Taming the TBR Mountain: A New Hope

Each year I set out to buy fewer books and read more of the books I actually own. And each year I fail miserably. In 2017 my book buying was... excessive.  Yes, let's go with excessive. Tallying up the totals was quite a shock to the system. Counting only physical books I ended up buying more than 70 books last year and the total costs was, err, something I don't want to talk about.

Now if you consider that I only managed to read 37 books during last year, it becomes abundantly clear that my TBR is out of control. I add books at a far greater rate than I'm reading them, which means that Mount TBR continues to grow on a yearly basis.

I could go on a book buying ban, but we all know how effective those are. I say I won't buy any books, but as soon as I see a shiny new book the ban goes out of the window faster than the Enterprise jumping to warp speed.

This year I'm going to try something completely different. I'm going to incentivise my TBR. For each book I read I'm going to reward myself with a certain amount to add to my book budget, which will allow me the flexibility to continue buying books without the foolishness of an outright ban.

I'm still tweaking the numbers, but my reward systems will be as follows:

• Starting fund of R200
• Books with less than 300 pages - R20
• Books with less than 500 pages - R30
• Books with 500 or more pages - R40

The beauty of this system is that I will be able to buy new books and still manage to curb my spending since I will have to read 3-5 titles for each new book I buy.

I'm not sure how effective this will be, but I can't wait to see how it turns out.

Let the experiment commence!