Y’all. I have a lot of books. I read a lot of books of all kinds. Novellas, novels, memoirs, non-fiction, the list goes on. Now, I don’t own all the books in my TBR (to be read pile, in case you haven’t run into this acronym before), and I don’t necessarily need to own them either. Yet, I still didn’t have an accurate list of all of my books.

What inspired this reality check? Last weekend, my book bestie Stephanie (@stephannes_bookshelf) and I participated in the Michigan Book Hop of independently owned bookstores around Michigan – which is still going on if you’re interested! One of the ways to earn an entry into the drawing was to hit up 5 bookstores and get them to mark your board – we did. We did the Detroit region together, and at every store, I had to stop and check if the book I was looking at was one of the following:

a) one I already owned
2) one I had on hold at the library
or
iii) one I could get for “free” on Kindle Unlimited (yes, I know, and as soon as bookshop.org has a similar program we will switch)

So on Wednesday, I faced down the towering stack on my nightstand, and even more towering if it were real stack on my Kindle. I went through all of the physical and digital books I own and made sure my TBR in The StoryGraph was completely accurate.

At that time, I had 660 books on my TBR. What I did not do yet is check the entire list of books I don’t already own (gotta love that mark as owned button!) for KU or library availability. Gulp.

The thought is overwhelming! So to help with that, I’m going to focus on reading books I already own. lol, I know right? Not entirely feasible because new awesome books come out ALL THE TIME, but it’s my goal.

SO, how am I going to conquer this mountain? Well, I am going to start out by continuing my normal reading plus also, reading the shorter books (think <100 pages) as it fits my fancy. Since starting this, I’ve read 16 novellas and added another book to my TBR – 645.

Read along with me?

You can learn more about me here, follow me on instagram as @jenny_bean_reads, and on StoryGraph here.