Your Book Body-Count Is Worthless

🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.You can buy my book Permissionless here.The reading influencers on TikTok seem to have accomplished something I’d previously imagined impossible: they’ve made reading itself a toxic competitive sport. It’s no longer enough to read a book, to love a book, even to like a book; quantity is now king for Booktokkers. And they’re not entirely alone in the pursuit of leaderboarding the written word; productivity hackers and bloggers have turned the accumulation of speed-read books into a metric for success too. But I find “number go up” to be a terrible reason to read…