I engage gleefully in tsundoku both digitally and physically. With the forced Coronacation underway, I thought it would be wise to use the opportunity to try to put the brakes on this habit. So I decided a few weeks ago that I would go on a buying pause until at least June 1st.
Good enough, and easily done. But it doesn’t help with the issue of the, um, backlog. So I am hoping that periodically updating the blog with indicators of progress may help me move through my reading. (And, in the likely event it doesn’t make a measurable difference, perhaps it’ll at least amuse me?)
Digitally, things are grim. (Okay, relatively.) As of today, Amazon says I have 773 Kindle books, 1 magazine subscription and 754 ‘documents’ — so call it 1520-odd actual books, since a few of the documents are probably actually documents. The oldest Kindle book is from September, 2011 and the oldest non-Kindle ebook is from March 2014. Any e-book downloaded to my PC and saved but not uploaded to Kindle is unlikely to be read and doesn’t count.
On my Kindle I currently have 84 screens worth of items, or 499 items. 231 are ‘books’ and 268 ‘documents’, reflecting my habit of buying book bundles (Humble and Storybundle, particularly, but also two packages from Baen publishers) as much or more than using the Kindle store.
Of the 499, 15 are read and I planned to offer a quick summary of what I thought of them in a separate post.
To help work through the 484 others, I decided that I would channel my inner Jefferson Smith, whose Immerse-or-Die challenges I greatly enjoyed. (Unfortunately, he seems to have stopped doing them in late 2018.) Unlike IOD, I am not reading on a treadmill with a fixed goal of making it to 40 minutes — I’m just cruising through the text until I finish, lose interest, or am actively turned off.
Physically, things are actually getting better. Well, okay, they’re not getting worse. My office bookshelf has 34 titles, mostly business or leadership titles, which are by and large intended for review. The side table in the bedroom hosts another 57. These are a mix of fiction, self-help, historical and business/leadership titles.
The reason I have so much of this crap is a combination of (a) weak self-control and (b) discovering that Amazon would rather take a small cut from selling you a really cheap used copy of a book from someone else than get no cut because you didn’t buy anything. (No prizes for guessing which cause is more at fault with my situation…)
I plan, starting from today, to try to get through 1-2 of these a week, minimum. I’ll try to document my progress here in a series of posts.
Longer-term, I’m interested in the potential of Blinkist or similar services to let me get summaries of non-fiction that looks interesting without my having to buy the actual book and then not get rid of it. We’ll see how that goes.
Next tsundoku update in two weeks.