Happy Sunday, bookish peeps! I hope you’ve been enjoying your weekend!
I’ve spent the last week rearranging my shelves and ended up unhauling over 153 books from my personal collection. While this was a small portion of my books, it got me thinking about how we as readers are constantly in this frame of mind where we feel like literary Pokémon trainers in our quest to buy and read all the books.
As an avid reader who shares a living space with others, my desire to read often outweighs my ability to acquire as many books as I would like. Not to mention, the constraints on my free time to read are limited when it comes to working and completing assignments for my grad school courses.
These two things end up leaving me in a bind.
According to Alexis C. Madrigal in an article for The Atlantic, as of 2010, Google calculated that there were approximately 129,864,880 books in the world. Likewise, based on a study the Pew Research Center did about the reading lives of Americans and a follow-up calculation from the Literary Hub website, I came to the conclusion that I, as a voracious reading 30-year-old woman, am only likely to read about 4,480 more books in this lifetime.
To see my reading life laid out in such bare terms, it finally clicked why so many people refuse to waste time on books that don’t excite them.
Taking all this into consideration, I finally decided to let go of books I always knew deep down in my heart that I was never going to read again. And from my collection of about 1500 books, I culled the teenage fiction, new adult, and non-fiction books that “didn’t spark joy” for me anymore.
What I found most interesting about the books I unhauled was that the majority of these books were from those early days of BookTube and high school.
In 2010, when BookTube became popular, I would often buy books that were trending in the bookosphere with the intention of reading the books and just never get to them. This meant that when it came time to unhaul books from this era, I had a bunch of books that made me think of specific content creators I hadn’t watched in a while because they’d left YouTube (shout out to Tiffany from @Fat Shopaholic who put me onto Kiese Laymon’s books before they became a cultural staple) or from creators I just outgrew as I got older. Specific books that I found myself unhauling in this category were John Green books, dystopian YA fiction, and a lot of women’s fiction.
On the other hand, my unhauled books from my high school years mainly consisted of books from authors I no longer vibed with or just had outgrown (do you sense a theme?). This was interesting to see because, as a teen, I read an author’s entire backlist before moving onto the next author. So, when I got to unhauling books from this phase of my life, I noticed how much my taste had changed. Where I used to love a bubblegum YA romance or mystery book, I now find myself being much more selective in what I read.
While it was hard to let go of so many books, I couldn’t help but feel giddy at refocusing my mind to start enjoying more books that interest me on my TBR.
Drop down in the comments and tell me if you’ve unhauled any books lately or just how your reading taste have changed over the years?
Don’t forget to check out last week’s Sunday Chat on taking a break from social media when you get a chance and to like, comment, and subscribe!
Happy Reading!
Sunday Vibes: “Fool For You” (Cee Lo Green cover) by Alice Smith & Dignity (ft. Yemi Alade) by Angelique Kidjo
Introvert interrupted 
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