I’m a book hoarder and it’s something about me that I’ve worked at for a while to overcome. There are books on my shelves that I know I will never read. Part of the problem is I have too many books so good books I want to read get overwhelmed. This post from the Unclutterer blog talks about how to reduce book clutter and I do some of these things, but probably need to go back and do more.
One thing the post advises is to keep your actual reading material pretty small, even if you have an eBook reader like I do. I have found that on my Kindle is that it’s easy to have too many books. I have them sorted in categories, and even that is way too much. Better to only have a handful and have the rest in archived items status. So given that, I was considering how to build some sort of online list of books I want to read. Then common sense kicked in: use an Amazon wish list.
This is a sample from my wish list and I don’t just have books available from Amazon. Some of the books are listed by Amazon but aren’t currently available for sale. That’s okay, as I likely can find some of them at my local public library. Now you might be saying, “My wish list doesn’t look like that. It has pictures for each item and they take up a lot more space!” That’s true, the default view is great if you’re trying to shop for someone (like yourself), but if you’re just trying to keep a list and review it, you’ll want to switch to compact view:
This is how I have my listed sorted. Now I’m just beginning to use the list, but I see one thing I need to do right away before this list gets too large. When you set the view to Compact, you can clearly see the priority of the item. There are five priorities, from lowest to highest, that give one the ability to mark what items are most important/interesting. I can sort by that priority, which means if I want to buy the next book since I have finished up one, I can get one of the higher ones on the list. However, if I leave it too long and the list grows too large, then I will have a hard time finding the ones I really want to read and I’ll also have a more tedious time trying to cull the list down by tossing out books I have decided I will never get to.
So what do you about those one time, special deals where someone is offering a book you want, but at a free price or something similar? Grab it, to get the deal, but still add it to the Wish List if you’re not going to read it right away. The Wish List can be sorted so you display purchased items on the list, too. Once you’ve started reading a book, delete it off the list. That ensures that only unread books stay on there.