When the amount of time you spend organizing and analyzing one of your habits or hobbies surpasses the amount of time you're spending actually doing it, does that mean you might have a problem? I'm asking for a friend . . . okay that friend is me!
One of them my favorites activities to participate in is reading. I consider myself to be a voracious reader and would rather he found curled up reading a book then doing just about anything else. In a slow year I read about 150 books and in my highest reading near which was 2019 I read 244 books. Yes, I realize that's a lot. Yes, I realize that's not normal. Yes, I realize that I read more in a year than some people have read in their life. No, I won't apologize because reading truly is my escape.
That sheer volume of books is what leads to the problem that comes with over organizing. I have to date marked 1,912 books as completed reading. I use the Goodreads application to maintain an accurate list of the books that I read. It does a great job and I'm very pleased to be able to search quickly to determine if I've already read a book. Nothing annoys me more then to get 15 or 20 pages into a book that sounds familiar only to realize that I have wasted precious time reading something for the second time. I know there are some people who will read the same book multiple times but that is not me. I love the idea of being able to immerse myself in a book and I find it difficult to do that if I already know the ending. I'm also that person who would never flip to the back of the book to find out how the story ends, that's practically blasphemy. Ha ha. On a side note, of course I'm not comfortable enough with just having Goodreads track so I have a spreadsheet with multiple tabs that keeps an accurate list of all the books that I've ever read. I know, I know but what's a girl to do.
With the challenge of keeping an accurate record covered, the next problem comes with what to read next. Another hard-and-fast rule that I have for reading is that if you are reading books by an author who has multiple books in a series, you absolutely need to read the books in order. I don't understand how reading books out of order doesn't drive a person crazy. It would ruin it for me to know what's going to happen when you read out of order. Yeah yeah, that's just one of the things that's odd about me. I find myself at this point getting obsessed with researching what books are available for checkout, keeping list of books in series, and taking the time to make sure I make recommendations of books for purchase to the electronic libraries that I have cards for check out. This becomes the great time sucker for sure. One search leads to a series of rabbit holes and next thing I know hours have gone by the wayside. I always think that once I have a plan of attack on which books and what authors are next in the queue then I am pretty much good to go for 6 to 9 months. Yeah right! Ironically if I had just randomly selected the next book I would have had even more time to enjoy reading. Of course that would mean I would have missed out on having some of my OCD needs met in the process.
Gone are the days when I could just go into the library and browse through the stacks until I found something that met my fancy. In fact with the advent of electronic readers, I find myself choosing print versions less and less often. That however is a topic for a completely different blog entry.
One of them my favorites activities to participate in is reading. I consider myself to be a voracious reader and would rather he found curled up reading a book then doing just about anything else. In a slow year I read about 150 books and in my highest reading near which was 2019 I read 244 books. Yes, I realize that's a lot. Yes, I realize that's not normal. Yes, I realize that I read more in a year than some people have read in their life. No, I won't apologize because reading truly is my escape.
That sheer volume of books is what leads to the problem that comes with over organizing. I have to date marked 1,912 books as completed reading. I use the Goodreads application to maintain an accurate list of the books that I read. It does a great job and I'm very pleased to be able to search quickly to determine if I've already read a book. Nothing annoys me more then to get 15 or 20 pages into a book that sounds familiar only to realize that I have wasted precious time reading something for the second time. I know there are some people who will read the same book multiple times but that is not me. I love the idea of being able to immerse myself in a book and I find it difficult to do that if I already know the ending. I'm also that person who would never flip to the back of the book to find out how the story ends, that's practically blasphemy. Ha ha. On a side note, of course I'm not comfortable enough with just having Goodreads track so I have a spreadsheet with multiple tabs that keeps an accurate list of all the books that I've ever read. I know, I know but what's a girl to do.
With the challenge of keeping an accurate record covered, the next problem comes with what to read next. Another hard-and-fast rule that I have for reading is that if you are reading books by an author who has multiple books in a series, you absolutely need to read the books in order. I don't understand how reading books out of order doesn't drive a person crazy. It would ruin it for me to know what's going to happen when you read out of order. Yeah yeah, that's just one of the things that's odd about me. I find myself at this point getting obsessed with researching what books are available for checkout, keeping list of books in series, and taking the time to make sure I make recommendations of books for purchase to the electronic libraries that I have cards for check out. This becomes the great time sucker for sure. One search leads to a series of rabbit holes and next thing I know hours have gone by the wayside. I always think that once I have a plan of attack on which books and what authors are next in the queue then I am pretty much good to go for 6 to 9 months. Yeah right! Ironically if I had just randomly selected the next book I would have had even more time to enjoy reading. Of course that would mean I would have missed out on having some of my OCD needs met in the process.
Gone are the days when I could just go into the library and browse through the stacks until I found something that met my fancy. In fact with the advent of electronic readers, I find myself choosing print versions less and less often. That however is a topic for a completely different blog entry.
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