Every January, thousands of readers log on to Goodreads, Instagram or TikTok and make the same declaration: this is the year I read 50 books. Or 75. Or 100. Screenshots of spreadsheets circulate, templates for tracking pages and percentages are downloaded, friends publicly pledge to “do better” than they did last year. What was once a private pastime is announced, quantified and, in some corners of the internet, judged.

The appeal is obvious: in a distracted age, reading can easily become crowded out by work, screens and fatigue. Literacy rates in the UK are stagnating: in 2024, around 50% of UK adults read regularly for pleasure, down from 58% in 2015.

As the UK launches its National Year of Reading, a steady drumbeat of commentary has framed the decline of book culture as a civilisational crisis. Columnists have painted lurid pictures of a post-literate society, in which the shrinking cultural centrality of books represents a slow unravelling of the habits that once underpinned modern public life. In this context, reading targets promise discipline and a sense of progress.

But do yearly reading goals actually help us read better, or do they risk hollowing out the very activity they claim to protect? As reading is increasingly tracked and performed online, there is a growing sense that a solitary pleasure is being reshaped by the logic of metrics and visibility. In a culture that counts steps, optimises sleep and gamifies meditation, the pressure to quantify reading may say less about books than about a wider urge to turn even our leisure into something measurable and, ultimately, competitive.

For Ayesha Chaudhry, who co-runs the Instagram account @between2books, this online book culture has become alienating. “The numbers I see online are wildly unsustainable,” she says. “I used to set huge targets – 70 or 100 books a year, written out in my diary. Then I’d get to December, feel guilty, and stare at all these empty spaces on the page.”

Last year, Chaudhry decided to purposely slow down, reading just 10 books – the fewest since childhood – and considers it one of her most satisfying reading years. “I actually sat with what I was reading, and also turned it into something more interactive,” she says. “Most of those books came into my life through conversations, recommendations from people I met on holiday, or listening to an author at an event. They became social experiences rather than items to tick off.”

The shift, she says, has eased both pressure and overconsumption. “I was buying books to meet goals, then feeling anxious because they weren’t read. It became a loop.” Now, her aims are non-numerical: exploring authors’ backlist titles, genres outside her comfort zone, and more time spent thinking rather than counting.

According to philosopher C Thi Nguyen, author of The Score, the phenomenon Chaudhry describes sits within a much wider cultural shift. In his book, Nguyen explores how modern life increasingly gamifies ordinary activities, showing how metrics and scoring systems can distort our experience of what we value.

“Gamification is when you take a natural activity, such as reading or communication, and explicitly apply game-like design features – scores, levels, streaks – to motivate people,” he says. The danger, Nguyen argues, is “value capture”: the moment when rich, complex experiences are flattened into numbers that begin to stand in for meaning.

“It’s very hard to share something like ‘this book changed me’ in a way that’s publicly accountable,” he says. “But it’s extremely easy to share that you’ve read 100 books. So the number becomes a kind of social currency – even though it doesn’t track what mattered.”

From step counts and calorie trackers to follower numbers and productivity dashboards, modern life increasingly rewards what can be measured and compared. “Large-scale data systems are built around what’s easy to count, not what’s genuinely important,” Nguyen says. “Curiosity, delight and genuine meaning cannot survive translation into a spreadsheet.”

That is not to say that voracious reading is always fuelled by an unhealthy desire for self-optimisation. Ella Risbridger, author of In Love With Love, represents the opposite extreme. Last year, she read more than 1,000 romance novels while researching her book, but deliberately refuses to track them. “I try to avoid anything that makes reading feel like maths,” she says. “Reading is where I go to escape targets.”

Journalist and author Afua Hirsch’s experience also illustrates this tension. As a judge for major literary prizes, she has spent years reading under intense deadlines. “When I was judging the Booker, I had to read about 150 books in five months,” she says. “It was literally a book a day.”

Hirsch describes this kind of reading as both a privilege and a strain. “Your brain becomes like a computer. You’re processing, and that’s stressful, especially when something is beautifully written and you want to linger.” After such intense periods, she often needs time to relearn how to read for pleasure.

Nguyen is careful not to dismiss metrics altogether. Used lightly, he says in his book, scoring systems can be useful, giving people a clear goal and immediate feedback. After all, we are in a moment of genuine concern about literacy. With reading levels falling among children and attention spans fraying across all ages, numerical goals can be the first step on the ladder. “Metrics can help people get started,” he says. “But ideally, they’re temporary scaffolding. You need to develop your own reasons to read.”

