, a meltdown.

Photograph by Venetia Scott

I was listening to “Prayer in Open D” when unwarranted panic struck. I thanked my cavemen ancestors for blessing me with hypervigilance and reminded myself that I was enclosed in a Lisbon hotel room, judging photos of myself. There weren’t wild animals on the loose; there were only mistmatched socks in my suitcase. I remembered to regulate my nervous system but felt incapable of mindfulness. As a last-ditch effort, I gentle-parented myself: you are a high-agency person.

Feeling high-agency, I decided that I hated Goodreads. I hate that I can’t rate books three-eighths of a star and that everyone can see what I read in middle school and that I never decided whether to use capital letters in my reviews. Goodreads must be the terradactyl that almost ate my ancestors. Between fight or flight, I chose to fight and deleted my Goodreads account.

Unlike Instagram—with its thirty-day window between deleting your account and actually deleting it—Goodreads deleted my account instantly. I tried to log in three times. No one ever says fourth time’s the charm, so I deleted the Goodreads app. The data fiend in me panicked, then stopped when I remembered that Storygraph still recollected the last seven years of my reading history. When I returned from vacation, I would download my data into a spreadsheet that now sits on my desktop, below a jpg of my LinkedIn profile picture.

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reading as a performance

(Note: when I say Goodreads, it could apply to all other reading-tracking apps)

A few months ago, my Spanish class gathered around a table labeled “BOOK SWAP.” My friend picked up Just By Looking At Him, remarking that a sticker cleverly censored the nude man on the cover. As passersby streamed through the hallway, he drew attention to the blurb and the first line of the novel: “My boyfriend Gus has a beautiful penis”—absolute hilarity to teenage boys. I remembered borrowing this book from the library, but I didn’t say anything. Neither did my friend when he cradled the book in his arms, concealed between his chest and a hardcover of Forest Gump. His friends asked why he kept it.

The point is: our reading taste creates assumptions about our identity, and there is enourmous pressure to conform. Whether Addison Rae actually read Britney Spears’s memoir or not, holding The Woman In Me suggests a different persona than, say, A Court of Thorns and Roses. I’ve found myself screenshotting acquaintances’ Instagram stories to zoom in on the books they hold in their laps, deciphering pixels to conduct a vibe check: a Bell Hooks cool girl or an Abby Jimenez romantic? Typing these words feels foolish—the same way I feel after spending too long on psychoanalyzing people who I will never talk to.

Addison Rae, holding Britney Spears’s memoir

Goodreads doesn’t help. Before Goodreads, I only announced my reading-related choices to the librarian; now, the app encourages shouting my “currently-reading” to every one of the decrepit app’s 125 million users. Each choice—what I read, how many stars to rate a book—becomes more consequential as they build a profile of selfhood. Do I want to be a Moshfeghian it-girl, or is that passé in 2025? When I search for a new read, I feel like my friend at the book swap table—with a judging council hovering over my decisions. In pursuits where an audience is unnecessary, why is there a need for one? Why do we even want one? Does it make us feel important, somehow?

I can’t answer that question, but I’ve certainly found myself performing. While I rated It Ends With Us four stars in eighth grade, I eventually revoked my rating because it was taboo (within my literary circle) to enjoy Colleen Hoover’s books—which, I reasoned, meant that the present version of myself probably won’t enjoy it either. Even now, I feel the need to justify my initial rating. The constant suppressions of my likes and dislikes have led me to distrust my taste—the very thing that makes me different from every other teenage girl almost-twenty-somethings who read on the train.

This is the point where you tell me that I care too much about others’ opinions, but that is the nature of performing: to appease the audience. Substack loves to condemn reductionist attitudes toward literature, but it’s difficult to extricate myself entirely from society’s value systems. What makes me choose the newest unhinged female narrator over a dusty paperback that I bought last year?

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i can’t think for myself

Tastes change, while the initial experience of reading doesn’t. I can’t time travel back to eighth grade and change my newfound concern about domestic violence (thanks to It Ends With Us). Goodreads, with its star-rating feature, focuses on the first. I mean, how do you even begin to quantify an experience? Before rating a book, I’ve always debated whether to rate based on my enjoyment or the book’s “objective value.” I’ve always chosen the later because it felt more “literary”—or safe, for fear of trolls lurking in the comment section of my reviews. Yet, the more I de-centered assigning “value” to each book, the more valuable each book became; I began to appreciate each book as an experience, rather than as an audition to be a five-star book. What more value can reading provide than a window of ourselves? On Goodreads, the top reviews are often witty one-liners, encouraging consumption over reflection. Rather than searching for meaning, we are content with inching one book closer to our yearly reading goal.

one of the top goodreads reviews of a book i liked

More importantly, with Goodreads, thinking isn’t convenient anymore. When I contemplated DNF-ing, I’d launch the app and browse one-star reviews to validate my urge; that, or convince myself with five-star reviews that finishing would be “worth it.” Then, I’d skim the book through other peoples’ lenses, and reading became one big exercise in confirmation bias. At that point, was I reading? Or was I just flipping pages? Before I wrote reviews, I read other reviews to ensure that the characters were, in fact, underdeveloped—that I didn’t miss a minute details that would invalidate my opinion. If I didn’t understand a critically-acclaimed novel, I blamed myself and slapped a four-star next to its title. Instead of capturing my thoughts, my reviews—the way that I remembered a book—became collections of the most reasonable-sounding reviews I could find.

If I wanted to pile on, I could mention that Goodreads’s algorithmic book recommendations also eroded taste. But I won’t, because I have to finish an essay for school, and I was already unreasonably mean to Goodreads.

(Note: while I was editing, I came across this YouTube Video that dives into the loss of individual reading tastes!)

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how i track my reading

I don’t think that deleting reading trackers is the solution for everyone, but it was for me. Here are some alternative ways of tracking my reading:

1. spreadsheets

I’ve always tracked my books according to the CAWPILE system (created by Book Roast on YouTube).

2. reading journals

I’ve grown to love physical forms of record-keeping, and my reading journal is my holy grail. Maybe it’s excessive to record every quote that mildly resonates with me, but, for the first time, I actually remember what I read two weeks ago. It has helped me slow down my reading and interpret difficult texts. (examples in the next section)

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behind the scenes

a picture from the night i deleted goodreads

my reading journal set-up (spoilers)