You’re damned if you do damned if you don’t.
With 2026 only a few days away, many are whipping out the Notes app on their phones to jot down goals for the new year — one of them may be to read more.
As impressive as you might think it is to say you’ve read a ton of books in a single year, like this one woman who bragged about reading 120 books in 2025, some are rolling their eyes at it.
Digital marketer and book content creation, Armah, took to X (formerly Twitter) to share a photo of herself proudly posing next to two massive stacks of books alongside the caption, “I did it!! 120 books read this year.”
While some people struggle to get through one, maybe two books in a year, many, almost 29 million, were shocked by this bookworm’s accomplishment.
“That’s pretty good. Any book I try to read, 3 pages in I’m sleeping,” one person wrote under her post.
“Wow, 120 books in a year! That’s seriously impressive. Whether fiction or not, your brain must be doing some serious heavy lifting,” read another tweet.
“My dad wish this was me,” someone else jokingly wrote.
However, others were quick to side-eye this impressive feat, especially after learning that many of the read books were e-books and what they referred to as “smut books,” romance novels that are rated R.
Talk about raining on one’s book parade.
“Most fiction is slop. Reading 100 trashy fiction books is the equivalent of watching hours of reality TV. Only truly great fiction should be considered reading,” quipped a judgmental commenter.
“I didn’t realize smut counts as books,” another chimed in.
‘There is no flex in proving you read 120 books. Congrats to that, but lets be honest, are you better than academias/students who spend more than a year reading text books, articles, journals, to become experts in their field which obviously adds value to the society? I love to read too but you gotta socialize a little bit. Don’t be this lonely, go out, watch a movie with a friend or two,” an unnecessary comment read.
“Hood books don’t count. Where are the self development books?” another annoying commenter wrote.
It shouldn’t matter what someone reads, as long as they’re reading something, especially in this technology-obsessed era we’re living in.
For those who questioned if Armah’s accomplishment was accurate, she clapped back by sharing a screenshot of her Goodreads account to prove the haters wrong.
“To those calling me a liar because they didn’t realize the rest are ebooks… screenshot from my Goodreads says hi.”
Read the full article here