Reader tracking platform StoryGraph, the fastest-growing rival to Amazon-owned Goodreads, was built in conscious opposition to the competitive reading culture increasingly fostered online. Founded by Nadia Odunayo, the platform positions itself as reader-first, data-light and deliberately flexible.

“Before I built the product, I spent months just watching Bookstagram,” Odunayo says. “A lot of people were stressed by social media and the sense that reading was a competition. I didn’t want to build something people would burn out from.”

Instead of focusing solely on the number of books completed, StoryGraph allows users to set page goals, time goals, or habit-based challenges. Page goals avoid incentivising short books, Odunayo says, and allow for books abandoned partway through. “If you read 50 pages, that effort matters,” she says. “You’re not punished for curiosity, or for reading War and Peace.”

The platform also foregrounds non-numerical challenges: reading across cultures, genres or identities; working through prize shortlists; only reading books already owned. Many are open-ended, deliberately resisting the pressure of annual completion. “You could be doing these challenges for the rest of your reading life,” Odunayo says.

The tension is clear: reading goals promise incentives in an era of distraction, but they also risk importing the logic of productivity into one of the few remaining spaces of offline pleasure. As Nguyen puts it: “Reading goals can be good starters, but if the number remains the reason you read, something has gone wrong.”

Running the numbers

Authors, a bookseller, an influencer and a librarian tally their 2025 reads

Derek Owusu author: 38 books
I didn’t read a book until I was 24. When I discovered reading, it was for pure pleasure. I read at my own pace and reread freely. I don’t usually track the number of books I’ve read, and even worrying about whether I’ve read “enough” irritates me. If I’ve read five books, who cares? I’m baffled by people being impressed or unimpressed by reading totals.

The only goal I set is if I really like an author, I’ll read their back catalogue. I don’t count how many books there are, I just keep going until I get tired. I want to improve as a writer, so I read with that in mind too. But when I’m writing it’s also paradoxically harder to read at all, because I become tunnel-visioned and I don’t want to accidentally plagiarise anything.

Rereading is a big part of how I read too. People say you can’t judge an album after one listen, but a book gets one read and a definitive verdict. Nabokov said: “One cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” The first time, you learn the texture; the second time, you see the craft.

My opinions change with every reread. Last year, I reread The Fall by Albert Camus and thought, “Why did I love this so much the first time?” It’s probably because I was in my early 20s and very angsty. I reread F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby every year: last year I didn’t like it much; this year I thought it was amazing.

Chrissy Ryan bookseller at BookBar: 145 books
Last year was the first time I set a reading goal: 100 books. I thought it was achievable and would keep me focused, especially if I hit a reading rut. When you work in books, a rut can spiral into, “Do I not love books any more? What if I can never read again and this is my whole career?” The goal helped, but only because I made a rule: if I started stressing about numbers, I’d stop.

Owning BookBar has changed how I read. I’m usually buying three to six months ahead, and I try to read as much as possible in that window to know what I’m stocking. If a book is pitched as “big and buzzy” and I’ve read it and didn’t enjoy it, I might not buy it. Conversely, sometimes I miss a book and read it later, such as The Correspondent by Virginia Evans – I wish I’d caught it earlier because I loved it and it sold really well.

Some of my favourite books I read last year (which are actually coming out this year) are I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder and Frida Slattery As Herself by Ana Kinsella.

Reading is pleasure and work for me. As a bookshop, you’re taste-making: you’re saying, “We endorse this.” That creates pressure, which can become suffocating. So, in December I stopped reading ahead and read purely for pleasure, and it reminded me why I love it. I’m trying to return to classics and older books more this year too, because having a greater understanding of literary context makes me a better bookseller.

Jack Edwards book influencer with 1.5 million followers across Instagram and TikTok: 137 books
I set reading goals that feel achievable. Last year, my goal was 100 books and I read 137. The point isn’t competition; it’s noticing how I spend my time. How much did I read last week versus how much time did I spend on my phone? The latter becomes about how you’re perceived; it turns toxic.

One of the ways I’ve managed to build a career out of this is by gamifying it – I realised that numbers make things more clickable: it’s the reason people love listicles, that number is satisfying to us. But, for me, reading has always been something I really enjoy, and you have to make sure you’re only competing with yourself rather than doing it for other people.

I think of reading like going to the gym: you train endurance and strength. It’s not just how long you read, but how long you can sustain focus and critical thought. The brain is a muscle, you build it over time.

I’m naturally a slow reader and I like lingering over books. I read with a pen in hand, underlining and marking passages. If someone pulls a book off my shelf, the markings show my path through it. The book tells the author’s story, but it also tells the story of me reading it.

