read all the books in my house

I have thousands of books in my house. Okay, not thousands, but alot. Of course, I have read some of them – like birthday/christmas presents or books specially for me.
But lately, I have renewed my reading fettish. I’m always buying books! And trying to read them.I’ve decided that to enrich my knowledge and not let all these pages go to waste, I’m going to attempt to read all the books in my house. Even if they are not my type of book – such as a ‘Colditz story’ or something, I will still read it.
So, at the moment I have two books from the library. Once I have finished these, I will begin. (By the way – for the purposes of this I will only read books in English – i have some library books out in another language). And I will re-read as well.

I am going to start in my room, looking at the first bookshelf and writing down all the books on that shelf, with tickboxes next to them. I will go methodically and try to keep a small vocab book so that I can improve my vocab as well! (I may keep other books like teach yourself HTML in 24 hours for idiots till the end.)

I will report back once I have made my first list. I am quite a slow reader, so it may take me a lifetime. But I am going to stick with this goal until I finish it!

Ok. I’m never going to reach this goal if I keep buying new books at the rate I currently do. So, even though book shopping is practically my favorite thing in the world, I have decided that I will not buy any more books for one year. This is going to be a big help toward my goal of reading what’s in my house, and on top of that it’s going to save me a lot of money.

There will have to be a few exceptions to this. Obviously I still have to buy the text books for my classes. Secondly, sometimes I feel like it’s important for my career to read certain books and they’re not readily available from the library. In those cases I’ll still buy them. So maybe it would be more accurate to say that I won’t buy any more books for pleasure reading for one year.

Oh, one other exception, if people give me book store gift cards as gifts, I can’t pass that up.

My first step toward this goal was to try to weed out the books I have. I went through my “to be read” book case and tried to honestly decide with each one if I was likely to ever read it. In many cases the answer was no. A lot of them were journals and collections of letters that I’ve picked up over the past few years at used book sales. While I find them interesting, chances are I’m not going to get around to most of them. So the library gets a few more boxes of donations before the year ends.

You wouldn’t think this would be so hard, but I keep buying more! I think I’m addicted to it actually. In addition to being a serious reader I’m in training to be a librarian, so I subscribe to all these reading lists and book communities and so I’m constantly reading book reviews and recommendations. Every time I hear about one that sounds especially good I want to run out and buy it! I have an entire bookshelf, taller than I am, full of books I haven’t read.

very difficult to do this if I KEEP BUYING MORE!

My wife and I combined collections and the number of books must be around 200 or 300. I don’t know for sure. Whatever it is, I always promise to read them instead of buying new ones, but I think I’m an addict of sorts.