Crushed under my pile of unread books

It’s a common bookworm problem, so many books that need to be read on your shelves, yet new shiny books catch your attention, so you grab them and ignore the ones you already have. Your pile of unread books slowly gets bigger and bigger and next thing you know its time for a new bookcase. I went from two bookcases to four last year, plus a small one. My fantasy case is double stacked and so are most of the others and at least 80% of these are unread. I read a decent amount of books, in 2017 it was 120, down from 163 in both 2016 and 2015, yet I seem to be buying them so much faster than I can read them. Does this knowledge stop me from buying more? Fuck no, read or unread, my shelves are beautiful, so many gorgeous books.. Yes I’ve been known to stroke my books while looking for my next read, sometimes I tell them I love them, sometimes I just sit and stare at them like the creeper I am. The key to my book buying is op shopping. A very large percentage of my books were purchased second hand for between 2-3 dollars. I once walked out of an op shop with the first 4 books in the Peter V. Brett, Demon Cycle series. That was a happy day. I find heaps of urban fantasy, paranormal romance and books that I’m not sure if I would like, so I wouldn’t risk paying full price for it. I have come across some absolute ripper reads this way and new authors that I now love. If you are looking to expand your reading, I fully recommend op shopping. I think I’ve got enough on my shelves now, so I probably wont be doing it much in 2018. I will be getting new books of course, I don’t think I could go on a book buying ban, that’s just crazy, but I will be limiting my purchases to series I already have on the go. Nicholas Eames and Mark Lawrence have books out in the next couple of months, no way will I miss out on those. Also Brandon Sanderson is an absolute work horse, I’m sure he will be releasing something this year and I can’t miss out on that.

So my mission for this year is to drastically reduce the amount of unread books on my shelves. To do this I’m using all of my yearly reading challenges to motivate and inspire me. FYI if you are looking for some reading challenges check out the “2018 Reading Challenge” group on Goodreads, they do yearly, quarterly and monthly challenges and have a great place for you to keep a track of everything. I’m hoping to read 102 books this year and my aim is for 75 of them to be books from my shelves. Also aiming for 30,000 pages.

As I like lists and challenges I will be updating my progress here once a month. (I have no problem using one book for more than one challenge, but I don’t use one book for more than one prompt in each challenge). So some of the challenges and my goals are as follows –

DIG DEEPER AND READ PARTICULAR
Duration: January 1 to December 31, 2018
1. Read books that are sub-genres of one particular genre
example: You love Science Fiction, so you will read 10 books that fit into the sub-genres like cyberpunk, alternate/parallel universe, space opera, etc.
Goal – Option 1     0/20

THE LISTOPIA CHALLENGE
Duration: January 1, 2018 – December 31, 2018     Goal – 0/40

POPSUGAR READING CHALLENGE 2018
Duration: January 1, 2018 – December 31, 2018     Goal – 0/20

1st quarterly challenge
MUST READ BOOKS 1001 books to read before you die
Duration: 1 January 2018-31 March 2018               Goal – 0/5

So these are some of them, for January there is also a marathon challenge, in which I’m aiming for 4,000 pages.

And that’s about it from me. If you are doing any exciting reading challenges, feel free to let me know what they are so I can check them out.