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What Is Your Relationship To Your Unread List/Pile Of Books? (9/13/20)
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Marc
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Sep 13, 2020 03:03PM
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I have a large number of unread books in physical, digital, and audio. All were obtained with the purpose of reading them but at some point, about a decade ago, my want to reads began to exceed my ability to actually get them all read! I have felt all the emotions listed at one time or another. Sometimes I given an unread book away, if I need a gift but that was more common in the past. I make frequent resolutions not to buy any more until I make a dent but somehow the to be read list on hand continues to slowly enlarge itself. But there are worse things to be addicted to!
I’ve got a large pile of unread books but this year, I decreased my book buying and I’m finally making a dent. My philosophy is that I will read every book. If I keep up this ‘good behavior’ for two years then I’ll be quite happy.
I have huge piles of digital and tree books. I love looking at the covers and imagining reading them; they also evoke enormous guilt so it's a complicated relationship!I would have to live 100 years to get to half of these books. And that's not even counting my "To Read" list.
And yet, I keep buying! (To be fair, I often read a new book immediately if it pertains to a current obsession.)
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My relationship to my unread books and to-read lists may be a bit odd, but feels very healthy to me. :-) There are over 2,000 books on my GR to-read shelf, and un-read physical books (my preference) ... let's just say I'm surrounded by them. I almost never buy new books, but do sometimes pick up used books at library sales, and I inherited house-fulls. Of those, I did give away many I knew I'd never read, but if there is any chance, I insist on keeping them around, at least until I try them.
I enjoy living surrounded by books. I love having over 2,000 books on my tbr to choose from when I'm picking something to read. I have absolutely no guilt, just love and completely unrealistic hope!
I love this question! :)One of the reasons I still love physical books is the joy that comes from finishing a book and then going to my bookshelf to decide what's next. I get a lot from the library (when it's open) and do a lot of audiobooks, but nothing beats a good shelf full of books to read!
I do feel bad for the books that sit unread for years. Every once in a while I admit defeat and trade them in at the used bookstore, but most of the time I'm optimistic that I'll get to them all SOME DAY!
I've got approx 100 unread print books on my shelves and another 100 or so on Kindle and I do plan on reading them all eventually - it doesn't bother me if I don't get to them for years on end. My GR to read shelf has about 3000 books, but I treat it like a bookstore - I stock it with books I think I might want to read. When an interesting book comes to my attention, I look for it on my GR list, and if it's there, that boosts my incentive to read it. Every once in a while I look at the very oldest ones and remove the ones that no longer look interesting, but cleaning up the list isn't a priority for me. Prize list books are my exceptions - if they are tempting, I'll read them right away, in time for the prize announcement.
~70% of the books in my many bookcases are unread and I don't feel guilty at all about it. One of my pleasures in life is going to a bookcase in my house to find something new to read. It's been great in times of pandemic! It didn't require a huge investment, either, because used books are so criminally cheap, and a second pleasure in life that I hold dear is going to used bookstores.The ~30% of books in my shelf that I've read are in a special category of 'keepers' that I return to again and again. Most books leave the house after I've read them.
I try to keep my unread books down to maximum 10. If it hits 10 I stop buying/borrowing/requesting them. And I try not to let a book linger unread too long as well ie read books in the order I acquired them. I also don’t tend to keep books after I have read them either - perhaps 5% of them maximum usually those by favourite authors or signed copies where I met the author (and not always then in the latter case)
One friend on Goodreads I met in real life and he came to my house. He couldn’t quite believe how few books I possess.
