Admiring & Acquiring

Admiring & Acquiring

• Feb 20, 2014

Last week, Kelly debuted a new feature on her blog called Book Pushin'. She was sharing her love for a historical fiction novel called The Bronze Horseman, a book that I'd purchased months ago in a Kindle sale. The more she talked about the book, the more excited I got about finally reading it. The summary had always interested me, but I was put off by the fact that it was 810 pages.

The weather here was crazy last week, and I ended up not having work due to ice and snow. Suddenly, I was faced with several days of total freedom - and the inability to actually go anywhere. It seemed like the perfect time to finally meet these characters that Kelly kept raving about… and then I finished the book in one day. I've got another post in the works about long books that was inspired by that chunky novel, but I kept thinking about something else after I'd finished reading it:

This book had been sitting on my Kindle for exactly one year.

For some people, one year isn't really that long for a book to be sitting on their shelves, waiting to be read, because they have an ever-growing TBR pile. For others, like most of my real life friends who are readers, it's almost unheard of to buy a book and then not read it almost immediately.

I had purchased this book, on sale, and then didn't think twice about when I was going to read it. If you'd asked, the best you would have gotten would be a vague response along the lines of "hopefully soon."

But after I finally read it, I knew that I immediately wanted to read the rest of the series. I made a trip to Barnes & Noble, and maybe spent ten minutes in there total. That's like a record for me! I raced to the fiction area, excitedly found the "S" last name section, grabbed my two purchases and made my way to the register. I couldn't wait to get home so that I could immediately continue reading. And then I thought:

When did I last buy a book and plan to immediately start reading it?

I forgot what it was like to buy a book right when I wanted to read it. I lost that love of racing to the bookstore because I just had to continue a series, find more from an author, start that book I saw in a magazine… My book buying habits have completely changed since I started blogging. I have a spreadsheet of all the books I own that are unread, and one of the columns is for the month/year it was purchased by me or gifted to me. Y'all, almost every single book in the list of 100+ has been added to my shelves since 2011.

There are so many posts about being a book hoarder - I've even written one before! I'm not really writing about buying too many books or implementing a book buying bans because those never really work for me. If it's necessary due to budget, that's a different story. But a complete ban just because? It never lasts because books are on the few things I love spending money on. I don't care that much about clothes, shoes, accessories, hobbies, etc. Shopping for books is something I really enjoy. While there's nothing wrong with book shopping, I am troubled by one thing. I think it's easy to get in this mindset, especially because of the nature of blogging, where it seems like:

Loving Books = Acquiring Books

But that equation isn't really right, is it? Truthfully, I think it should look more like this:

Loving Books = Reading Books

When did I start focusing on the wrong thing? I'm not saying that I don't still read a ton. Of course I do! It's just that I've noticed this obsession (for lack of a better word) with buying books. I'm always scoping out new reads, constantly adding books to my Goodreads wishlist, browsing NetGalley and Edelweiss to see if there's anything that should be on my radar.

It's fun, but it's also a little nuts! I realized that my book buying habits reveal that all I'm really doing is:

Admiring & Acquiring

Yep, I said it. I'm rapidly adding books to my shelves for various reasons: they were recommended to me, they were on sale, I have heard good things about them, I just read something else by that author, the summary sounds interesting and the Goodreads rating is high... You name it. There's such a focus on acquiring books - something that doesn't seem that odd when I look at the book blogging world at large. So many bloggers love getting new books just as much as I do! 

Shopping for books isn't the problem for me though. It's the fact that the book sits on my shelves, and I glance at it. I talk about how pretty it is, how great it sounds, how I plan on reading it at some point. Maybe I'll pick it up one day, but chances are high that it will languish for a few months at least before that actually happens. It's a book that I'm admiring when I could be doing something better: 

Absorbing & Adoring

They're sad little books just waiting to take me on an adventure. I'll see the pretty spines and remember the reasons I bought them, but that's not always enough to make me read them (absorbing!) and hopefully fall in love with them (adoring!). I wrote earlier this year about framing my goals and resolutions in terms of what I want more and less of in 2014. One of those was shopping, and this post is just an extension of that goal. 

I want to simplify things. Go back to the basics. And part of that involves reminding myself:

Just because I can buy it, doesn't mean I should.

Just because I want to buy it, doesn't mean I need to.

There's nothing wrong with buying books, but I do want to be conscious of how I'm spending my money and where I'm directing my focus. My focus shouldn't be on acquisition and the thrill of the purchase. It should be on the part where I take the time to read the books I've bought and remember all the reasons I wanted it in the first place. 

This has been a long post, and I'm impressed if you made it this far. Truthfully, I wrote this mostly for myself - a reflection on the fact that there's something to be said for self-control and delayed gratification. Two things I want to cultivate more of in myself this year.