A Reflection on the Continued Failures to Read Books I Own
Reading Your Shelf: or how not to actually do that at all
Last year I decided it was time to really get serious (as opposed to all the other times I was really serious) and read my own books.
For reasons that are at best foggy at this distance, I thought turning it into a game would be the solution to a decades long habit of leaving books languishing on my shelves. Nothing else had worked, so why not spend hours making a spreadsheet of all the titles I hadn't read, printing it, and cutting it into little slips?
The plan was TikTok videos. I'd pull a slip, read the book, make a video about it, and then do it again. This happened a grand total of one time - turns out I hate making videos. Besides which, I don't read books one at a time so the whole endeavor was misguided from the first. I'm capricious with the titles I'm reading, drawn to a book intensely only to lose interest fast, refusing at times to get into a book even though at another time I'll absolutely love it. Combine that with a weird compulsion to finish books only on a deadline and you have a recipe for reading a lot of library books in a year.
After a few months I reluctantly admitted defeat on the video project and instead decided to buckle down unassisted. So how did I do?
Since I'm the sort of weirdo who keeps a detailed spreadsheet of everything I read, I can tell you it was a grand total of 87 books! This looks like a fantastic number, except I read 263 total books last year. So only 32.34% of what I read, I owned. At the end of the year I had 6 books I was in the middle of, and I owned every single one of them. Two of them had been in progress for more than 6 months.
I still have 1,467 unread books on my shelf as of this writing (it will go up by at least 3 by the time this gets sent). 87 a year isn't going to make a dent.
Solutions?
One of my longest friendships happens to be with a woman who has the same overwhelming desire to hoard library books. We semi-regularly make a pact to do x or y thing and get this problem under control. My latest goal was to have less than 10 books out including novels, novellas, manga, and graphic novels (films don't count). It's been a few months and I haven't succeeded, which I know is a shock to all of you.
Clearly, the only real solution is to work on impulse control, but I do think a goal of checking out less than 10 books at a time is a good one. Though that alone won't solve this. I'm also going to limit my library book reading time to my lunch breaks on the four days I'm at the office and start keeping my library books there as well. That way when I'm looking to pick up a new book at home I have to go to my own shelves or ebook apps.
Aside from reading my own books, I would also like to be more intentional in my reading. With that in mind, I'm going to make a selection of 10 or so books from my shelves that I want to prioritize and put them where I currently keep my library books.
Sadly I also think it's time to start weeding my collection. There are books I've owned for 20 years that I haven't even looked at. There's an odd entropy to owning a lot of books that seems to start snow balling like you're on a special collection mission in Katamari Damacy. I've acquired books on topics I'm not that interested in, picked up ARCs because they were offered, 'rescued' books other people were giving away because I felt bad for them, been given well intentioned gifts that simply didn't appeal to me. It's time I start re-homing them. Some I'll send to Little Free Libraries, some I'll try listing on Pangobooks, I might make a Half Price Books trip or twenty, and I'll likely end up donating some.
So what are we doing here?
At least once a month I'll be checking in here with what I'm currently reading, what I've finished, the 10 books I want to get to next, what I have out from the library, and what I've weeded form my shelves. These may be separate emails or I might do one covering it all in a month. We'll see what happens.
If you're here reading this, thanks! Hope you'll stick around for awhile and in the meantime:
Feel free to browse my book catalog and tell me what to put on the to read shelf next.
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