Decades of Unchecked Book Accumulation
As a child, I was a voracious reader. My family would head to the bookstore in the mall (yes, bookstore, yes, the mall) and I’d come home with a stack of books that I’d read in two days. And then my dad told me I had to start reading thicker books… Yes, we should have gone to the library more when I was a child. I know this. I can’t change it now. I got a taste for acquiring books way back then, though. But, back then, I read everything I bought.
When I hit high school and I was reading a lot for my classes, and I didn’t have really any free time, my reading for pleasure decreased dramatically and was relegated mostly to the summertime. So I was still buying books, but I wasn’t reading nearly as many. There started to be books on my shelves that I hadn’t read.
And then when I was out of school, and had more time, I started watching all the tv shows I hadn’t had time to watch when I was in school. And I ended up watching a LOT of tv. I had a TiVo, and I was watching so many shows I couldn’t keep up with them week to week, and had to catch up over the summer. And so I wasn’t making time to read then either.
The final nail in the coffin of over the top book acquisitions was when I was given a kindle as a gift. I started downloading all the free books that were available, and there were a lot. And I didn’t just download books I thought were interesting, but I was also downloading free books I thought my mother would like (who had been given a kindle the same time I was). The result being that I have a lot of books on my virtual shelf that I wouldn’t actually pick up and read normally.
And here we are six hundred books later.
So how can I hope to possibly turn this around?
I do have hope. I’m not one to make New Year’s resolutions, but several years back I made one to stop watching tv shows I wasn’t enjoying. It took repeating the resolution a couple of years but I got a lot better at not just watching something because I’d been watching it already. And now I don’t watch much tv at all. I don’t mindlessly sit in front of the tv all day, and I hate watching something that’s nothing more than a time suck. I feel like I can get there with my reading too – learning to stop reading something I’m not enjoying, rather than wasting time on a bad book when I could be reading something else. But it’s going to take time and effort.
I’ve already made some headway in the past couple of years. If I get a book from the library I read it right away. If I buy a book, these are read first and not put on the shelf until they are read. So the visual reminder is always there, rather than being put away to be forgotten. And for the books in this challenge, I give the book a rating when I hit 50 pages and against when (if) I finish it, to demonstrate to myself whether it was worth finishing that book or if I knew it was bad after 50 pages. My hope is that by continuing to do these things I will decrease the build up of unread books that I have.
Week 1 Update
This week I was able to read 3 books, two digital and one physical, leaving my to be read counts at:
Here’s what I read this week:
Vilest Things by Chloe Gong – Fantasy Fiction: Worth It
Rating after 50 pages: 4 stars
Final rating: 4 stars
The Artist of Blackberry Grange by Paulette Kennedy: Not Worth It
Rating after 50 pages: 4 stars
Final rating: 2 stars
The Fall Risk by Abby Jimenez: Worth It
Rating after 50 pages: 5 stars
Final rating: 5 stars
Until next week, happy reading!
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