Milestone: I\u2019m now down to 125 unread trade paperbacks and hardcovers.<\/p>\r\n
\u2026Someone recently asked me why<\/em> I\u2019m trying to get through all of my unread books. My first reaction was that that question didn\u2019t really make sense to me\u2014of course<\/em> I want to get through all of my unread books! Why wouldn\u2019t I?<\/p>\r\n 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?<\/p>\r\n 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\u2019ll probably take a couple more years to get through my unread ebooks.<\/p>\r\n 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?<\/p>\r\n I\u2019m not sure I have a good answer. But here are some musings:<\/p>\r\n I think partly it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t done, and a big overwhelming-feeling one. Making steady progress on it over a period of years has been kinda soothing.<\/p>\r\n 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\u2019t want to read one after all, then I skim it or give up early on it; I\u2019m not making myself read stuff I don\u2019t want to read.) So there\u2019s a certain amount of feeling like I\u2019m 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\u2019s something satisfying about that.<\/p>\r\n It\u2019s not like I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\r\n But I can at least catch up on the ones that I own. And that\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\r\n
\r\n