FROM THE INTERIOR: READING HABITS

Welcome to the Interior!  Today I am musing, along with Should Be Reading…and some of the possible topics are:

 

Musing Mondays asks you to muse about one of the following each week…
• Describe one of your reading habits.
• Tell us what book(s) you recently bought for yourself or someone else, and why you chose that/those book(s).
• What book are you currently desperate to get your hands on? Tell us about it!
• Tell us what you’re reading right now — what you think of it, so far; why you chose it; what you are (or, aren’t) enjoying it.
• Do you have a bookish rant? Something about books or reading (or the industry) that gets your ire up? Share it with us!
• Instead of the above questions, maybe you just want to ramble on about something else pertaining to books — let’s hear it, then!

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First, I’m refilling my cup of coffee.  I am having it in the mug shown in my logo above.  One of my cheeriest mugs….

I’ll start off by talking about one of my newest reading habits.  Typically, I track all books purchased, review books received, and books read…all with links to my reviews, and this documentation is on my Curl up and Read blog.

This has been working for me…but after abandoning my Mt. TBR Challenge (in which I was supposed to read books purchased before 2014), I counted up the books I purchased this year…also documented on Curl up and Read.

And what did I find?

At that time, there were sixty-seven unread books on Sparky that were purchased this year!  Yikes!

So I decided to add a list in a notebook, too; just so I could have something handy to peruse when choosing my reading for each week.  Since adding the notebook list, I have crossed three books off as read and reviewed.

And added a few, too, but no worries.  Now I feel as though I have a teensy-tiny measure of control.  LOL

Here is a visual image of my print book stacks (below).  It is not as bad as it looks…only fourteen of them were purchased by me this year. (The right two rows in front).  The others are contest wins, and not just this year.  I am bad about reading those!  The review books and books I bought seem to come first.

 

 

 

 

 

Another part of my new reading habit is purging books I’ve read and will never read again…(That could include most of them, but I’m not there yet!).

I was ruthless…yet the hardest ones to purge were the ARCS, which technically, we can’t give away…so the recommended practice is tossing them.  But what if someone dumpster dives?  And then it is almost like I gave them away….see, I’m going to the worst case scenario here.

I have problems with that rule…why not give them to other readers?  But I guess I will try to forget about that niggling feeling in my head…and purge!

Meanwhile, I have a box for the library collection drive in my garage for other books. 

My garage is fairly cleared out, since the purge.  I also purged paperwork from my bins so I could add collectibles from the house into them…and try not to be a hoarder.

The trouble with all of these practices, from the list on my blog to the notebook list:  I then feel free to add more books!  LOL

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After the purge, my office looked much better!  I am just now noticing the little basket on the wall crammed with cards received over the years…could that use a clear out too?  LOL

 

 

 

 

What are your tried-and-true or new habits?  What works for you?

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