The Algorithm Scheduled My Reading. I Missed the Book

The reading app scheduled my books: thirty minutes a day, with a progress tracker and a streak. I have a 400-day streak and I have not finished a book in a year. I read to the timer now, and I miss the book.

The app was supposed to make me read more. It sets a daily goal, tracks my minutes, and celebrates my streak with little animations. It has worked, in the way that a treadmill works: I am on it every day, and I am not going anywhere.

I have a 400-day streak. The number is beautiful. It sits in the app like a trophy, and I protect it the way you protect a streak, which is to say I read when I do not want to, and I stop when the timer stops, and I choose the books the app recommends, and the app recommends what it can track.

The book I have been reading for three months is good. I know it is good, the way you know a meal is good when you eat it standing up. I read it in thirty-minute blocks, and I mark the progress, and the progress bar moves, and the book is almost done, and I have started to realize that I have not once been lost in it. I have been present for it, on schedule, the way you are present for a meeting.

Here is what the app cannot schedule: the night you read until 2am because you cannot stop. The page you read three times because it rearranged you. The hour you lose entirely because the book took you somewhere. The app optimizes the losing, and the losing was the point, and I have started to feel the shape of the missing thing, which is the shape of being taken somewhere.

I turned off the timer last night. I read the book without the progress bar, and I read past the thirty minutes, and I finished it, and I sat in the dark with the book in my hands, and I felt the thing I had been missing, which was the book, and the book had been there all along, waiting for me to stop scheduling it. The streak is broken now. I am not going to fix it. I am going to read the next book the way you eat a meal you love, and I am going to be late for things, and I am going to be okay with it, because the app was right that I needed to read more, and it was wrong about what reading is.