I am really, really good about purging stuff I don’t need from my house, computer, social media, life, etc. Unfortunately, I’m also really good at splurging. And while I’ve gotten much better about not splurging too much when it involves spending money, I’m still really bad at certain kinds of acquisition. Like adding possible books to read to my “investigate” list on Goodreads.

At the beginning of the year, I mentioned that I had waaaaaay too many books on my to-read, to-investigate, physical-shelf, and audio-queue lists. My big goal for the year was to pare that down, and to be fair to myself, I did work really hard at trimming down several of those categories. But then they built up again, until I had nearly 100 unread or untried books. Thankfully, very few of those are actually ones I own (three), and more than half are “investigate” books (which means a good chunk will get deleted once I try them out).

My original plan was to start gathering books from the library and systematically eliminating them or moving them from “investigate” to “read” categories. Then I discovered the extremely handy Nook preview on the Barnes & Noble website, which enabled me to go through the list a hundred times faster. In a single afternoon, in fact. Numbers:

To Investigate: Began at 52 books. Previewed all but 6, which are either on order from the library (4), or unavailable via library or bookstore (2). I’ll leave the unavailable ones for another time. The to-investigate list is now shrunk by 46 books. Win!

To Read: Initial list started at 20 books, with a further 22 which have yet to be released. This future-TBR list remained unchanged, of course, but I was hoping that the to-read pile would only increase by a small number. Um…apparently I’ve gotten better at spotting what I’d like to read, because in previewing those aforementioned 46 books, 27 of them ended up on the to-read pile. !!! That’s an astonishingly high rate for me. Usually about 95% of the to-investigate list gets cut.

Totals: What started out as a total of 94 books – including future-TBR books – is sadly only reduced to 69. That is a distressingly high number of books I’d actually like to read. I’m sure some of them won’t make it past the second round of cuts – when I read further and decide a book isn’t for me after all – but really? 69? That’s WAY too many!! I haven’t had more than about two dozen actually-want-to-read books on my list in about four years…sigh. [ETA: Um, 75, including the six to-investigate books. I can’t count.]

Time to start reading off my to-read list only…