In late 2015, it occurred to me that I had hundreds of unread books on my bookshelves, due to my decades-long habit of buying books but not reading them. So I decided to do something about that.

From early 2016 through late 2019, I read or skimmed (or glanced at and decided to discard without reading) my few hundred unread mass-market paperbacks.

Then I started in on my 570 unread trade paperbacks and hardcovers, and I created a spreadsheet to track the number of those books that I had read, and the number remaining, and to estimate how long it would take to finish.

As of the last time I updated this page, in June, 2024, I have 150 of those left to go; I’m hoping to finish in late 2025 or early 2026.

(I’ve added about 49 more books since I started the TPB/HC phase of the project; so one way to think about the numbers is to pretend that I started with 619 instead of 570.)

Here’s the graph that Google Sheets generates from my data.

After I finish this phase of the project, the next phase will be reading my unread ebooks. There are a few hundred of those, and I’m averaging getting through about a hundred unread books a year, so I imagine that’ll take me another few years.