The never decreasing TBR pile

For the last two years I’ve been tracking my reading and book buying habits. Why?Well, really in response to a tweet from someone (I forget who) in publishing, an idle enquiry that got me thinking. Could I really justify buying as many books as I did? How did my reading ambitions fit with reality?

I had a beautiful notebook, sitting blank on my shelf, which was made to celebrate the publication of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty in 2005, and was well placed to be my tracking book. It seemed fitting. I buy notebooks and don’t use them in much the same way as I suspected I bought books and didn’t read them. I was about to find out.

I track reads on Goodreads anyway, for ease of reference, but wrote them down here too each month, as well as books I had bought, been sent for review, won, received as gifts or got out of the library. After a while I also started to add in things I’d watched – book events, exhibitions, films or special TV series I thought worthy of record –  for no reason than that it had resonated with me and I wanted to write it down.

So what have I found out about my habits? Bearing in mind I have copies of both The English Patient and A Suitable Boy on the shelf and have left them unread for around 15 years. How long does it take me to read a book? Are there any patterns?

Well yes. It turns out there is a pattern of sorts. First up, I read on average 8-9 books a month. (I’m a fast reader with a peculiar style of getting through a page.) My book buying habits are less predictable. There was only one month in the last two years where I didn’t buy a book at all. Some months are 2-3 books, some months are more. Last year, it averaged about 4-6 per month, this year I can see I have mostly succeeded in buying fewer books in an effort to ‘get through them’ and it’s more like 3 per month. Except in February and March when I bought 20.

So, in theory my initial suspicions were not correct – I read more than I buy. But I also go to the library once in a while – either when I have something I want to order from them or if they get some new books in that I browse (our library is small and the range mostly appeals to old ladies. There is a lot of British crime or saga books so not all my thing.) I get sent a few books for review or I ask for them on NetGalley. My mum lends me books. I get them as presents. So I think it sort of averages out as a one-out-one-in policy.

If I can read them within three months of buying them, I can easily justify the one-in-one-out policy. But that doesn’t always happen. There are 2 books from January 2018, the month I started the tracker, that I haven’t yet read. I’m interested in reading both of them but now they’re here, there’s no hurry.

This also reflects my TV watching habits. I am still more likely to watch something ‘live’ as broadcast than on any other platform. If it’s on TV and I want to watch it, better that I sit down to watch live or I just won’t do it. I bought Mr Barsby a box set of Breaking Bad at least 5 Christmasses ago, which we still haven’t watched. I doubt that we ever will – but if it had been on a channel we had access to (it wasn’t) when it was first on, I may have joined in the hype, and not just wondered what the fuss was about. Now the hype has died down, I wonder why I was even bothered.

This is nicely reflective of society in general, I guess. We want what we haven’t got and overlook what has been sitting on our shelves for years. It explains why there is so much focus on the next debut author or the big new book by a superstar author, and neglect the backlist. Yet sometimes the backlist is the most rewarding read.

So what have I learned? First up, that I need to think and reflect on whether I really want to read a book before I buy it. Am I suckered by the hype. Am I just buying it out of habit because I get twitchy not being near books after a while? Several of my purchases could have done with some reflection time, maybe some decent browsing time where I could have read a few pages first.

Second, I think I need to consider whether I’m buying a lot of ‘same-y’ books. I scanned the shelves the other day in an attempt to look for variety and found very little. It would be beneficial to read more widely – not necessarily different genres – but maybe different styles, different countries, books in translation, books by minority writers could all feature more in my bookshelf. 

Third, I’m always wanting to re-read a number of books. I’ve done less re-reading these last couple of years than I normally do and I feel it. There is benefit to re-reading. You see new things. Your changing life experiences may mean different parts of the book speak to you more this time round. Plus, in some cases, it’s been so long since I read something, Middlemarch, for example, that it almost feels like the first time.

So I shall take these lessons and consider what they mean for my habits this year, and I shall see if next year, I’ve been able to act on them. For now:

I vow to read The English Patient and A Suitable Boy in 2020. And Wolf Hall.

Please send me lists or recommendations of books I can read to widen my horizons. Please not fantasy fiction but I’ll try most other things.