Another book installment!

Now that I’m not sitting her ogling the TV all the time, there has been time to get back to chipping away at my “reading myself out of my bookshelf” task.

And here it is – another 12 books out-the-door 🙂

TV Detox – How am I doing? And a new project!

Have I stayed within my allotted 1 hour a day? Hmm, probably not quite. Have I stopped hanging in front of the TV all day, absolutely!

Remember about three weeks ago, I decided I needed to do something about my TV time? And I did! The first couple of weeks I did really well, I more or less stayed within my allotted hour, some days the TV never came on, and sometimes I watched a couple of programs rather than just one. But on average, probably no more than 1 hour a day. Which was my goal!

This last week though, there’s been a slight change, and mostly because I have added another small declutter project to the mix 🙂

As you probably know, I started this year with an intention to read myself out of my bookshelves, and this have so far been a pretty successful endeavour. I though I could take a cue from this, and try a similar thing with my DVD/Blu-Ray collection.

I’ve decided to watch myself out of my movie collection. This means, I will go through my movies one after another, watch it one more time, then decide which one of these categories it falls into:

keep – great movie will watch it again – worth being kept as a physical disk
copy – good movie will/might watch it again – worth copying it to a PC hard drive
toss – good to crap movie probably won’t watch it again (or know I won’t) – get rid of it

Now, I know this will play a little havoc with my TV time. But since I’m doing this with a friend, it will mostly be weekend watching, not a day to day thing 😉

Sounds like a fun project, yes?

Counting them, I probably have around 200 movies, which are movies and not series. Some of them are really old, and some are really crappy – you will probably have a laugh when you see pictures of them – so hopefully it won’t be to hard to cut down a little on my movie collection.

My biggest challenge when it comes to cutting down the amount of DVD/Blu-Rays are my series collection. Not sure how to handle those yet. You see, I have collected a few series over the years, especially sci-fi series, that I kinda would like to keep. Most of them are in CD/DVD albums, so they don’t eat all that much space. Hopefully when I get good a getting rid of movies, I can start chipping away at the series as well. We will have to get back to that…

But we were talking about movies! So far we have watched 4 movies, or rather watched 3 movies, one was so bad we couldn’t stand to watch more than the first 5 minutes 😉

Result? 3 out-the-door and 1 maaaaybe copy (probably not).

Another pile of books

I don’t know if you remember – but early this year in Taking a stab at by bookshelves, I wrote about my Read a book program. How I’m planning on reading my way through my books, to decrease the collection I keep.

I read in spurts, either not reading at all, or can’t seem to get my nose out of the books, kinda spurts 🙂

The year started off slow, but the last 6-7 weeks I’ve really gotten into my paperbacks. I have read a bunch of books and so far only one is a keeper 😉

That means that today, 18 books are going out of the house.

Well.. that is not strictly true actually, I know my mum reads some of these authors, so I’ve shot her an email to check which ones she wants, before I get rid of the rest. Hopefully in a day or two, some will be on their way to my mum in England and some will be on their way to the paper recycle bin 🙂

As soon as the weather is good enough to start my garden projects, I won’t get much reading done.. but for right now at least, I’m on a roll, so I’m hoping for one more pile of books this spring.

I have to admit, it’s hard to let them go, I like my books. But I have checked, and they can all be bought, as kindle e-books, should I want to read them again 😉

What about you, how do you handle your book collections?

Taking a stab at the bookshelves

I’ve been thinking about taking a stab at my bookshelves…again.

I have done this several times over the years, and the books I have left, have survived several culling’s and it will be more difficult to par down this time around.

My read a book program
What I’ve been doing the last couple of years is; read a book, then decide – good enough to keep? or donate/toss material?

This have help me getting rid of quite a few books, but I haven’t been ruthless enough in the “how good must a book be, to be a keeper” department.

I did a count of all my different books today, and I found I have 346. For some of you this isn’t even a collection (I have friends with more than 5000) and for some of you this is a lot (I also have a friend that I know have 2 and only because they were presents). I’ve had way over 1000 at one time, so being down to 346 isn’t to bad.

But, I have a goal, and that is to fit all my regular sized paperbacks, into a special build bookcase, which unfortunately only takes 200 of them 😦

So this year, there’s going to be a little twist to my read a book program 😉

Books I love
Only books that I love are keepers and deserve a place in my bookshelves. You know, the ones you’ll read over and over again, are part of a special collection, have special sentimental value, is an absolute keep for reference/work/hobby reasons or you just absolutely have to keep for some reason or another.

Books I like
Books I like, but that are not quite in the “I love” category, will go (donate/toss or sell). I will however, write down the title and author of these books on a “could read again maybe” list. And if and when I ever decide, I need or want to read it again, I will get it as a Kindle e-book.

Books that don’t excite me
Will go – either donate/toss or sell.

Overall goal sometime into the future
My overall goal way into the future is to have most of my books as e-books, then I won’t need to use to much space in my small house for books. But as I said, way into the future. I’m not quite ready to part with all my physical books quite yet.

So let’s see how we do in 2014.

And on that note.. here is my first installment on books decluttered 🙂