I have a confession to make.

I have… an addiction.

It’s not glamorous.

It’s not trendy.

It’s not even all that expensive.

But it’s making me crazy, so it’s important that I get it out into the open and start working on it in earnest.

I am addicted…

to books.

There! I said it! I can’t take it back.

The Backstory You Need

It all started when I met my wife. Before then, I had relatively few books to my name. Sure, I had the requisite few that I adored and planned to keep for the foreseeable future. But I didn’t have a problem until we started to combine our collections.

Then things got out of hand.

We started going to library book sales and bringing home box-after-box of really cheaply priced books. After a while, we had too many boxes, and we weren’t reading enough for buying more to make sense. So I put a stop to that.

The Plot Thickens

Then my wife started buying new books on Amazon. First it was one, then it was two, then it was three, four, or five a month. This on top of the boxes we already had stuffed into three closets, outside storage, under beds, and on our shelves.

I got her to curtail that after a bit, but all the while, we were both hoarding books another way: on our Kindles.

Any time either of us found a book we might find interesting, we bought it. When books were given away on free promotions, we grabbed them up. And we got back to the occasional book purchase in physical form.

The Solution

We both had to admit that we are book hoarders, and I decided enough was enough. We had to start working our way through it all before it took over our lives (and the rest of our space).

So that’s what I’ve been doing lately. I’m reading as many books as I can as fast as possible. If a book doesn’t grab me in the first chapters, I mark it ‘abandoned’ on Goodreads, and get rid of it. For Kindle, that means deletion. I donate physical books to our local Little Free Library.

Slowly but surely, I’m making progress, and my wife has started to come along for the ride. She’s reading more (even if she is still buying books, grumblegrumble), and we’re working our way back to some semblance of normalcy.

I’ll be making updates on my progress here, so if you’re interested, keep your eyes open for posts marked “The Great Book Purge.”

Are you a book hoarder? And do you have any ideas on how to stop hoarding books when you don’t really want to stop…?

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