Image source: Merlina McGovern
Today’s post is more of a request for any tips that you have for staving off that urge to buy new books when you have a million books that you already have on your to-be-read list.
Let me start off by saying that I grew up being a voracious reader. If ever my mom was looking for me, most likely I was tucked away in some cozy corner with my nose stuck in a book. Horror books, fantasy books, romance books, young adult novels, contemporary stories, the backs of cereal boxes—I read anything and everything. My brain always needed to be fed more and more books, no matter what activity I was engaged in. Long car rides, plane rides, dinner, lunch, breakfast, recess breaks, all perfectly fine times to be reading for me.
I kept up that reading bug all through high school and college. Though, college was when I first ran up against reading becoming a slog. Having to read hundreds and hundreds of pages for so many classes and finding myself having to read books just to read books (like the thickly bound annotations for James Joyce’s Ulyssess) began to suck the life out of reading for me. I would still read for pleasure though, and many times that pleasure reading took precedence over reading for school (something my grades sometimes sadly reflected).
As I entered the workforce, I began to work in the publishing industry. Hooray, I thought! I am actually getting paid to read. But that joy quickly turned sour as I had to read dry continuing education manuscripts 40 hours a week. My route through the publishing industry took me through an increasingly technical reading forest—radiology magazines, network computing, healthcare technology, application development, business-to-business marketing technology. Day in and day out, I would read paragraphs and paragraphs of technical jargon, editing out redundancies, fact-checking, streamlining, strangling prose to fit into a brand style guide. At the end of each day, my eyes literally couldn’t keep reading.
As I got home, exhausted each night, I would throw myself into TV, streaming entertainment, or online video games to take my mind off the dry-as-dust words that had burned themselves into the backs of my eyelids. Over time, my daily reading habit dropped by the wayside.
But then, I began to listen to audiobooks. This has been life-changing for me. Now, I actually had time to read again. I could read while I was doing household chores. I could read as I went on my daily walks. But, audiobooks, as wonderful as they are, just don’t hold the same mystical allure that physical hardcopy books hold for me. I would still try to read “real” books at night, but my soul-sucking corporate job just took too much energy out of me. My sore eyelids would start sagging about five minutes into any night-time reading session.
However, now that I am a freelancer and now that I am editing books that actually interest me and have value, I find that I’m not as exhausted as I used to be in the evenings. I now have time to read my physical books again. I have posted a picture of one of my many bookshelves at the top of this post. Of the books on that shelf, I have currently only read nine. Such a paltry percentage and one that I’m sure is replicated across the other shelves in my house. But, here’s the thing, whenever I find a bookstore, I want to go and browse. And of course, it is physically impossible for me to leave said bookstore without purchasing a book. The last book on that shelf, Ireland’s Wild Plants: Myths, Legends and Folklore, is one that I just purchased at a cozy general store in an Irish seaside town. And of course, I’m currently in the middle of listening to an audiobook, Killers of the Flower Moon, and two physical books, 100 Poems (Seamus Heaney) and Bird by Bird. Who knows when I’ll be able to read my most recent purchase.
What I should really do is ban myself from buying a new book until I’ve read all of the books that I haven’t read on my current shelves. And, what I should really do is run five miles a day and eat nothing but tofu and brussel sprouts, right? Right?
But seriously, seriously, I shan’t buy another book…for at least another month.
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