Two of my favourite books I read last year were Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, which I thought was such a fun exploration of internet culture and the loneliness epidemic, and Gunk by Saba Sams, an amazing novel set in a nightclub in Brighton about an unconventional family dynamic.

My goals now are mostly non-numerical. After studying English literature, I realised how narrow the canon can be, so I prioritised literature in translation, and I fell in love with Argentinian horror and Japanese and Korean micro-studies of character. This year, I’m reading more African writers and exploring the continent’s literary heritage.

Olivia Young-Thompson librarian: 45 books
Last year, I read about two or three books a month, but I didn’t set a target. I also started writing my own book, and when I’m writing I find it hard to read much. One hobby replaced another for a while, and that’s fine.

My reading was a mix: tiny charity-shop paperbacks, big novels, classics and “fluff”. My favourite books from last year included Katherine Arden’s Winternight trilogy, which I loved because it felt cold and wintry during a hot summer, and also some nonfiction, particularly Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted.

Working as a librarian, I actually don’t feel huge pressure to read hundreds of books, though it helps to know about the prize winners, as that’s what people often come in looking for your thoughts about.

Some people read 100 books a year, and if you can do that, wonderful. But if you can’t, you shouldn’t be seen as any less of a reader. I think the competitive side of reading mostly exists online.

There’s also a difference between racing through novellas and spending weeks with War and Peace. I hate fast fashion and fast anything, and I’m scared books are starting to fall into that category too. I’ve gone back to rereading books I loved as a child – it’s like re-listening to a favourite album. Forgoing that pleasure just to add another number to a tally feels pointless.

Jan Carson author: 300 books
I read for about four hours a day. It can sound shocking, but reading is my job. That time includes reading for pleasure, for content that I’m teaching my students, articles I’m writing and proofs I’ve been sent.

I don’t read in four-hour chunks. I break it into an hour in the morning, an hour in bed, and I read on the treadmill or exercise bike. I keep a book in my bag, so if someone’s late for coffee or I’m stuck on a bus, I read, which pulls me away from doomscrolling. Short stories are perfect for those small windows of time.

I keep a semi-private Instagram to track what I’ve read, but it’s just for me really. A lot of my goals are non‑numerical – for example, this will be my seventh year of reading an author’s entire canon in chronological order. That doesn’t have to be an overwhelming goal: in 2020, I did Agatha Christie, which was a lot of books, but for Toni Morrison it was only 11. You see writers grow into their voice, which is heartening in a publishing culture that venerates the perfect debut.

My favourite books last year were Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man and Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. I try to read across genres and I’m not a snob about what I read, either. Some authors slow you down and reward attention, such as Marilynne Robinson and Hilary Mantel. I’m also drawn to older writers such as Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble; the sentences move at a different rhythm. I spend a lot of time talking about books with friends – I love that communal argument and exchange.

Books to help you …

Find love

Chosen by Philippa Perry
Amir Levine’s Secure, to be published in April, is grounded in attachment theory, in which there are four main styles of bonding: anxious (craving closeness, but fearing rejection), avoidant (preferring independence over closeness), fearful avoidant (a mix of the two), and secure (comfortable with closeness and easy-going). Psychiatrist Amir Levine gives us a set of tools to help us feel more secure in all our relationships, not just romantic ones, but with colleagues, friends, family and even with ourselves. This is not a fanciful book but is grounded in research and neuroscience. I believe if you follow its principles, you will in time become more secure. But any psychological work is not like rubbing on cream – it wouldn’t be enough just to read the book. You’d have to do the work and then keep up the practice. Secure can help you know yourself better, and self‑awareness is the first step towards positive change, in this case becoming more open and relaxed in all your relationships. If you can’t wait until April, my runner-up is his first book, Attached, written with Rachel Heller.
Philippa Perry is a clinical psychologist. Her latest book is The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read.

Have better conversations

Chosen by Hannah Critchlow
Emily and Laurence Alison’s Rapport is fantastic at helping us to understand other people, and showing how we can work with them to increase our own cognitive power. There’s evidence that a huge part of our species’ success has been due to our ability to cooperate. We constantly take shortcuts in our information processing, accumulate biases throughout our lifetimes, and have genetic predispositions to seeing the world in different ways. But when you get a group of people together and allow them to communicate freely, it can balance out biases so they can start to see the world more accurately. And from that, we can start to solve problems and move forward in a positive way.

