2BRd

Author: Victoria Kent

  • How Did It Get This Bad?

    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!

  • My “Read What You Own” TBR Challenge

    Welcome to my journey!

    I have a serious problem.

    I have over six hundred books on my TBR – just counting the ones I already actually own. I don’t know how this happened.

    Yes, I do. It was a combination of taking advantage of the free books available for kindle, buying books for decades that I never got around to reading, and acquiring books into my collection from family members…that I also never got around to reading.

    It’s not that I’m not a reader, I am. Have always been one. But once I started to have my time mostly taken up by schoolwork, I didn’t read as much. And then my tv watching took over my free time and I read even less. So I was reading far less than I was acquiring. For years. Decades even. So here we are.

    I have set a challenge for myself to read all the unread books I own, whether physical or digital. I am calling all of these together my “physical TBR”: these are books I do not need to buy or get from the library, I already own them in some format.

    I see a lot on Book Tube where people just get rid of a bunch of their books at one time after deciding they aren’t really going to read them. I don’t have the personality to be able to just take things I own off my TBR, so that is not an option for me. I don’t feel like buying and getting rid of books without reading them is the answer. That’s just throw away culture. That doesn’t mean you should never get rid of books, but we shouldn’t be normalizing wasting money either. 

    These are the rules I’ve set for myself:

    1. Puzzle books, coloring books, audiobooks and foreign language books are excluded (for now).
    2. I am allowed to be brutal with DNFing, especially for free books (kindle First Reads and other free kindle books). The goal is to get through everything so I can choose what I want to read right now instead of reading something I wanted to read twenty years ago – and it doesn’t mean I can never finish those books. But I am wasting time on 2 and 3 star books. I do not intend to race through books I am enjoying, but I also do not intend to waste time on books I am not, even though that is what I normally do! 
    3. I am allowed to continue series so I don’t forget what happened in earlier books. Caveats: I’m going to be very selective of series I continue and I will try to decrease my TBR some before reading the next in a series (leaving them for times I really need a good book!).
    4. This is not a “no buy” challenge, but there is some overlap. I am allowed to buy books I have already read but are collecting and am allowed to have books bought for me for my birthday etc. I am also allowed to buy books already on my “TBR but don’t yet own” list from my work charity book sale. 
    5. I will try to avoid “x number of books to read before you die” type lists because it causes me to add books to my TBR that I don’t really want to read. Same thing with “top 10” type videos. I will also sporadically prune my “TBR but don’t yet own” list. I don’t want to come out the other end of this with a daunting ready made tbr. 
    6. I will not purchase any digital books during this challenge. 
    7. I am allowed to get a book or audiobook from the library to participate in a book club where the book is already on my “TBR but don’t yet own” list, but I will be selective in this. 
    8. I’m not setting a time period because I don’t want this to be a chore that I give up on. I may set a time period when I get closer to finishing. 
    9. I will read 50 pages of any book before DNFing, except in extreme circumstances which I will note at the time. 
    10. I have finished all library books that I had (including Amazon Prime borrows) before beginning this challenge and intend to only get additional books during this challenge as outlined above. 

    Let’s take a look at the initial counts:

    I’ll be posting weekly updates. Time to get started – wish me luck!