I happened upon Shealea’s tweet about a Spring Cleaning in September challenge and then got the beginnings of her blog post in my inbox, and felt like it would be a good thing to check out. As mentioned before, I’m already doing #ReadWhatYouGot for the first three weeks of September, but looking through the various challenges put forth, this actually helps serve my purpose for a few things I’d intended to do…eventually. This will help me potentially Do The Damn Thing. So here’s my letter of intent…to the world…
Challenge 1: Clean out my Goodreads Want To Read shelf…again
Historically, I would go through maybe every six months to be honest with myself about books I actually want to read. Over the years, my mindset for want to read has shifted from “eh, I wouldn’t burn it” to “If you put it in my hands I wouldn’t say no”…but as my number creeps slowly again towards 5,000, maybe I should figure out what I want my want to read to actually say. And then slice through that puppy like Prince Phillip to Maleficent’s forest of thorns.
Challenge 2: Reconciling my Spreadsheet and Goodreads
Over the past few years, I’ve been maintaining my Reading Log much more to the letter than I have Goodreads. What happened this year was that I realized I had gone months without adding books as Read on Goodreads and properly tagging them for the right categories. Sometimes, Kindle books would mark themselves as Read, but then I never went back and tagged them, all the same. And I keep coming across books I never added when I tried to go back and reconcile a while ago. So…here’s hoping.
Challenge 3: List at least one section of my physical TBR on PangoBooks
I have been hovering over this idea of slow-selling the books in my TBRoom (AKA The Athaeneum). I have historically done pulls to take to my local used in batches, but there are some that are still—as in my Want To Read shelf—if you told me to read it I wouldn’t say no. I decided to try using the Contemporary Fiction shelf, but there are actually an abundance of ARCs in that section, so maybe I’ll do Nonfiction or SpecFic instead. (Yes, my TBR is sorted into bookstore sections.)
I hadn’t been sure what I actually wanted to do with them, but I saw this post on Book Riot about apps to sell your books and I was very much drawn to PangoBooks. It’s a little bit like paperback swap where you can list books individually, but you know…you get paid in money instead of books. So I will start with a few listings and see what happens. I can be much more honest with myself if I have to put work into listing each book: do I really want to read this? How badly will I feel about sending it to someone else if they buy it? I hope I actually make it to this project—I even bought packaging!
(But we’ll see…)
Bonus Challenge: Rid myself of all these ARCs
I have a mountain of ARCs in my dining room that I have either already read or got in the mail and have no intention of reading. They’re on a shelf, but they’re slowly taking over the whole wall in that room. The reason I still have them (and a small number of books bought from Friends of the Library sale) is that I also have a Little Free Library-ish type structure that I’d intended to set up…oh, five years ago. It was built for an indoor library program and needed a good home, so I took it. And my husband offered to help repaint and waterproof it. Sadly, it’s been sitting under our coat rack with taped up doors and several cans of spray paint for [redacted]. So either we’re going to get this damn thing painted and set up (after we get rid of all the monsoon weeds out front) or I am going to find a new home for at least some of these ARCs. I know some people keep a box to put in LFLs they pass or go looking for them or whatever, but there aren’t any in my neighborhood at all, or on any of my regular routes. So we’ll see what happens with that.
I think that’s plenty to do in the next couple of months, yes? Especially if I want to get in my reading and other fun stuff. Projects are fun! (But do I ever actually complete them? We’ll see next time on the Great British Baking Show.) (Sorry. Current obsession.)