The authors draw on their own experiences as forensic psychologists, working in dangerous, hostile situations, and set out four personality categories – monkey, T rex, lion or mouse – each with communicative strengths and weaknesses. This provides a roadmap to understand yourself and others too. I think it’s incredibly important in the modern world that we continue to build these interpersonal skills, creating rapport even with those who think differently to us, as opposed to just hiding behind our screens.
Hannah Critchlow is a neuroscientist at Magdalene College, Cambridge University. Her new book, The 21st-Century Brain, will be published in April.

Sustain a long-term relationship

Chosen by Orna Guralnik
Stephen Mitchell was, in a way, the founder of the relational school of psychoanalysis, which is a more contemporary school of psychoanalysis – and Can Love Last? is a very useful book for couples to read. He talks openly, in accessible language, about the underlying unconscious dilemmas that love poses, the risks of vulnerability, dependency and unpredictability and the ways in which we try to avoid risk and dampen love to feel safer. It helps people get in touch with their more fundamental motivations, allowing them to be more courageous in their loving.

Rather than offering “three things you can do tomorrow”, it goes deeper. Mitchell gives engaging examples. I love that he speaks intelligently about this intense experience that we all go through; forming relationships, falling in love, struggling with it when often we feel like we don’t understand what’s happening to us. And he speaks beautifully to the tension between the need for safety and the need for adventure.
Orna Guralnik is a New York-based clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, best known for the television show Couples Therapy.

Stop being a people pleaser

Chosen by Alex Curmi
The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi is different from any other self-help book I’ve ever read, with the format of a philosopher talking to a young, frustrated student really drawing you in. Everyone can relate to being that young person trying to figure things out. And I think everyone feels like they have that older, wiser person in them somewhere too. The book is intended to introduce readers to the work of Austrian psychoanalyst Alfred Adler. He felt that at any point you can decide to change your life.

People pleasers often unconsciously take on the responsibilities of not just their own life but of other people’s, because they feel if they don’t put in that extra effort, other people are going to dislike them. Kishimi introduces the Adlerian idea of the separation of tasks, where you decide which tasks you are responsible for and then let other people get on with their own tasks.

That’s extremely liberating. Of course, the huge irony is that when you live without fear of dislike, people tend to like you much more because they intuit that you have a lot more self respect and you’re being more genuine, and genuineness and authenticity are very appealing.
Dr Alex Curmi is a consultant psychiatrist and host of the Thinking Mind Podcast.

Be happier

Chosen by Paul Dolan
I first encountered Oliver Burkeman’s writing when he wrote a series for the Guardian called This Column Will Change Your Life. He doesn’t take himself too seriously and I admire his self-deprecation. You can be serious and say things that are important and robust and also have some levity. Four Thousand Weeks is enjoyable to read and consistent with what I’ve always said about one of the key ways to be happier or live better, which is just to get over ourselves about stuff. Burkeman talks about the fact that we’ve got a limited amount of time, hence the title. So, never mind next week. What are you going to do this week to make it just that little bit better? Focus on the small stuff, not the big stuff, do things now rather than later, stop worrying about making next week perfect.

It’s fundamentally about happiness, because that is the ultimate achievement. It’s interesting when people say they want to be successful. What is the point of success? It’s a cliched thing to say, but it’s about the journey.
Paul Dolan is professor of behavioural science at London School of Economics. His latest book is Beliefism: How to Stop Hating People We Disagree With.

Navigate trauma

Chosen by Lisa Feldman-Barrett
George Bonanno has studied trauma in many forms for over three decades, and in The End of Trauma he challenges some conventional, outdated beliefs. Stories and case studies show that trauma is personal: it varies across people and contexts. It’s not a feature of an event, but an experience. Adverse events can happen to people and they might not be traumatised, but equally, something that would not be traumatic for many can authentically be traumatic for you. Trauma doesn’t mean “I feel really, really bad”. It means “I’m having intrusive thoughts and can’t connect with the pleasures of the moment. I’m feeling so bad that I can’t function.” Still, most people are surprisingly resilient and do not develop PTSD – even after terrible events such as 9/11, rape or war. People are distressed, they get angry, they grieve, but most can function in their everyday lives.

