The Book Buy Ban – a most drastic meassure

Hello, sweet peas!

Have you ever looked at your TBR in awe and fear? Do you ever frown at yourself as you scan the spines, stare at the covers? I do that a lot. I sit on the floor in front of my shelf and stare at the books, mentally tallying which ones of those I’ve already read and which one of them are just gathering dust.

The thing is, why don’t I read them? I needed them so desperately when I bought them? Each book I put on my TBR was carefully selected. (Okay, in some cases that’s just a very bold lie.) And now they are just here, on piles and on shelves and lying on a windowsill and on a desk and on the livingroom table.

And somewhen last November – I know, I could have told you about this before but I’m just really bad at blogging again – I decided ENOUGH! and thus, the Book Buy Ban was born.

The time:

Let’s be honest: I have enough unread books. At least at the moment. There is really no reason to follow the lure of the siren’s call that is Amazon, Bookdepository or just the bookstore that’s located in the middle of the town where I live. Right? Right.
I don’t wanna leave all those stories behind. I wanna read them. And that will only work if I stop buying new books that push the just recently bought ones back.

So my decision stands:

No new books will be bought between December, 1st 2019 and June, 1st 2020.

Gifted books do not count. I got some for Christmas but that’s something different than buying them myself.

The goal:

I wanna read some books. According to Goodreads my TBR keeps 150 unread books at the moment. I wanna read some of them. I won’t be crazy enough to set myself an incredible high goal, a number that I will never reach. Who knows? Maybe I cannot finish more than one book in those six months. Maybe a big reading slump swallows me whole.

But I have made a new shelf on Goodreads that I lovingly call “Joel”.

Let’s not dive into my weird habit of giving my Goodreads shelves names. Also, I’m really excited for the sequel of “Last of us” coming out in February. Do not judge me.

Well, Joel is now a proud shelf hosting a lot of titles. Titles that I wanna read soon. Books that have been overlooked, books that I needed so much at that time and have since been neglected. It’s a colourful mix of different genres, different pagecount and different age groups. Joel helps me a lot getting excited for books that I would have forgotten otherwise.

So the goal is basically, don’t buy any new books but read a whole bunch of “old” ones.

Here is the link to the shelf, in case you are curious: Joel

The Joker:

You know, I’m not crazy.

People who know me might raise their eyebrows at this but I promis I’m not. crazy.

I know it is hard for a bookworm not to buy any books. Especially when there are new releases that you have been waiting for forever. I have those too. That’s why I have given myself permission to buy three books during my Book Buy Ban. Three special jokers for three special books. It seems not much, I know. And somehow it also seems contraproductive. But the whole point is to keep it low. I don’t wanna cave in at some point and go on a book shopping spree. But three books, that’s doable. I can read three books that I have bought in addition to the TBR books.

I already have my eye on some books, of course. Since the release date of two of the books I wanted got pushed back, I will probably use the jokers for something else. What I definitely want though is “Im Sturm der Echos” by Christelle Dabos.

The Challenges:

To make the whole thing more fun I have decided to join some challenges.

First is the Goodreads Challenge, like every year. I wanna really challenge myself this year and read 80 books. That is about 30 books more than I did last year but then again I did 80 two years ago. It is possible.

Second, I wanna join a whole bunch of people doing “Beat the Backlist” that is hosted by Novelknight. Aaah, I still need to finish my page for that one. This also includes a reading bingo, which is always fun. I might even try the bigger one. Go big or go cry in a corner, right?

Hey, if you have any fun challenges I should take a look at, feel free to suggest.