
“For years now, reading has been something like training for a marathon,” he writes. “I keep mental tallies of how many pages I’ve read per night, and how many more pages I need to read in the next few days to keep to my average. In 2011, after years of hovering in the mid-50s, when my annual average hit precisely 60 — that is, 720 books read over 12 years — I did a private victory lap.”
Bourne keeps track of his reading habits by listing every book he has read dating back over the past 12 years so he can quickly tell how he is tracking, month by month, to ensure that he fulfills his target. Unfortunately the result wasn’t just a considerable amount of great reading but also a compulsion to stick to his timetable and achieve his quota and that took over from pure reading pleasure as motivation. No More.