Bonanno also shows that resilience to trauma is rooted in how flexibly you cope. Sometimes it helps to talk about your experience, but other times it helps to distract yourself. Sometimes you should seek company, but other times it’s better to take a hot bath and go to bed, hoping tomorrow will be a better day. It’s always possible to look at the event from different angles, which ultimately gives you more choice in how to feel. Flexibility is a skill that can be learned and practised like any other. Ultimately, you have agency over how you deal with the slings and arrows you encounter in life. With agency there is hope.
Lisa Feldman-Barrett is a neuroscientist and a professor at Northeastern University. Her latest book is Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

Handle stress

Chosen by Robert Sapolsky
I’d recommend Dopamine Nation by a colleague of mine, Anna Lembke (a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University). I don’t recall if the word “stress” appears in the book, but it’s ultimately about that in a very meaningful way. Her focus is the biology and psychology of why our cultures leave us so empty and prone to addiction, why the more we eat, the hungrier we get. She emphasises how we, in our privileged lives in the west, have been led to believe that we should never feel pain, failure, defeat, discouragement: “everyone’s a winner”. What this does, for one thing, is make us pathetic and unprepared when it comes to really tough circumstances. She has a model according to which, in the absence of any capacity to tolerate pain and being hypersensitised to the kinds of pain that are inevitable in any life, we get a hypersensitised craving for reward that leads to addiction. The take-home message for me is to remember the consequences of having the goal of a pain-free life with no setbacks or adversity.
Robert Sapolsky is professor of biology, neuroscience and neurosurgery at Stanford University. His latest book is Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.

Tackle narcissism

Chosen by Linda Blair
Today we tend to want to label everything, and I don’t think that’s always the most effective way to create change and wellbeing. Narcissism is a term that people love to throw around as an insult: “They’re such a narcissist.” What they actually mean is, “I don’t think they value me enough, and I don’t think they see my point of view, and for that reason they’re annoying me.” Well, guess what? That is narcissism, too. And by focusing on it, either in yourself or in others, you are simply making it worse.

To treat a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, the most important thing is working on deepening and strengthening your relationships. What that comes back to is not just thinking about other people’s point of view, but getting more realistic about your own. So – like the Dalai Lama – try to think of everybody as being equally important, including yourself, and spend your time trying to understand them rather than judge. In the blink of an eye, you’ve begun to solve narcissism, either in yourself or in your tendency to call it out in others, and you will emerge happier. The Art of Happiness is a dialogue between a western psychiatrist, Howard Cutler, and the Dalai Lama and I think it’s a winner. It may have been published in 1998 but the wisdom isn’t dated and the Dalai Lama, of course, is still going strong.
Linda Blair is a clinical psychologist. Her latest book is Siblings.

Become a better parent

Chosen by Emily Oster
Thomas Phelan’s 1-2-3-Magic is an older book but it is fundamentally sensible and I think it would help a lot of people enormously. It’s a bit of a corrective to some of the more intense and exhausting parenting books we have had lately.

The intention is to give you a system, and tell you how to implement it – so it’s very no-nonsense, with a lot of worked-up examples. It feels like good, sensible advice, structured so you can be successful. The crux of it is that, when thinking about behaviour change, kids respond well to a consistently implemented system of rewards and punishments. And – maybe more importantly – if you get to a better place, family life will be easier and there will be more space for fun.
Emily Oster is professor of economics at Brown University. Her latest book is The Unexpected: Navigating Pregnancy During and After Complications.

Understand neurodiversity

Chosen by Almuth McDowall
Approaching Autistic Adulthood by Grace Liu is one of my favourite books. Grace is mixed race and a lesbian, and beautifully illuminates the intersectional perspective. She does a great job of describing her journey to adulthood and the difficulties she has experienced without sugar‑coating or judging others. Some of it makes me laugh out loud, such as her description of “neurotypical‑splaining”, as in when people who are not autistic try and tell autistic people what it is like. The book gives real-life insight into the autistic mind. It’s a great read for autistic people (“You are not alone! Here are some things for you to think about to navigate life better”) and for people who come in contact with autistic people, which given population prevalence means all of us at some point (“This is how you can respond appropriately, without patronising or belittling people”).

It’s an easy and poignant read with many anecdotes. Grace’s approach is also evidence based – she tries to address the double empathy problem: that autistic people understand each other, and neurodivergent people understand each other, but communication across the two neurotypes often results in misunderstanding. She debunks some of the myths and is honest and authentic in her writing.
Almuth McDowall is a psychology professor at Birkbeck College, London, specialising in neurodivergence research.

Maintain focus

Chosen by Oliver Burkeman
How to Focus by John Cassian, translated by Jamie Kreiner, is from a series published by Princeton called Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers. Cassian was a fourth-century Christian monk but the translation is informal, refreshing and modern. It’s about the problem of concentration and distraction, which they figured was partly because of demons but also because of the vagaries of how human attention works, which they could do something about.

