And it begins.

Hello, my name is Mariana and I have an addiction.

And not a bad one, either. I am addicted to buying books. Ever since I was nine years old and won my first 100+ pages book, it has all happened like a snowball: I have read more and more and more and more.

There are worse addictions to have, of course. I don’t smoke, rarely drink alcohol and find buying clothes to be an obligation rather than a pleasure. But books… I love buying them to the extent that I now have titles and more titles waiting to be read, piling up, bought but yet untouched, observed but not fully discovered. And as time passes by, I have less and less hours to spend on reading things I actually chose to read for leisure, making the whole matter worse.

My biggest difficulty is that I’m a sucker for bookstores. My favorite place in my entire town (Recife, by the way, on the Northeast of Brazil) is a bookshop called Livraria Cultura, a wonderful place that sells from anything I could possibly hope to read to – and there lies the problem – everything I didn’t even know I wanted to buy. I simply can’t help myself: the titles are just standing there, colorful and pretty, hoping to be picked up, hoping to be the one copy to come home with me, smelling so good (admit it, you must also love New Book Smell. I can’t be alone on this one). And leaving the bookshop without a book is my equivalent to going out for ice cream and only looking at the flavors without actually tasting any of them.

I do not, by any means, intend to read less. Quite on the contrary. I simply want to stop a) piling up books on such an amount that the older ones do not get read at all and b) spending money on titles I could buy for cheaper prices if I read everything I already have first. And for that, for finding peace with all my sad little friends waiting on my shelves to stop being a cover and become a story, I have a plan. A plan that might actually help other people on the same situation I am.

THE UNBREAKABLE RULES FOR CONTROLING MY BOOK BUYING HABIT

1. I will not buy any more books until all but five of the ones I already own are left unread, unless one of the following exceptions happens.

2. It is ok to ask for/be given books as presents.

3. I am allowed to buy one book at most on each national travel; four books on each international one.

4. No more books in German until I have read my first one on the language.

5. Books bought a while ago must be read between books recently bought.

6. If friends are buying from incredibly cheap, once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity websites, one book purchase is allowed.

7. Borrowed books are top priority.

8. Every book read will get a review here, so perhaps I might help anyone looking for a good read.

There it is. Perhaps as I enter an abstinence crisis more rules will be necessary, but I find these to be enough for now!

The next post will be a scary one to make, but a much needed one to face: I will make a list of all books I have unread so I can tick them as I (hopefully) advance. Wish me luck!

7 thoughts on “And it begins.

  1. I know how you feel, Mari. It’s the same here. I cannot help fall in love with a pretty face (or shall I say cover?) in a bookstore. And Saraiva DOES NOT help anyone.
    (Oh, that remembers me: have you heard about the NEW Livraria Cultura that is going to be open on Rio Mar Shopping? My boyfriend told me that it will be the BIGGEST bookstore of North and Northest! I don’t know if it’s true, once I haven’t gone to Rio Mar yet., but my arms are – already – itching to embrace all the wonderful books I’m sure that will be there.)
    Account me in this challenge. And I will be your best commenter – I’ve already loved your way to write. And that you write in English. I’ve always wanted to create a blog and write in English buuuuuut I don’t think I’m so good at English like you or Rebecca. One day, who knows?

    XOXO

    • Come on, your English is very good (: I’m sure my text is full of mistakes! haha I decided to write in English because most of what I read is in that language (sometimes translations can kill a book and, well, paperbacks are cheap), so my book reviews would be more useful in English than in Portuguese. And it’s also good practice, I guess!
      I am dying to go to the new Livraria Cultura, but that mall seems to be totally crazy still haha So I’ll wait around for a while and go there, hopefully with no money at all so I don’t fall in temptation. The smell of that bookstore makes my brain very happy!
      And yay, you’ll be following my challenge! I hope I’ll be able to help. I’m counting on you to keep me on track!

Leave a Reply to winterhappiness Cancel reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s
https://bookaholicintherapy.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/and-it-begins/?replytocom=4
bookaholicintherapy.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-10
81134
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:SDFMHN5DL45TFAX2BGKAL7UEAXY7UYNN
<urn:uuid:b66cc034-8b89-4f85-bfaa-adf0654c2481>
2020-02-16T20:01:42Z
192.0.78.13
text/html
sha1:XMCRMY4MIRM4XKZXJXMS52T6L4FFOIIU
<urn:uuid:dac4d478-5c2e-4d39-b58b-44faa56633d8>
https://bookaholicintherapy.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/and-it-begins/?replytocom=4
response
<urn:uuid:2a13a4ac-9716-43b0-84e8-06ffd05f68f5>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-10
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-52.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/