Book Buying Ban who?

yeah, we don't know her

When you have a lot of books, as I do, you get a lot of advice to shrink your TBR (To Be Read). And one of the most popular pieces is always “go on a book buying ban”. I don’t really do book buying bans, in fact I tend to fail them quite spectacularly.

On the one hand trying to not buy any new books for a certain amount of time does do quite a nice job for Steve my TBR. It makes me “shop my shelves” and focus on what I do already own. And with Steve being over 750 books (at this time) it’s a help for sure.

On the other hand, new shinies call to me and beckon me, so I can have the best and brightest hoard any book dragon has ever seen. And usually, that side wins. And wins by a lot.

Every year one of my friends starts a Summer TBR Reading challenge. And I’ve joined in for a few of the years. The challenge is simple, try to read as many unread books off your TBR as possible-without buying any more. (Which is the catch for sure)

She usually tries (and succeeds) in reading all the books that she has purchased in the past year. While I would love to do that and read all the books I’ve purchased since last August, that would be a lot. And while I’m a fast reader, I’m not that fast unfortunately. So I just try to read as much off of Steve as possible.

The problem with this challenge is that every year I do really well till August. Then I justify the fact that I haven’t bought a book for 2 months and then buy a lot of books. Which really nullifies the whole challenge.

But this year I decided that I’m going to add a small addendum to this challenge where the preorders that I have will not count as breaking the book buying ban. This way I still get the “new shinies to add to my hoard” tingles, support authors and cannot buy any other than the ones that are already preordered. (So no going into June and trying to preorder a lot of books).

I’m hoping this small change will help me not only read a lot of books off of Steve this year but also satisfy my need for new books. Which hopefully I will be able to really get him down by quite a bit this summer.

I probably will do a lot of my check ins here as well as my instagram, just to keep myself on track.

Do you like doing book buying bans? Can you do book buying bans without a small treat?

Hope you have a great day and happy reading!

~Stephanie