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:
- Puzzle books, coloring books, audiobooks and foreign language books are excluded (for now).
- 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!
- 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!).
- 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.
- 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.
- I will not purchase any digital books during this challenge.
- 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.
- 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.
- I will read 50 pages of any book before DNFing, except in extreme circumstances which I will note at the time.
- 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!