Failing My To-Be-Read Pile

I’m well on my way to reaching my goal of whittling down the ebooks I’ve purchased from 20 to 15 by New Year’s–if by “well on my way,” I mean I’ve read three and bought, oh, about nine more.

For something that gives me as much joy, relaxation, and sanity as reading, I’ve written here before about all the ways reading kind of stresses me out, and this is no exception. Happiness is a pile of books, but it’s sometimes also overwhelming to see, to wonder when I’ll get through it all…not to mention justify to myself all those ebooks I purchased so I can buy more ebooks I see on sale (because I will).

Do you other readers have this issue? If not, I want to be you when I grow up.

This summer, when faced with a growing number of books on my Kindle app, I thought, Hey, these books I bought? I should actually read them all! Because, it’s like when you rarely visit the city you live by unless you’ve got family in town. There’s a part of my brain that was like, I’ve got these awesome books now to read. And then I just kept acquiring.

So I made a pact to myself to read the awesome I already owned and go from twenty to fifteen ebooks by 2016, and then maybe hit the single digits by next summer. And so, around book club picks and friends’ releases, I started trucking through my purchased ebooks.

But, guys? There were suddenly all these free, fantastic-sounding novellas out there by new-to-me authors. Contemporaries with unique premises, fun paranormals, tales of geek love. I bought some of them. I might’ve wanted to buy them all.

(PEOPLE. Stop writing things. And stop making them so affordable. Wait, don’t.)

Panic building a few weeks ago as I realized my TBR dreams were slipping from my grasp, I employed new strategies. I downloaded some of the ebooks from iBooks so they weren’t in my Kindle app and thus didn’t really count (right?). (Plus the reading experience in the iBooks app? Divine.) I thought of portioning some books off between two TBR collections in my Kindle app, maybe high- and low-priority, and just trying to keep the high under a certain amount. Then, as a last-ditch strategy, I removed some books from my collection that I’m not as excited to read (usually non-romances). I figured I could search for them if I wanted to read them in the future, but, more importantly, doing this kept my official TBR down.

Today I have 24 books in my TBR collection in Kindle. For those of you counting at home, that means my goal of going from 20 to 15 has gone in the opposite direction.

Is this a failure of my will? Or a success that the book world is full of such great reads? I guess it all depends on your viewpoint. Maybe I should adopt the latter.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to find time to read the 31 book samples I’ve downloaded by Dec. 31st…