Drowing in content part 2

In 2021! I wrote a blog post about ‘drowning in content‘ where I bemoaned the endless TBR and made futile plans for tackling it.

To mix metaphors – according to Oliver Burkeman in an article titled Treat your to read pile like a river: “In a world of effectively infinite information, the better you get at sifting the wheat from the chaff, the more you end up crushed beneath a never-ending avalanche of wheat.”

I’ve also got grabby hands syndrome due to being resource poor into my late 20’s (and now I’m time poor). And, as per my previous post, reading books is a different hobby to accumulating books. Burkeman suggests “treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it).”

I look at the WAWAW shelf, and see that it has only grown since I wrote the post in 2021, and the main TBR, which I trimmed recently by accepting that there were some books I just wouldn’t get round to reading, and shake my head.

Maybe I’m stuck in “backlog” mode – looking at the TBR as something to be reduced rather than accepting it’s impossible to do so given my compulsive book-buying habit?

I still feel that the original impetus for WAWAW (five years ago!), to leverage reading the WAWAW books to collect reviews for this blog, was a good one. And I shall continue with that. For the ‘other’ TBR I need to pluck books from it as and when they take my fancy, rather than consider it a chore to be completed. Burkeman explains that if it’s not a chore, and it’s fun, you are more likely to do it – and it’ll get done more easily and quickly. For the sake of room, though, I still need to moderate the books accumulated versus books read equation to favour the read over accumulated…