Paul wrote: "I try to keep my unread books down to maximum 10. If it hits 10 I stop buying/borrowing/requesting them. And I try not to let a book linger unread too long as well ie read books in the order I acqu..."I think you're my antonym, Paul ;)
lark wrote: "~70% of the books in my many bookcases are unread and I don't feel guilty at all about it. One of my pleasures in life is going to a bookcase in my house to find something new to read. It's been gr..."Pretty close to the same percentage of unread books for me. I can't allow myself to feel bad or guilty about it, and frankly I'm only tempted in this direction when I'm feeling irrationally bad about myself for other reasons as well. I have reached a sufficiently advanced age that I know I will never be able to read them all, although I think I knew this was going to be true even when I was a young man. Acquiring books, and imagining the pleasures of reading them, is just too enjoyable for me to allow the number of unread books I have to influence this behavior. And once I've read a book, I also cannot imagine unloading it any more than I could imagine unloading a friend. If I really despised a book, I might be tempted to get rid of it, but I enjoy rereading books too much to make this a feasible or sensible practice for me. Even with books I have disliked, I have on a number of occasions reread them and found something to value there.
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Books are one of the few things I actually enjoy spending money on, so I've given up trying to restrict myself too much. I do have a bookshelf dedicated to those unread so I see them everyday reminding me what's available. I have 100+ unread ebooks. Most of those were free, on sale, or acquired by my wife and then recommended to me.
I feel like possibly the universe would implode or time would stop if I had no unread books in the house...
I think I'm similar to lark in that most of the books I have are unread ones. I tend not to re-read books, so once I've read one, I tend to pass it on/donate it. I'd say my collection is about 80% unread/20% read (because I do keep some favorites & a few reference books). I don't mind having these, sometimes I will go through quite a few, others times they languish for months. I'm a prolific library user, so I always have a pile coming from/going to there. I like having the possibilities. When the shelves start looking full to me, I try to read/reduce my amount & move some out before acquiring more.
I easily abandon books that are not grabbing my interest. Sometimes I will clear my shelves a bit & get rid of a few that I haven't yet tried because I'm just not pulled to read them & figure if I need to read them at some later point, they will cross my path again in the future. (I do the same w/ my tbr lists, both here & on my library's site.)
My books fit on two bookcases. That's where I keep all my unread books. I have one hanging shelf that houses my "keepers". My library pile is by my desk. And any book or books I am currently reading reside on the table beside my favorite chair. (All could easily fit on the shelves in my den, but I like having them in the categories I mentioned.)
The young adults in my house have their own book collections, spread around a room or two. One has so many books I joke that the floor may collapse one day from the weight.
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Paul wrote: "I try to keep my unread books down to maximum 10. If it hits 10 I stop buying/borrowing/requesting them. ..."I am glad to meet another book-lover like me! Collecting and displaying books - that is what we have Goodreads for, isn’t it?
I only keep books that have a particular meaning to me, books that have had an impact on my life amd formed me to who I am. And I will not keep a book by a famous author if i don’t absolutely love it.
Charlotte wrote: "Collecting and displaying books - that is what we have Goodreads for, isn’t it?."Yes my Goodreads shelves have replaced my real ones!
Why I keep books I've read: frequently, as soon as I give a book away, I discover that I need it, or that I need something about it, again. To re-read paragraph I love. To see how the author writes a certain kind of scene, and to compare it to how other authors did it. So many reasons. It happens a lot, so I err on the side of 'keep' these days because it's maddening to need to see something and not have the book in the house any longer.
I buy way more books than I can ever read. As someone said above, in quarantine I went on a book buying spree feeling that I could save bookstores, all while unemployed. So basically, I'm delusional about my unread books. I have a shelf of read books and above that, unread books. I'm finding that if I shelve it on unread, it's there to die. If I really want to read it, I have to keep it OFF that shelf. The nightstand, my backpack, anywhere but that shelf. I've read more books during this unemployed, sheltered-in-place six months than ever in my life, and yet, none of them came from my unread pile. Three of them did come from my GR TBR, but I didn't own them, so I got to buy them: yay! saving bookstores.
My "unread" shelf is mostly on goodreads. I try to keep it to about 40 books, and occasionally delete books that I've become less interested in. I usually don't buy books until right before I'm ready to start them.I do have a small shelf of unread physical books. They've mostly been languishing unread for many months, less relevant to my current preoccupations. Occasional purges as well.
