The pile

The State of the Pile: October 2017 edition

So.  My books have returned home.  So has my sofa and the rest of my furniture so life is looking up.  However, unpacking meant that it was time to face up to things and take stock of the pile.  It’s been a while since we did a state of the Pile post – nearly year in fact, which is when I first started packing up things up for the initial bits of the house renovation work.  Some of it has been in those boxes ever since, while we saved the money to do the next bits, some of it (the stuff in the top box mostly) got read while we we saving and of course more was added to the pile too.  Most of the time I like to ignore the size of the pile and it being in mostly boxes in a corner for 8 months and then out of the house in storage for another two made that very easy.  But you can’t ignore something and pretend it isn’t a problem when you have to unpack it and fit it back into your house.

Plastic storage boxes full of books
Two boxes are the downstairs keeper shelf. Another two and a half are the backlog

We’ve done a bit of a reorganisation too, so that I’m no longer keeping my to-read pile in a little bookshelf by my side of the sofa with the overspill on an increasing number of piles hidden behind my sofa arm.  Instead, I’ve got the formerly-DVD bookcase for them.  And it’s pretty full…

A very full bookshelf
One very full bookshelf containing the pile

Yeah.  That’s an Ikea half-Billy  bookcase double-shelved with unread books. Well except for the top section, which s going to have some CDs in it when we unpack that box.  It’s a little scary how many unread books I’ve got, but I think it’s going to be helpful or them actually to be out in the open.  Why?  Well because I now have a finite amount of space for the unread stuff.  I’ve promised myself – and Him Indoors – that I won’t let the pile get so it won’t fit in this bookcase.  And being on shelves means that I can organise it and get at stuff more easily, which I’m hoping will help stop me from getting in one of my “I have nothing to read” moods and going out and buying more books because I’ve forgotten about some of the really good stuff that’s hidden at the bottom of the furthest pile behind the sofa arm.

So now the nonfiction books are together, the romance books are together, the crime books are together, the literary fiction is together.  Nothing is harder to get to than the back row of a shelf.  If I’ve got more than one book by an author waiting to be read, the first one in the series is on the front shelf so I read it first.

And in unpacking and sorting I’ve found some books that I’d forgotten I had (not a surpise) and realised that I have books waiting to be read that fit some of the #ReadHarder squares that I’m missing – which is *amazing* because we’re in October and I still have a fair few to go (see September Stats for current progress) and only two and a half months to finish it in!

So, now I’ve been reminded of all the good books that I’ve got waiting to be read, lets see if it helps restrain my book buying urge.  It’s going to have to for a few weeks at least – because there’s no space for anything else yet!

I want to hear from you if you’ve got any tips for managing a book backlog and for restraining your bookbuying urges as I’m fairly sure I haven’t seen the last of the restless feeling of not being able to settle down to a book and having nothing to read!

4 thoughts on “The State of the Pile: October 2017 edition”

  1. I just redid my room upstairs, and found that I had about 650 books. A friend of mine found a bunch of books in the trashbin behind someplace, and stuffed his van full of books for me to look through which made four more huge overstuffed boxes. I also went to the Kansas City Half Priced Books event and bought forty. So I’d say you’re doing fairly well compared to me! =)

    1. I did clear out a load before I packed the boxes first time, and then some more before they went off in the middle of August. I purposefully didn’t count them because that would scare me. We must be at 150+ though…

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