First, know that distraction is a perpetual challenge, and it makes a lot more sense to just accept that. Second, prioritise having interesting things to focus on instead of the other tempting distractions that lure you away. So it’s not a self-punishing, “I will not spend an hour doomscrolling”, it’s, “how can I make sure that I am spending some of my time and my life on things that naturally draw me to them, and I prefer to do than spending all that time doomscrolling?”

The most borrowable solution offered is the idea of making a daily practice, something that you can keep coming back to, and learning to forgive yourself when your focus is less than what you would have it be. You’re still working the muscle of concentration.

Monica Heisey

The author of Really Good, Actually on Being Alive from the musical Company, by Stephen Sondheim

My favourite love song is maybe a little untraditional in that it’s not addressed to a specific love object. I’m sorry to say it is also a show tune, but at least it is a show tune from the best to ever do them, Stephen Sondheim. Being Alive, from the musical Company, is sung by Robert, a 35-year-old bachelor and romance sceptic, whose married friends have ambushed him on his birthday to insist he find a partner (rude). At first, Robert lists all the reasons love is annoying, scary, even tedious: “Someone to hold you too close, someone to hurt you too deep, someone to sit in your chair, to ruin your sleep…” His friends admit this is true, but think Robert is giving love short shrift. Yes, it can be inconvenient and invasive and exhausting, maybe all the first kisses and playlists and poems boil down to two people farting on each other in their sleep, but it’s more than that, too: it’s someone to experience life with, to help you understand yourself and the world, to teach you things and treat you gently and call you out and make you laugh – to vary your days, as Robert says. His list of complaints turns mid-song into a plea: “Somebody hold me too close, somebody hurt me too deep, somebody sit in my chair and ruin my sleep and make me aware of being alive.”

Tom Crewe

The author of The New Life on I’m Still Here by Tom Waits

For a writer, I have a strange lack of interest in song lyrics. I can listen to a song for years without really knowing the words, happy in my ignorance, mumbling my own meanings. I’ve always thought that I’m Still Here by Tom Waits is incredibly romantic – but mainly because of the slow, tender piano; the shyly hesitant strings; and Waits’s voice, which can slouch and smirk and spit and roar, but here just sounds old, richened and sweetened by experience, a little frail as it lifts at the end. Now I listen to it properly, I realise it’s a song about a love that’s only being kept alive by one person, not two. But I’ve always imagined it as about a relationship that’s lasted, that’s lasting still. When Waits sings “You haven’t looked at me that way in years”, I don’t hear it as a melancholy statement of finality but as proof that a certain look, of love, has reappeared. And the fact that the song only lasts one minute 49 seconds means that, when it ends, the first thing to do is play it again. I’m still here, and so are you.

Meg Mason

The author of Sorrow and Bliss on I Do It for Your Love by Paul Simon

Maybe it’s because “furniture shopping” doesn’t rhyme with anything that there are so few love songs written about long marriages. Or maybe it’s because Realistic Love Songs would be a hard-to-sell Spotify playlist. But Paul Simon’s I Do it for Your Love is truly an advertisement for the genre. Exquisitely beautiful, intimate, full of pathos, it’s an entire relationship in four verses, as per Simon’s gift: their register office wedding on a not especially nice day weather-wise, moving into a musty apartment with plumbing issues, and the lovers catching persistent colds off each other while they cling to each other through that long winter and for a while after. One day their secondhand rug will get rained on while they’re dragging it home from the shop, the colour will bleed and their relationship will begin to falter. “The sting of reason, the splash of tears… love emerges and it disappears.” As Simon’s final chorus, it’s sublime and heartbreaking, and so sobering for the long-married to think that, for all that commitment at the beginning, sometimes a furniture purchase and the logistics of getting it back to the flat can bring about the end.

Caleb Azumah Nelson

The author of Open Water and Small Worlds on Let’s Stay Together by Al Green

I first heard Let’s Stay Together about eight years ago when I was working at the Apple shop. There was a daily playlist and, when it came on one day, I was just very moved by it. There is a real earnestness to the lyrics. The first line, “I’m so in love with you”, is a very plain but beautiful declaration. I’d never heard it before and I asked around, “Does anyone know what this is?”, but before we could get a chance to figure it out, the song switched. The number of friends I hummed it to and they would have no idea. Then a couple of years ago I was in a taxi and it came on the radio. It was while I was writing Small Worlds and I was thinking a lot about music of that era, the 70s, music that my parents would have listened to. When I found out what the song was it made its way into the novel and I constantly return to it. It’s about wearing your heart on your sleeve – you know how you feel about someone and you aren’t afraid to say it. I am always so interested to hear how people express feelings of love. It’s difficult but the best singers manage it with even the simplest of lyrics. There’s something underneath the words, something in his voice that is so full of longing and you have to surrender to it.

