Tag: No Book Buying Challenge

This is it!  The last month of the #ShelfLove No Book Buying Challenge!  Those of us participating are discussing how we did.
For those of you who don’t remember, I chose not to purchase any books this year.  Free books, of course, didn’t count.  However, I didn’t meet this goal.  I ended up purchasing several books at the Texas Book Festival.  I did succeed in reading at least 51 books that were already on my shelves…or on the floor.  Yeah, lots of books, but I got rid of a lot of them, too.

I plan on participating again next year, but that’s for another post.

This month, those of us participating in the #ShelfLove No Book Buying Challenge are discussing whether or not we’re thankful for taking on the challenge and whether or not our book buying and reading habits have changed.

Am I thankful for the #ShelfLove challenge?  Oh yeah, and I have reasons:

• I came up with several ways to get books for free, and I started listening to serial and short story podcasts.
• I’ve fallen in love with audiobooks thanks to discovering the free audiobook website, podiobooks.com.
• I became much more discerning about the books I purchased with the gift cards I received for Christmas and my Birthday.  The same goes for the books I chose when the Boyfriend made an agreement with me to help me survive the Spring semester.
• I finally got my Goodreads shelves updated, created a spreadsheet of all my unread books, and made TBR jars.
• I cleared out enough books from my collection to earn enough money to buy the one book I had been looking forward to for most of the year.
• I’m finally ok with not buying books.  I’ve also come to prefer book-related gifts instead of bookstore gift cards.  Why?  I own more books than can fit on my shelves.  Despite all the books I took to the used bookstore, my shelves are no less stuffed than they were at the beginning of the year.  In fact, I have even more books thanks to the Boyfriend, gift cards, and winning giveaways.

This month, those of us participating in the #ShelfLove No Book Buying Challenge are discussing how we organize our books.

I have too many books to keep in the apartment I share with the Boyfriend.  Because both of us have large personal libraries, but only so many walls to place bookshelves against, most of my books are in boxes in storage.  Only two of my book boxes are in the apartment instead of my storage unit.  They hold my Harry Potter books as well as all my books from Anne Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles” and the “Lives of the Mayfair Witches.”  Since I’m re-reading all those, I decided to keep them at home rather than having to go to my storage unit every time I finish one of the books.  There are several other books in the boxes as well, but I simply don’t have space on my shelves.

 

With a few exceptions, all the books on my shelves are books I’ve never read.  Also, I have them organized by height and from hardcover to mass market paperback.  The disadvantage to organizing them that way is that, whenever I get a new book, I have to rearrange the shelves.  You might think I would also have the problem of finding specific titles, but there is a large part of my brain dedicated to the books I have and where they are at any given time.

Even though we have four floor-to-ceiling bookcases, I only have the use of one of them.  That might seem unfair, but they’re his bookcases, and he made room for me when I moved in with him.  However, my books were creeping into other parts of the apartment, such as the table and floor next to my desk, which was in the living room until a couple of weeks ago.  Now that Summer is over, and Texas finally got the memo, I’ve moved my “office” into the dining room (the air conditioning never quite makes it there).  We aren’t planning on renewing our lease, so I decided to take over the room until we move into a place with three bedrooms.  I also have a shelf that contains all my French books, and I’ve loaned him several of my books so I can keep them on one of his shelves instead of mine.  Clever, huh? 😉

After our trial period of living under the same roof assured us that we could share living space without committing double homicide, I convinced him to let me organize his books.  The closest he got to being organized was having all of his Jim Butcher books on one shelf.  He culled books to go to the used bookstore while I began grouping the ones he decided to keep into genres, more or less.  I also kept any series together and in order, and then I organized by height whenever possible.  Since we’re both writers with decent sized collections of reference books, we decided to combine them on one shelf with a bookend in between.  We’re just not at the point in our relationship where we feel comfortable completely integrating our libraries.  Right now, it’s enough to know that we have similar tastes and many of the same books in our separate collections.

This month, those of us participating in the #ShelfLove No Book Buying Challenge are discussing the pros and cons of owning a significant number of books.  For myself, I’ve only seen having a large personal library as positive, with one exception: moving.  I’ve been packing and unpacking my belongings throughout my entire life, and I don’t even know the number of times I’ve moved.  I’m uncomfortably familiar with the general workings of Uhaul rentals and storage units across the country and during one move I managed to double the weight of my poor Nissan.  I’ve also hurt my back a countless number of times from overfilling boxes with my book collection.

You would think I would have learned by now and tossed the majority of my Smaug worthy hoard.  Think again.  Despite my efforts to pare down the number of books I own, my library has only expanded in size.  Thanks to ebooks, and the No Book Buying Challenge, that’s no longer happening exponentially, but it’s still happening.  I have bought with gift cards or received as gifts, more physical books than I’ve read this year.  The books I have at my apartment are double stacked on the shelves, I have several more boxes in storage, and the Boyfriend and I are planning to move next year.

The boxes of books are the ones I hope always to own.  The ones at home are mostly books I’ve never read; which has led me to think that perhaps there is another con to book hoarding.  I’m not getting any younger and tomorrow is never a guarantee.  Either I need to make peace with the idea of never reading many of those books, or I need to make a decision.  Do I cull my collection (again) or develop the discipline to choose a book I own instead of a library book or one borrowed from the Boyfriend’s shelves? I think I’ll just throw my hands up in the air in frustration when I move again, just like I’ve done every move before *sigh*

Six months down, six more to go for the #ShelfLove No Book Buying Challenge, and I swear I haven’t gone insane….yet.  Actually, these first six months have been easy for me; at least until the Spring semester ended, and I was no longer getting a paperback of my choice from the Boyfriend every week.

As many of you know, the Boyfriend made a deal with me that I would get a new book every week I completed all of my assigned writing.  It was a way to both motivate me and keep me from having a nervous breakdown, and it worked.  I didn’t realize just how much those weekly trips to the bookstore had helped me until they were gone.  A trip to the library resulted in me lugging home seven books, which helped.  However, the problem is that I tend to pick books that I then want to buy, so my wishlist is only growing.

I also realized that I truly do have a book buying habit.  I’d call it an addiction, but so far I haven’t spent any money on books to get that “fix”.  However, I’ve used all my gift cards, I choose the slowest shipping option when I buy anything on Amazon to get the $1 credits, and I frequently “1-click” free ebooks.  I also compiled a huge list of sites for free books.  Because of this, my digital library has expanded exponentially, and I’ve listened to quite a few audiobooks, all for the low, low price of free.  I’m ok with that though since those books aren’t taking up space on my shelves or in my storage unit.

Speaking of my physical books, I removed an entire box worth of books from my life and sent them to the used bookstore.  I’m trying to earn the money to buy The Outlandish Companion, Vol. 2 by Diana Gabaldon.  I got $21.67, and I’m putting together another box from books that have been sitting in storage for years, thanks to moving at least once a year and living in increasingly smaller apartments or overseas.  My apartment is bigger now, but I’m sharing it with the Boyfriend and both of us have the problem of not having enough shelving or the wall space to add more.  If it were just me, I’d get rid of the couch and replace it with two shelves, but that’s not the case, and it’s not my couch.  So, instead, I’m participating in this challenge.

So far, I plan on participating again next year, but I already know I’ll do things a bit differently.  I’ll have graduated from college and should have a decent paying adult job by then.  So, I’ll set some goals for myself to “earn” money, including activities such as finishing physical books and exercising.  Until then, I’m going to continue doing what I’ve been doing and hopefully won’t end up in a straight jacket.