How to catch up on books you feel like you should read

 

Hi, my name is Tale and I’m a book hoarder. I have a bad habit of collecting books; I find them in bookshops and libraries and take them home because I truly want to read them. But then some of them unaccountably find a dusty place on the bookshelf and they don’t get read. I see new books that I want to read AT ONCE and then more books always move to the bottom of the pile.

Because I work in a library this gets worse, we get new books in all the time, the conversation during breaks is about books and annoyingly enough people I know have good taste keeps recommending books to me. It’s a nightmare! Mostly kidding, but it does mean that books I do want to read gets left behind to gather dust somewhere in my apartment. They are the ones at the bottom of a pile, hidden in the bookshelf or left in the kitchen on my way through. And I just really want them to be read. I believe that unread, new books are unhappy until someone has cracked them open and looked inside their rich world.

I’ve talked about my goal of reading 100 books in 2016 before (I’m at 30/100 now, follow along on Goodreads), and now I want to add a new goal: I will read through my pile of unread books before I read anything else. No more picking up new books at the library or seeing a book in a shop window that I HAVE to read NOW. No more. My stack consists of 20 books so by the time I finish that I will be halfway to my 2016 goal. I think it’s important to point out that all the books in the stack are books I do want to read, I only forgot about them. And I think that is important, despite the title of this post, don’t ever read a book JUST because you should, read it if you also want to read it. Don’t be afraid to take a book out of the stack if you know you will not enjoy it or learn something from it that you need.

This is my stack of books:

On purpose I’ve made it into an actual, physical pile of books in my living room, this way it will sooner or later become something I want to move, which will make me want to read faster. The stack got a lot higher than I anticipated, it’s like Marie Kondo says in her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying up; you need to see everything together to really know how much you have. It is motivating to see the large stack, and to hopefully see it dwindle. To make this part even more motivating I’ve made a printable to hang on the wall behind the books. The more I read and remove from the pile, the more I will see of it. I’ve filled the poster with motivational quotes and I can’t wait to see more of it appear. You can’t see any of it now since it’s behind the books, but I will take progress pics, so you can see it later on 🙂 I did make some bookmarks inspired by it that you can get access to by signing up for my newsletter below!

My action-goals for this challenge:

• Pick all the books that you have been meaning to read and put them in one pile.
• Take a picture of the pile so you know how far you have come later on.
• Hang up something behind it that will gradually show up, to ensure you want to see the bottom of that pile!
• And the most important part: Read!

And use my motivational quote bookmarks while you do! You can download and print them yourself by clicking the image underneath!

How about you? Any reading goals you have going on, or do you, like me, have books that keep getting left behind? Join me in my challenge, why don’t you?