Alice Winn

The author of In Memoriam on Wouldn’t It Be Nice by the Beach Boys

Music gives me a headache. Evelyn Waugh once called music “physical torment” and I agree with him, although possibly Waugh was only pretending to hate music in order to hurt Stravinsky’s feelings at a dinner party. Still, I’m very grateful to the sparse selection of music that doesn’t make me want to shut myself in a quiet, darkened room: I think Rachmaninoff is the most wildly romantic composer, and I love him with my whole heart. As to outright love songs – I’m very fond of Wouldn’t It Be Nice by the Beach Boys. I distinctly remember, as a teenager, wondering how married people could behave so normally when they got to live with the person they loved, when they could sleep every night in the same bed! What bliss it seemed! To have the exquisite privilege of privacy and a person to share it with – nothing could be more wonderful. Wouldn’t It Be Nice reminds me of that feeling, and makes me appreciate what I have, and how badly I wanted it.

Bolu Babalola

The author of Love in Colour and Honey & Spice on Nothing Even Matters by Lauryn Hill feat D’Angelo

For me, Nothing Even Matters really encapsulates being in love. I must have been a young teenager, about 14, when I discovered The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and this song from the album just made me stop and think about love, perhaps for the first time. It made me fantasise about how it might feel to be in love. The performances are like silk and honey, and the smoothness of their vocals, how tender they sound, makes the song sound like love feels. The lyrics add to that, and their interaction and chemistry as artists adds yet another layer. My favourite line is when D’Angelo sings, “I sometimes have a tendency to look at you religiously”, because it really homes in on the sacredness of love, which alongside the wooing and the flirtation is such an important part of the texture of this song. It’s just so beautiful, about being completely enveloped by the romance of it all and being in your own cocoon; building your own world that you feel safe in with another person. Whenever I listened to this song when I wasn’t in love, it gave me hope that I might find it. And now that I am in love, it gives me a space to explore those feelings.

Naoise Dolan

The author of Exciting Times and The Happy Couple on Jolene by Dolly Parton

I tend to be cynical about romantic love, at least in its conventional monogamous iteration; as such, the song that best encapsulates it for me is Dolly Parton’s Jolene. With straightforward chords and melody, set in an anxious C-sharp minor, this Dolly classic has the speaker lengthily accuse another woman – the titular Jolene – of attempting to “take [her] man”. Jolene has done nothing, as far as we know. The speaker’s “man” is the one who’s muttering Jolene’s name in his sleep and waking up crying for her. Rather than take her partner’s sex dreams up with him, the speaker sees this as a Jolene problem. Love, to the speaker, is a zero-sum competition in which women fight for the ultimate prize: a man. Ironically, there’s richer textual evidence of the speaker’s fascination with Jolene – those auburn locks, that voice like summer rain! – than of any detailed attraction to her nondescript man. Of him (besides his strange nocturnal behaviours), we are told only that “I could never love again/ ’Cause he’s the only one for me”. Parton is too gifted a lyricist not to have realised how generic such declarations are, how mass-produced they sound compared with the speaker’s bespoke admiration of the putative other woman. I hope the speaker elopes with Jolene. Regardless, the song bitingly depicts a vision of romance that involves treating people like property.

Laura Barnett

The author of This Beating Heart on Into My Arms by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

I met my husband, Andy, at the Edinburgh festival in 2008, when we were both in our mid-20s. Our first date was to see the Irish singer Camille O’Sullivan perform in a candlelit church somewhere in the city’s Old Town. Her version of this song by Nick Cave was the standout: intimate, emotive and about as romantic as anything I’d ever heard. A romance that seemed somehow more adult, more clear-sighted, than most – one in which a couple’s differences (Cave’s narrator observes that the loved one – possibly his own former partner PJ Harvey – believes in “an interventionist God”, while he does not) need not undermine the depth of their connection. It’s a message I might not have been ready to hear at 21, but I was at 26, with a couple of painful break-ups behind me. After the gig, Andy and I ran through the rain-soaked Edinburgh streets and shared a 4am kebab, this song mingling, in my head, with the sudden volt-charge of my feelings for this man I’d only just met. Inevitable, perhaps, with such a soundtrack, that we’d fall in love – and that, years later, after our son Caleb was born in 2020, I’d find myself listening to Cave’s song on repeat, finding it just as apposite in describing my layered, fierce, bone-deep love for the child I was holding in my arms.

