Enough is enough! ! ! No MORE BOOKS.

I have a real problem with having just too many books.  There must be 4000 of them in my front room alone.  Add to them the extra 6000 that came on a disc from eBay for the Kindle that gives me 10,000 books at my fingertips.

I know R I D I C U L O U S.  I need to move them on. However I need to read them first.

If you were here in my house and I gave you the tour of the library as you walked into the front room you would see the left wall has ceiling to floor bookshelves and they are lined with my Penguin collections. The Penguins are also double shelved.  If you then looked to the right side of the room again you would see three large bookshelves filled with yet more books.  These are the non Penguins.  These are the books I just have to have when I have visited book sales, garage sales, second hand bookshops, markets and yes new book store shelves.  The percentage of these books that are unread is too embarrassing to publish.

When I got my Kindle a year ago I wanted to get books loaded onto it. Anyone who has an e-Reader will probably know how much fun it is to put books onto it, especially when confronted with all the very cheap and free books 'out there'.

I bought a disk from an eBay seller that said, "Loaded with books from all genres."  It was less than $10.00 and had free postage.  Of course I am going to "buy it now".  However a week later I received an email from eBay staff telling me I would not get this disk as the seller had been de-registered. Oh oh, must be pirated.  I said goodbye to my $10.00 and vowed to leave the book sections on eBay alone.

Two days later the disk arrived. Despite the dire warning from eBay a solidly packaged disk of 6000 books was in my hand, all neatly divided into folders with all genres and all mobi files. Not only that but it contained software to be used to transfer any book file into any other book file I wanted.

But what was really wrong with this disk? Probably the folder that said, "Best of 2011."  I think every book that was ever published in 2011 is on this disk.  Also every crime author I can think of, romance, drama, adventure, travel, comedy....this is a very illegal disk and I am sure now this seller was de-registered with very good reason. I'd be surprised if he isn't doing time somewhere.

Now my dilemma. Do I simply destroy the disk, doing the right thing?  Do I copy it a dozen times and pass it around to my friends?  Well, no. I do have some scruples. However I do not have as many scruples as I once thought I did.  I kept the disk.  I did not pass it on willy nilly. I believe too much in keeping the book markets going.  But there is no way I can destroy all these books. Besides, I justified, there are so many I'll never be able to read even if I am reincarnated in this same household for another 16 lifetimes.  So I have put it in the drawer.  Yes I do take the occasional book from it.

But now , getting back to my original dilemma.  I am going to get really disciplined here. For the next calendar year, yes 2014, but beginning NOW I am only going to read my own books.

My goal is to move on all of the non Penguin books to free up the space so my front room is only the Penguin collection.  All other books, once read will be given to friends, released into the wild or sold. I am not getting any younger and definitely time to downsize. I will put them in bus shelters, in the hands of people who would enjoy them one way or another. I will have competitions on my blog site.

I need an icon now for the blog stating these are the TBR books from my own house. I will work on that one.  However I do belong to a book group and we meet from March - November. That entails 9 books a year of which I don't have. Okay - I will allow myself to buy those books for the book group. I don't want to become a social isolate. Besides, who knows, I may already own those books. But I promise to pass them on once the discussion has finished. I will not hoard them.

As for ordering from the library,  every book listed in the Australian Good Reading Magazine, ABC Tuesday Book Club and every other source of review I read I am now going to stop that. Cold turkey?  Well, ah, no. Instead of putting everything onto the library wish list and picking them up in buckets I will only order one Library book at a time. If it takes 100 days to come in then so be it.

The Challenge:   I will read only the books I own and put the list up linked to the badge. 

This way I can keep track of what I own and what I read.  By doing this I should be able to work through my Century of Books challenge much quicker. I am sure I have a book in my house for every year of that century.  The Penguins alone would fulfil that quest.

Okay- so you heard it here first.  For all of you people out there who want to get through their own TBR books that have been collecting dust for how long??  now is your chance to join this challenge.
Feel free to take the badge and link it to your list of books you own. You might only want to do a list of 10 or 20 at a time. You might want to put up a length of time you will only read these books.  Up to you but I'm going ahead and I am looking forward to clearing out some of my beloved books to someone else.

There will be giveaways from this challenge as well.  If I don't get really stuck into this challenge of mine then you are going to get to know me not through my blog but by watching that awful show on TV about hoarders and all the psychologists that try to get them to clean up their homes. You know what I'm talking about.  So please, don't laugh too hard, just wish me luck.