Project Shop My Shelves

As I was perusing my bookshelves the other day, I realized that I have a problem: I buy too many books. Well, not exactly. Over the past few years, I have reined in my book shopping habit, but what I didn’t account for is that I never truly get ahead of what I have on my shelves, so the books stack up. I have books on my shelves that I have been “dying to read” since 2016 when I was in grad school. That is, uh, not great. The funny thing is that I made a To-Be-Read section in my bullet journal where I list out all the books I own, books I want to read, forthcoming books from authors I love, and that spread has gotten progressively longer year after year.

This year I decided that I want to do something about it, and I’m going to call this Project Shop My Shelves. My goal with shopping my shelves is to actually read the books I already own and read double the amount I buy. Yes, I will be curtailing my book buying. With the buying, I have had a few reservations about this. I want to support my fellow indie authors, especially during this politically horrible time, and I want to buy trad pub books from marginalized creators because if they don’t have a good launch, they’re less likely to get future publishing deals. The book buying ban will be mostly focused on white cis het authors because, frankly, they can wait for me to buy their books. In order to get ahead of my buying, I want to make it a habit to read at least double the amount of books I buy, so if I buy 3 new books, I need to read at least 6 books. I’m not sure how I’m going to count advanced reader copies (ARCs) yet, but I don’t get them that often, so they may be an exception to this rule as I’m doing promo work my reading them.

In order to make a dent in my rather embarrassing TBR pile, I think I’m going to try to read the books that have been there the longest. Maybe not all at once, but I would like to make a point to move them to the done pile if possible. There are some that have been there since at least 2016. I have removed books that I think I am no longer the audience for and donated them to a local book drive, so my hope is that I will still enjoy the ones that remain, even if I’m nine years older. If I find I don’t really jive with a series or book I bought back then, I will move it to the donate pile and make a note of it. In the same vein, I want to be realistic about my enjoyment of certain authors. Sometimes, we buy things because we think we should like them, and we really don’t. I have a few authors where I like a specific series, but I think once I finish that, I won’t be invested in their work anymore and that’s okay.

Going forward, I also want to be mindful about the medium in which I buy an author’s books. There are some authors that I enjoy much more in audiobook than I do in ebook or paperback (like J. R. R. Tolkien). As much as I like having the physical copy of their books, if I’m not using it to teach a class, it doesn’t make sense to have it if I don’t read it in that form. At this point, I have a tendency to buy duplicate copies, one in ebook/paperback and one in audiobook, and I want to not do that if possible.

I’m hoping to post about this project once a quarter and track my progress as I try to cull my tbr pile to a more manageable level. If I can’t read more or read faster, I can at least read with more purpose, and that’s what I plan to do. Project Shop My Shelves starts in April, so I hope you will join me in knocking down your tbr pile and reading what you have.

Once again, here are the main parts of Project Shop My Shelves:

• Don’t buy new books unless they are from marginalized authors (indie or trad)
• A 2:1 ratio of old books to newly bought books every month (or more if possible)
• Read through the older books to finally get them off the TBR pile
• Be realistic about my enjoyment of an author and what medium I prefer to read them
• Post quarterly about my progress with this project