Precious Reading Time

I’ve come to a few realizations about my precious reading time. This realizations comes as I am surrounded by books. I’m drowning in them. I’m pretty sure that some day, I will be gravely injured by falling towers of books–that I haven’t read yet!

I have been acquiring and collecting books since I was a child.

When I was a teenager and into my early twenties, I was a book reviewer. I received around 40 ARCs/samples a month. And I would generally love to read about 5-10 of them. So I’d save them.

The format of my reviews was 3 capsule reviews a month. So out of those 5-10, I would read 3 or so. They would either stay in my bookshelf or move onto a better home. And those remaining 2-7? On my to-be-read shelves.

Please note, this didn’t stop me from buying books I was interested in, either.

Seriously, my to be read shelves have about 30-50 books per shelf. And there are THREE bookcases. And then I started using my desk. And then I started using my floor. Then, to my wife’s chagrin, I expanded outside of my office.

Now that I have a kid critter about to crawl (she is sooooo close), I realize I need to get rid of a lot of books I don’t have an intention of reading. When I am on leave, I really hope to reduce some of my library so that traditional self capacity is respected.

And, to do that, I will need to change my reading habits.

I am usually a read-to-the-end reader. I would take a book and try not to come up for air until I was finished (or forced to take a break because I was an emotional wreck and couldn’t read through the tears).

But this reading style wasn’t going to hold me for much longer. First of all, I HATE interruptions. And, as a result, most people around me hate me when I’m reading XD Now that my life is all interruptions, I have to change this.

I am reading with stolen time. A few minutes here and there. I hope I can at least do a chapter-size (or at least a scene-size) chunk of reading done. It is difficult when one reads genre fiction as writers are generally conditioned to leave chapters on cliffhanger-y notes.

But sometimes, the book I have with me, I just don’t want to dive back in. And now I

So I’ve added a Did-Not-Finish shelf to my Goodreads. Some have ratings, some won’t. I may try to include comments on most as to what happened, but I simply can’t finish everything I start to read anymore. After all, my time is precious. And within that time, my precious reading time needs a system of its own.

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