Thursday, August 26, 2010

My Name Is Betty, And I Am A Book Addict. But Look How Good I Am!

I have an exciting announcement to make:

I DID IT!!!!

My one big goal for the year -- heck, for a lot longer than that -- has been to get my To-Read Pile down to 400 books. For a while, I seriously doubted that I was going to manage it this year at all, never mind pulling it off by late August, but thanks to truly painful amounts of self-control, a veritable orgy of reading, and a convenient shipping delay on the part of Amazon, I DID IT!

*releases confetti and balloons*

And I'm going to keep it below 400, too. For a while now, I've been thinking of doing a little culling on the To-Read shelves. The truth is, as much as I hate to let a book go once I've got it in my hot little hands, I have realized that there are books on there that I honestly don't want to read. Science books that are so out of date now as to be useless, misguided gifts, books on hobbies I've lost interest in, sequels to books I turned out not to like... All in all, I figure I might end up purging a couple dozen, which I plan to box up up and donate to the local library for their next book sale. I didn't want to do it before hitting the big four-double-oh, because, well, that would have been cheating. But I feel pretty good about doing it now.

And then, as a celebration and a reward, I believe I will pretend that there is an extra month in this year -- Augtember! -- and allow myself to buy another month's quota of books. Hey, as long as I stay below the magic number...

5 comments:

  1. What color balloons? (Oh, and congrats!)

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  2. Augtember is notoriously a busy book-buying month. Though watch out you don't overdo it -- there's still Septober, Octvember, and Decembruary to come!

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  3. Captain C: Every color in the literary rainbow! And thanks. :)

    Fred: I think I'll try to be good and skip doing extra book-buying during those. :)

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  4. I can appreciate your plight. I have a backlog of to-reads that keeps on growing. One of my greatest sources of temptation is the New Release shelf at my public library. Poor Moby Dick keeps getting pushed back, to name but one. Do you track your to-read list on-line? Or is this an actual physical list/collection?

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  5. These days I use LibraryThing to catalog what's on the To-Read Pile, as well as all my other books. It's also a physical pile of books as well (well, all right, multiple physical piles), but there's no way I could keep track of what's there without computer assistance.

    I also have a wishlist of books I want to read but don't (yet) own, which is even bigger than the to-read list.

    So many books, so little time!

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