Gold star TBR

Remember when you got awarded a gold star by the teacher when you’d achieved something special? You’d run home to boast about this with the hope of another reward (chocolates and sweets being the favourite of course) for being such a star pupil?

Though I can still run (sadly my skipping skills are depleted to zero), I no longer feel the need to rush to my mother for a pat on the head. But the hope that someone will recognise – and acknowledge – an achievement never goes away does it? We all love to be appreciated and praised.

So I am awarding myself a star for effort for my progress in bringing some degree of control to my pile of 160+ unread books. Not quite gold star standard but maybe I merit a silver.

At the start of the year I joined the Triple Dog Dare where the plan was to read only books from the TBR for the first three months of 2016. It was a kick up the rear end and it worked so well I’ve continued with the habit long after the dare came to an end. So as a result, of the 25 books I’ve read so far this year , 18 have come from my TBR. The rest were all books I had agreed to review. It hasn’t been particularly hard to read what I already have – I’m not exactly short of choices so whatever my mood there’s always something suitable.  It’s meant I’ve tackled a few of the Booker winner titles that I’ve been putting off for some time like Rites of Passage by William Golding and Anita Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.

Now before you begin awarding me a halo I should confess that the overall size of the TBR hasn’t been reduced. It’s gone up in fact because I adopted the principle that even while I am working my way through the TBR backlog, I can still buy any number of new books.  I just shouldn’t read them in preference to the ones I already have. And of course I have been buying.  I started 2016 with 166 ‘real’ books and a stack of e-books. I’m now at 169 books and thats without a few that I’ve just been ordering. If only i could a) stop buying books b)stop requesting them from Net Galley and c) stop ordering them from the library then I’d be in really good shape and would definitely deserve the gold start. But that would be terribly dull…..