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Milestone: I’m now down to 125 unread trade paperbacks and hardcovers.

…Someone recently asked me why I’m trying to get through all of my unread books. My first reaction was that that question didn’t really make sense to me—of course I want to get through all of my unread books! Why wouldn’t I?

But then I thought about it some more, from another angle: Why am I spending the rather large amount of time that this project is taking?

I started my unread-books project in early 2016; I read about 380 mass-market paperbacks over the next 4ish years, and have now read about 500 trade paperback and hardcovers over the past five years. I have another year-plus left to go on this TPB/HC phase of the project, and then it’ll probably take a couple more years to get through my unread ebooks.

There are so many other things I could be doing with all that time! I never have enough time to do all the things I want to do. Why choose this project instead of any of the other ones on my list?

I’m not sure I have a good answer. But here are some musings:

I think partly it’s a desire to not feel like I have this big task hanging over me. I spent about 30 years buying books with the intention of reading them but then (more often than not) putting them on my shelves and not reading them; and after my father’s death, I added a couple hundred of his books to my collection. Knowing that I had 800+ books sitting around waiting to be read was yet another task I hadn’t done, and a big overwhelming-feeling one. Making steady progress on it over a period of years has been kinda soothing.

Another, related, aspect is that I acquired all of these books with the intention of reading them. (But if it turns out that I don’t want to read one after all, then I skim it or give up early on it; I’m not making myself read stuff I don’t want to read.) So there’s a certain amount of feeling like I’m finally following through on long-ago plans that I made. I recently finished reading the last book in a box set that I bought sometime around 1990; there’s something satisfying about that.

It’s not like I’ll ever fully catch up on reading. There will always be more books that I want to read than I have time for; even if I gave up on all the ones I already have, new books (and stories) that are of interest to me are probably published faster than I can read them.

But I can at least catch up on the ones that I own. And that’ll be pretty satisfying when I reach that point. Even though it does implicitly mean choosing not to do (or at least to postpone) various other things.

(This entry was originally posted on Facebook on October 9, 2024.)