Goals for 2011

It's time to clean up this blog and get rid of most of the challenge lists.  I'm not doing any formal challenges this year.  This year I hope to clean out my bookshelves.  They are sagging.  I know myself well enough to know that I will always have full shelves, but I would like to get to the point where my shelves are full but the extra piles are gone.

I'm hoping to accomplish that by reading at least 50 books this year and twenty-five of those (hopefully more) must have been on my shelves or piles or Kindle when the clock struck midnight on Jan 1, 2011.  That of course meant I needed a new spreadsheet to keep track of what I acquire during the year.  I just love spreadsheets.  There is already one book on it as I downloaded a free book to my Kindle on Saturday.

Now as for the Kindle?  Out of those 25 books, only five of them can be from my Kindle.  That doesn't help me clean off my shelves, and that's the purpose of this challenge.

This led me to think about where I get my books.  Why do I have so many?  I read 65 books this year and only about a dozen of those were read on my Kindle.  Yet my shelves are still full.

I get about a dozen advanced readers copies of books from various publishers.  They all get read in the timeliest manner I can manage so they really don't sit on my shelf for very long.

I buy about a dozen actual- paper not digital - books a year from various stores.  Usually these are books from authors I love and am chomping at the bit to get my hands on the book.  I typically read those quickly as well.

The biggest chunk comes from the library book sales.  It's easy to buy a book when it only costs 50 cents.  It's not so easy to get it read when there are so many other books to read.   I average eight books a sale so that means I'm buying at least forty-eight books a year and those are usually the lowest priority.  That's where I need to think and cut back.  Those sales are sagging my shelves.  I'll still go but I'm going to take a little more time. 

So that's where I stand.  I hope 2011 is an awesome year!