lists – Only Mostly Dead

I’ve just spent a ridiculous amount of time getting my Goodreads book shelves in order. I did this in order (really) to answer one simple question:

how many unread books do I have?

I’ll come to why this is important in a second, first let me explain something about Goodreads shelves. Shelves are a way of organizing your books and when you open a Goodreads account it comes with 3 already set up: Read, Currently Reading and To-Read. These are exclusive – a book can’t be both Read and Currently Reading at the same time. You can set up other shelves which aren’t necessarily exclusive in which case they act like tags.

Anyway if you search for a book, or someone links to it (like this say) then you can click the “add to my books” button and it will give you the choice to add to one of these special shelves. Now my list in Goodreads is quite complete in that it contains all the books I own, read or unread and a lot that I’ve read but no longer own (but not all by any means). It also contains a few that I intend to read but haven’t purchased or obtained yet (they may be out-of-copyright books).

So this brings me to why I want to know that number. I have a feeling of always adding to the metaphorical mountain of books waiting to be read when I already have more than enough to keep me busy for years to come. What I now intend to do is track my “TBR” (To Be Read) number and only acquire new books when I have reduced it by reading some, hopefully I’ll read more than I acquire and that way some sense of sanity will prevail.

The problem is that when I come across a book I’m interested in or may read at some point I can only really add it to my To Read shelf, so my To Read shelf is a list of unread books I possess and ones I may get at some point.

So I have created a “My TBR” shelf and a “Wishlist” shelf. I have spent the last couple of hours sorting my To Read shelf into those two categories. I also cross-referenced with my list of actual ebooks in Calibre and physical books – which meant some physical sorting and added in any that weren’t already there.

And the number is 181. I have 181 unread books, most of them ebooks. I’m going to make a rule that whatever my TBR is at the beginning of a calendar month it must be the same or less at the beginning of the next. Which means I can only get new books after reading existing ones. Otherwise they go on the Wishlist – which currently stands at a wimpy 14. (I might at some point add a rule about what proportion of new books can be completely new as opposed to off the Wishlist – but I might not, some things are too anal even for me)

UPDATE: I have discovered, whilst making this post, that most of my effort today was UTTERLY POINTLESS!

*takes deep breath*

OK, it turns out you can make any shelf exclusive like the original three. Not only that but once you do it’s one of the options on the “add to my books” button. So all I really needed to do was this:

Create a new shelf called Wishlist (which I did anyway)
Go through my existing To Read books and add any to Wishlist which I don’t actually own.
Make Wishlist exclusive. At this point it removes these books from To Read.
From now on put new books in To Read or Wishlist as appropriate.

OK. Actually that would have still taken a while as I would still have had to compare calibre/physical books against my To Read list to identify the Wishlist items. But it wouldn’t have taken so long to co-ordinate three shelves on Goodreads – especially trying to make the numbers add up (because To Read should = Wishlist + my TBR)

Oh well. It was sort of relaxing to do even if some of it was wasted effort. Now I’m off to delete “my TBR” and after that there may be alcohol and chocolate in my near future!

OK, so I don’t do many of these so-called “meme” thingys – but lists can be fun and this came up on a blog I found whilst tag surfing.

Bold means I’ve read it.
Italics means I intend to read it (yeah right!)
[] means I love it.

List is from The Big Read

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams]
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 The Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

The partial-bold ones are not a mistake, they represent ones I’ve not finished.

So, about 12-15 depending on whether you count the partials, actually slightly better than I thought when I first saw the list. Anyway I’m off now to read some more of no. 50.