Choice, So Much Choice: How Do We Keep Up?

I can’t remember ever being more overwhelmed by choice when it comes to deciding what I’m going to read next. I still remember those days before the internet when I dreaded finishing a book because I had no idea where my next book was coming from. That, of course, was because no internet, meant no way to download a book in ten or fifteen seconds any hour of the day that the urge struck me to do so, and because books were relatively expensive to me when compared to my piddling amount of disposable income. 

And no internet, meant that I had to work hard to learn about new books because I pretty much had to depend on the Sunday newspaper to review maybe four or five books for me that were being released that week. If I was lucky, one or two of them might even appeal to me; if I was even luckier, I might be able to scrape together the money to buy one of them. Nowadays an avid booklover can find more book news than they can possibly read or absorb before it goes out of date. With just a few exceptions, American newspapers have canned just about all of their book reviewers, but there are book blogs, book vlogs, Amazon and Barnes & Noble reader-reviews, on line literary magazines, print magazines dedicated to new books, library site reviews, GoodReads, LibraryThing, and on, and on, and on. So much choice.

Last week I posted about the exercise I went through to cull a few books off the TBR list I keep over on GoodReads. That resulted in three books being removed, a good thing, but I almost immediately added two books to the same list based on a comment made on the very post noting the three-book removal. Net gain: one book less on the list. 

The GoodReads list (123) is made up mostly of books published in the last ten years or so, but not a whole lot of them from the current year, so I have been keeping a handwritten second list of newly published books (44) that I depend on my library to find for me if I can’t somehow first snag a pre-publication review copy. (I know that makes it sound as if I don’t buy books anymore, but I’ve already bought five in August and the month still has ten days to go. Now let’s add all those books (37) that have been given to me this year (I call these my “trunk books” because that’s where I keep them), all of which I want to read sooner or later, and we are up to 209 books that I fully intend to read at some point. I won’t even try to count  the several dozen books on my shelves that I haven’t read yet – because I’m not crazy enough to believe that I will ever read all of those.

So, I’m going to try something different for a while by simultaneously reading a book from each of these categories:

·     Review Copies

·     Library Copies

·     Bookshelf Copies

·     Trunk Books

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This is in lieu of allowing my choices to be limited by what is on the TBR lists, because let’s face it, those lists will never go away – and none of us really want them to. But of course, there are many, many TBR list books in each of the four categories I’ve designated, so this is kind of a win-win proposition. If I don't do something like this, I know that I will end up reading nothing but books published in the current year - and that can't be good.