Stephen Buoro

The author of The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa on Olufunmi by Styl-Plus

My favourite love songs are about heartbreak. They never fail to be gripping, affecting, even beneficial narratives. In these songs, decisions are foregrounded; humans are shown as flawed and contradictory; the essence and import of love is reaffirmed. The R&B song Olufunmi by the Nigerian group Styl-Plus readily comes to mind. I first heard it in 2004 when I was 11. It was played everywhere in Kontagora where I lived, and across Nigeria: at barbers, markets, even church events. Olufunmi is about break up – the loss of a lover’s radiance, the ache for their body, the coagulating feeling of dismemberment. At the time in 2004, I preferred other hits such as the more refined and pulsating Oruka by Sunny Neji or the more thematically significant African Queen by 2Baba. African Queen, for example, disavows colonial/western aesthetics and celebrates the Black African skin. But over the years, Olufunmi has been one of my key ear worms. Its supreme quality is its emotional geometry, Styl-Plus’s soulful, serrated, shattering delivery that scrapes and stings you when you listen to it. Like great heartbreak songs, it reinvigorates you over time, perennially reinforcing heart and soul, unlike the transient highs other kinds of love songs tend to provide.

Joanne Harris

The author of Chocolat and Broken Light on The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face by Roberta Flack

For me, the ultimate love song is Roberta Flack’s recording of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. I first heard it as a teenager in the early 80s – it was on a mixtape made for me by my boyfriend (later to become my husband), and I was struck by the sweetness of the vocal, its tenderness and sincerity. It’s a strange recording: at the same time deceptively simple and almost painfully slow and sustained, which gives it a kind of tension. With its breathing cadence, it evokes the shifting rhythms of light sleep or the afterglow of lovemaking. There are many versions – the Johnny Cash version, from his final album, is charged with so much grief that I find it almost impossible to listen to. But to me, Flack’s version is the ultimate expression of youthful, hopeful, romantic love; a love that is wholly trusting and completely vulnerable. I’ve carried that feeling with me ever since I first heard it, and it remains one of my favourite songs, untouched by time and still as fresh and surprising as when it was first released in 1972. It reminds me that not everything has to change, that love can still be revealing, and that memories need never die.

Louise Kennedy

The author of Trespasses on King of Hearts by Lucinda Williams

My dislike of love songs began at school discos, when the “slow set” – a mortified arms-length shuffle with a boy around a freezing Gaelic Athletic Association hall to the strains of Classic by Adrian Gurvitz and Honey by Bobby Goldsboro – made me want to rip my own face off. Love, I (who had never had a boyfriend) believed, should be unhappy, unsatisfying or, ideally, unrequited. I am still partial to songs of elusive love, and nobody writes them like Lucinda Williams. King of Hearts is from her 1980 album Happy Woman Blues, written when she was reeling from the suicide of the poet Frank Stanford; apparently several other women, including his wife, were reeling, too. The track opens with plaintive strings and the lines “Can you relieve me, baby/ Take your heart from your sleeve”. From anyone else, these lyrics would be pitiful, but when sung in a voice that Emmylou Harris said could peel the chrome off a trailer hitch, they are devastating. Williams offers her lover silver and gold, promises to never deny him, but you get the feeling it’ll make no difference. “Whoever’s holding the cards, please deal me the King of Hearts” she cries, as the song builds to its close. That Williams ain’t too proud to beg destroys me every time.

K Patrick

The author of Mrs S on Love Is Overtaking Me by Arthur Russell

I love love songs. I’m the annoying friend who always knows exactly what they’re going to sing at karaoke. In the end, it has to be Love Is Overtaking Me by Arthur Russell, from the album of the same title. It really takes the temperature of love. There are the highs of a new romance managing to overtake the lows and he sings himself in and out of self-doubt: “Is it so different now?/ Or is it just the way I feel?” You’re in the renewed landscape with him, just about frolicking because the melody is that good. Blood pumping in the reverberations of the tune, the whole song surges forward. The lyrics have all the intense commitment of a teenage crush, but with a retrospect, like we never really learned any better and it’s OK. He’s so gorgeous and accidentally defiant on the album cover, too, in his white cowboy hat. “And it’s waking my heart up/ And it’s breaking my heart/ And mostly taking it over/ like the sun shines gloriously through the sky.” Stuck in what seems like an everlasting winter, I have this on repeat, keeping me giddy through the wind and rain.