Well I tried to. At the beginning of the year I decided I was going to do the most nerve-wracking thing ever – delete my Goodreads “Want to Read List” of over 200 books. Why would I do this? I must be crazy.
Honestly, my Goodreads list has become bogged down with books I can’t even remember adding, books that are already on my “Read” list, etc. It’s giving me anxiety. I don’t have the time or the energy to go through each book to see which ones I owned. Also, I want to get my personal TBR down this year without being distracted by all the other books I want to read.
So after coming to a resolute decision that I was going to do this, I pulled up my Goodreads TBR list and holding my breath, I hit delete. Then I got a message – you can’t delete books off a permanent shelf, only move them to another shelf. WHAT?!
After trying multiple times without success (arrggh), I realized that I could delete the books one at a time, but again, who has time for that? Goodreads wasn’t making this easy. So then I attempted to do what it told me to do – moved the list to another shelf – only to find out that it merely made a duplicate of the list. I don’t want two lists! C’MON GOODREADS! The fact that I couldn’t do what I wanted with my bookshelves was completely frustrating.
So Plan B.
I have other book tracker alternatives downloaded on my phone, so I pulled up an app called Bookshelf, which simply keeps a catalog of all the books you own. You can further organize your bookshelf into categories. Since I haven’t kept up with it since I downloaded it over a year ago, I deleted the account and made a new one. It comes with a default category of “My Books” but I made a category called “Personal TBR” and proceeded to scan in all the books I have yet to read. The idea is that I will move each book to the “My Books” category when I finish reading them so I can count how many I read.
So what is the result of my scanning?
114 books…. that is the number of books currently lining my bookshelves that I have yet to read. Nearly half of which are classics (49). The other half is a mixture of nonfiction and fiction of several genres.
I am hoping to get this number below 100 by the end of the year. It will all be determined on whether I can keep up with my reading and reach my reading goals. I want to read at least 12 classics off my Classics Club List, all of which I own. Then at least 12 nonfiction books, half of which haven’t already been determined. Right there that brings me to 18 potential books, but that doesn’t include the book club picks I already own or just my random mood reading.
I can do this!
Book Admirer 