It's the fun resolution setting time of year. I guess I could be bummed that I missed most of last year's reading goals, but I enjoy the reset that comes with the new year. All the possibilities! I also like to use the last week or so of the year to purchase a few books, you know, one last splurge before I tighten things up and work on reading what I already own in the New Year. Not that my self-imposed buying restrictions are very successful. I read a few and buy a few. It's a cycle that just keeps on repeating itself. I supposed that I should just live with my buying habit and just hope to maintain some kind of equilibrium between reading old stuff and picking up new books. Maybe finding that balance point should be my real reading goal. Rather than Bookshelf Zero, my goal should just be to read a book or two more than I buy.
I recently stumbled on a picture I took back in 2014 that is a good illustration of this idea. I laid out some books that I was going to prioritize for reading in 2015. I didn't get to all of them in 2015, but there was only 1 book in that picture that I have not read. The one book I haven't read, Parade's End, is the type of book that tends to sit on my shelves for a long time. Perhaps I should just stop buying books that I struggle to read and just buy things that I will get to quickly. It will slow my progress towards reading my backlist, but it will prevent too much new accumulation. I've bought 13 books and have read 12 owned books this year. Some of those 12 were definitely books that I bought this year, but that's not such a bad thing with this equilibrium point idea. If I just lower my equilibrium point by 5 books or so a year, I will gradually turnover my bookshelf. The real goal would be to lower the average time it takes me to get to a book. This will be a difficult number to determine at this point given that I don't have a purchase date for many of my books, but I know what is relatively new and what I've had for a while. Prioritizing the stuff I've had for a while should be the real goal.
The book I'm currently reading, The Wapshot Chronicle, perfectly illustrates this approach. I bought this book back in June 2016. It's a Modern Library book, that's why I bought it from a used bookstore that quickly went out of business, that is not really something that I've been clamoring to read. It's a perfectly good book. I'm not bored while reading a few pages before I go to bed. It's actually a very pleasant reading experience. There are just other books that I would rather read. Some of those I already own, but a pretty good percentage of the 170 (for now) unread books that I own fall pretty neatly into the Wapshot Chronicles category. I looked through my unread books list and it's rife with books that I'm not exactly thrilled to pick up. They are usually really long or notoriously challenging reads. Both of these are features that attracted me to those books in the first place. It would be so fun to just get lost in some impossibly long book that people love (like The Count of Monte Cristo or Once and Eagle) or discover the magic of Proust or Tolstoy! At least that's what drives some of my buying decisions. Those future states are fun to think about, just like making reading plans for a fresh block of 12 months, but they are much more difficult to realize.
Learning to deemphasize a sense of failure while highlighting the periods of discovery and beauty that come from reading wonderful books is an underappreciated aspect of Bookshelf Zero. The project is really just a reminder to take a look back every now and then and do a little book shopping from my own shelves. It's not a single-minded focus on getting through an arbitrary pile of books. It's a reminder that there are good things waiting if I make the effort. I can still buy books, as my recent purchase of 6 books from Thriftbooks so clearly attests, but there are plenty of new things to read just waiting on my shelves.
