I was never one for making New Year’s Resolutions , even as a child, perhaps I’ve always been aware of the unwisdom of trying to commit yourself to something you know you’re unlikely to be able to achieve.
I’ve never been rash enough to try to commit myself to a dry January which would have made me both miserable and feel like a failure when I finally toppled (inevitably) off my wagon but this year I did make a couple of sort-of resolutions.
The first, which is more of an ongoing rather than a New Year’s resolution is to do new things. I got the idea off a fellow blogger a couple of years ago – she was doing a new thing every week which I feel veers into doing things for the sake of it, my objective is to do things I’d normally wimp out of (I still haven’t driven the OOH’s elderly 4 x 4 or the tractor mower which terrifies me), be impulsive occasionally, not refuse to buy something because I don’t know how to cook it, generally not allow myself to sink into a rut. I can’t say that I’ve done anything startlingly new this year, I have a feeling that buying myself a Desigual handbag in the sales doesn’t really count, even if I’ve never owned anything by Desigual before or a jade green and pink bag r. There was nothing new about one of the daughters saying airily as she clutched the bag, ‘If you decide the bag’s too young for you I’ll have it.’
It’s mine.
Marginally more successful was the decision arising from my realisation that my book buying habit had got out of control.
Sadly I don’t have a local English language library though I do have the excitement of parcels in the post. As a result this is the bookcase in the bedroom where I keep the to-read pile.
It doesn’t look like that much – except that I haven’t read any of them and all the shelves are double stacked so there’s about 190 books in there. That’s only our bedroom too…
So I took myself in hand and decided that with effect from New Year’s Day there would be no more book buying, except for my book groups, until the end of March. I prudently put in an order on December 31st.
I can say that for a month now I’ve been clean – well there was a slight lapse when I was ordering two books for the book groups and saw that there was a copy of Frances Spalding’s biography of Gwen Raverat which I’ve been after for ages, but is both hard to find and very expensive, for £4. Even the sternest resolution monitor would have agreed that it would have been foolish not to snap it up.
Otherwise I’ve been really good, I’ve only read what was already in the house (and what came in the post from that last order) and I felt inspired to do some bookish housekeeping. Sorting out the to-read bookcase and ejecting the books I know I’ll never read, it’s not really a cheat’s way of diminishing the pile, going through all the many shelves and culling what I’ll never read again and the girls and OH have no interest in, and collecting all the books that various people have left on tables, the edge of the units, the middle of my desk in the expectation that the tidiness fairy is going to sweep them up and put them away and doing it myself.
There lies the rub. I was hoping, expecting really, that at the rate I read I’d have cleared at least one front layer of books off the to-read bookcase by the end of March. Except that in going through all the shelves culling and sorting I’ve been discovering books I forgot I had and want to read. And where do the books I want to read go?
My to-read bookcase now has more books in it than it did on January 1st.
So much for New Year’s resolutions.
Victoria Corby 
Looks like you are not only a reader but a collector! Bravo 🙂 et Bonne Courage.
‘Collector’ is the polite way of putting it, ‘hoarder’ is probably more accurate!
We are building a new house. Friends are convinced that it is to house all the books overflowing here….but I have read every one of them, except for the last parcel to arrive which I’m only halfway through.
Pre-internet days when I bought nearly all my books on trips to England and was limited by what I could physically carry on the train I re-read books all the time. Now… one of the reasons we have so many books is because it’s so easy to get them; there’s also such a thrill about getting parcels.
I also decided not to buy any books until the end of March – and bought quite a few before the end of December. I’ve managed January without buying books (you can’t count swapping books as buying them can you?) and I’ve only been reading my own books and the library books I’d borrowed before January, but now I’m wanting to read/buy other books – I don’t think I’ll last through February. In fact I’ve borrowed more library books and am itching to read them.
My books are double shelved too and I really should go through and sort out the ones I’m not going to read – those books I bought to make up the 3 for 2 bargains!
Swapping definitely doesn’t count. I’m not so sure about buying a book that you want to read for your OH or daughter though! I’m doing OK at the moment, I suspect that the buying urge is going to get very strong in a month or so though!
Current Kindle content: 714 books. I think I’ve read about 50 of them so far, deleted a couple of dozen that were rubbish, and there are others I partly read and may return to when they fit my mood. How long would it take to read that many books? Probably the rest of my life. But still I keep adding to the collection. At ;least I don’t need bookshelves, though. 🙂
No paper books at all?? One of the on-going discussions in the book group is how difficult some books are to read on Kindle, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life is one example. Not a problem for me as I don’t have a Kindle but what about you?
I’ve never done a month without buying, but I do know the buying way too much thing.