Alternately titled: Taking Inventory Of All The Unread Books On My Shelf To Shame Myself Into Reading Or Donating Them.

I was only going to focus on the 28 books sitting on my shelf unread, but seeing as that made more than 50% of my collection (54% to be exact), I figured that I might as well give the whole bookshelf tour—all two shelves of it.

It’s a long one, so I don’t expect anyone to read it all the way through, but here’s what you can expect: A straightforward list of my unread books that you can skim through. Then I go through each book on my shelf (read and unread) in the order they are organised on my shelf, which is labeled in the next photo. I share a few sentences about each book on things like memories attached to the book, how much I got it for, reasons for adding it to my shelf, reasons for keeping it on my shelf, etc.

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[Note: Re-uploaded this blog post because the comment section wasn’t loading under the original post.]

I’ve been on the go in February, so my Kindle has been getting a lot of lovin’! Finishing a book on a Kindle is not quite as satisfying as finishing a physical book, but I do love how easy it is to whip out a Kindle, whereas with physical books, I really need to get settled.

An unexpectedly positive development from reading on my Kindle is that my impulse to buy books and obtain ARCs has cooled off. I suppose that ebooks take away the distraction of shiny new covers, which is what makes a good part of bookstagram hype, and brings the main focus back to the writing.

All that said, there’s something romantic about a physical book that just can’t be beat.

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Is it crazy that I read just over 1 book/week this month and it felt slow? This January I read 6 books; in the last third of 2019, I read 10 books/month on average! I think that a reading rush at the end of the year is natural; there’s an urgency to get certain reads in before the end of the year (for me it was a selection of 2019 releases) or read a certain amount of books to reach your annual reading goal. Perhaps, come January, it’s natural to feel a little burnt out. Perhaps you’ll dial your pace back down (for me, seemingly, a steady pace of 1 book/week).

But this year I’m not so focused on how quickly or slowly I get on with my next read. My main focus/reading resolution for 2020 is to read more presently. To slow down. To soak it in. To embrace bigger books.

So, this January I read a “mere” 6 books and DNFed 2! I’m so proud of myself for DNFing. After recapping my top reads of 2019 and reminding myself of how good books can be, it was so much easier to make peace with DNFing those books.

I read and read and read with an intensity I’d never really known before. I mean, I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there’s a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books. They weren’t a luxury good during that time in my life. They were a Class A addictive substance…

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don’t really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping. It is not where we are, but where we want to go, and all that. “Is there no way out of the mind?” Sylvia Plath famously asked. I had been interested in this question (what it meant, what the answers might be) ever since I had come across it as a teenager in a book of quotations. If there is a way out, a way that isn’t death itself, then the exit route is through words. But rather than leave the mind entirely, words help us leave a mind, and give us the building blocks to build another one, similar but better, nearby to the old one but with firmer foundations, and very often a better view.

—Reasons to Stay Alive, Matt Haig