The first Challenge I'm setting myself this year is a year long one and it is to read one hundred books over the course of this year.
I seem to have gone from loving books and reading all the time to being much more intermittent with my reading. Just recently, like so many other people I've been picking up my phone more and more and of course this has meant that sometimes I simply fill my time with social media, playing games and well basically … just not reading books.
Now I have decided that I simply want to bring my love of reading books back to the forefront of my mind. Hopefully giving myself the Challenge of reading a minimum of two books a week should help to do this.
To start me off and to inspire me I have just been around the house counting the books that we own. The ones on bookshelves, the ones on ledges and the ones stacked by the side of the bed ... all of them.
The grand total of physical books in this house is 362.
I also have my tablet which holds all the books that I used to have on a Kindle. There's around 200 on there, or maybe more now as I tend to pick up any Kindle freebies that I spot on Amazon that sound interesting.
I have some books at the Van which will have to be added into the main total, I'm guessing around 25-30, we'll see when we get back there next month, but I'm thinking that this will still bring our total number of already owned physical books to just under 400, which is a big improvement on the 619 that I counted up to in 2015.
Over the years books have come in, both new and second-hand, and some have gone out again to car boot sales and charity shops and the number we own has fluctuated up and down, but then last year we decided to start slimming down the collection properly in our bid for a simpler life and it's nice to see that we seem to be on target to reducing the number we own.
Ideally I would like to own just one hundred books … but I doubt that would ever happen. Perhaps I can get to one hundred fiction and non-fiction (biographies etc) and then another one hundred cook books … now that might be achievable!!
Anyway thanks to my counting of books I now know that this bookshelf will easily hold one hundred books, and as this is one of the few pieces of furniture that we intend keeping once we sell our house it's good to know that if I can downsize all the non-cookbooks to one just hundred, they will all fit comfortably on the shelves of this unit and we will have the cupboard for storage of other things. My cookbooks I hope will in future all be able to fit in my kitchen!
I will be listing all the books that I have read and am currently reading, on the post that published just before this one and that is the post that can be linked to from the link on the right-hand sidebar, under My Challenges 2020 so you will be able to follow my progress throughout the year.
Better go, I have some reading to do.
I started this last night as my bedtime reading ... it's good. I'm also loving their television series on Sunday mornings 'Living on the Veg'. How nice to see a good vegan cooking show on television. 🙂
Sue xx