What a joy to have your own curated bookstore at home - and it's a bookstore that loans or gives books to friends for free.
I love physical books. But...I travel for a living (not so much this year) so I started moving more toward ebooks and audios. One less thing to carry since I can read or listen on my phone. Then when I moved house a couple years ago, I decided to reduce my physical books to almost none. Just kept a couple favorites.
Now my TBR is pretty much virtual. I put books on my TBR so I have a big "curated" list to pick from. No matter my mood, I'm certain to have something in the electronic stack. I have more books listed than I could ever read, but I do enjoy looking at them and sorting through. And I love a good cover!
And I also moved to prioritizing library loans. Between moving away from physical books, and getting most of my reads for free...well honestly I'm not brave enough to look at just how much I was spending before.
I also a huge fan of the physical book. I like to collect them as well as just buy them. So the only time that books ever leave the house is when I find a hardback or first edition to replace the paperback I already have. I have one or two doubles for covers or special editions. Replaced paperbacks are donated to the local hospital.I'm approaching 5,000 volumes in the house - lots of art books, history and research projects, but mainly novels.
When I find an author that I love I will tend to hunt down lots of their books. Often I have to buy from overseas because there simply don't seem to be any second hand in New Zealand. Penelope Fitzgerald was one such author - most of her books came from the UK.
Charity books fairs are big here - old books for a dollar or two - so for the cost of three new paperbacks and come away with fifty books. Sometimes this throws up surprises - last time it was five or six pristine hardback John Updike titles.
The end result is that my TBR is way bigger than I will ever have time for. When we went into lock down, I worked out I could stay in the house reading solidly for 8 years without needing to leave to buy a new book.
New titles continue to come by post, and so I have a few piles of most recently purchased that I want to read first and then all the rest that I dip into from time to time. The ones I wanted to read first used to sit on the bedside, but the pile became precariously high, so I put a bookshelf by the bed. That soon got full, so I put a taller one next to that. Both are full now, so there is plenty of current reading matter to attack, and only an arm stretch away from the bed.
I have maybe about a hundred unread books at home, or more, and a ten-page wishlist online.I'm happy to have them because I'm happy to support bookstores but I do at times get overwhelmed by them, particularly when I'm not making a dent but bogged down in ebooks from the library. But they keep. I recently read a book I bought 17 years ago and was happy I'd bought it. My husband also read it, and my mom and dad are now planning to read it, so it's being well used, finally.
I have however started donating books I've rated 3 stars or less here, unless they are interesting for research or particularly beautiful or hard to replace if I want them again. We live in a small apartment, so something has to give!
I wish a had a pile on unread books. My brother and I own thousands of books but they are all read though not all of them by both of us. As a publisher I receive plenty of manuscripts to satisfy my crave for reading, even so, quite regularly I’m searching our bookshelves to find another book when I have a spare moment. And I keep books because you never know when you want to reread them, and I do, so does my brother.
I think it is relative what is considered to be a large pile. I know people who have massive libraries (they either collect and buy a lot of books or have inherited a full library or more), and also, if someone is working in the publishing industry, they probably have a lot manuscripts, arcs, PR gift books.I had an issue a few years ago buying physical books but reading shorter ebooks to be able to meet my target for my Goodreads challenges, for which I overchallenged myself - I did not see how hard it would be for me to read 75-100 books per year next to work and household chores. At one point I probably had like 150ish unread physical books, and it started bothering me.
For the last 2 years, I have been trying to do a TBR Takedown challenge. I challenged myself to read less books, but to read 75% of my yearly reading off my shelves (because I am running a prompt-based monthly TBR jar challenge as well, and I might not find fitting books on my shelf for those challenges - I like this challenge, it gives a little bit of spice to my monthly reading as well). In the meantime, of course, I got a few more books - some I received as gifts, some I bought myself because of deals going on.
Right now I have 89 books that are unread, so I made great progress, and I am super proud of it. The number still makes me a bit uncomfortable, so I'm on the right track.
