New Year, New Me
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Sounds somewhat familiar, I’m sure I’ve heard that before somewhere. Might sound good set to music…
Got to make a start on organising things this year. Prioritising. Making sure stuff gets read. And that means tackling the TBR pile. And that’s scary.
In my day job as a teacher I spend a chunk of time with one course covering the two branches of media production – traditional media and new media. We kinda draw a line around the proliferation of the world wide web and say that anything that existed prior to this line is traditional media, anything that came along after this line is new media. Simple. Elegant. Easy to put into a 2 mark exam question. And so my to-be-read pile exists in a traditional media form and a new media form.
It’s easy to visualise the traditional media in that it’s right there in front of me, a stack some 20 books tall. It’s easy to see where I’m at with it – you can count the books in the stack. And it’s easy to organise and prioritise – the order of the stack is the order books are going to be read in. Currently reading The Deor Hoard and Slow Gods. Next up is… And so on. And when I get down to The Observable Universe I know I’ve reached the end. But I won’t have, because by the time I get there there will have been another book or two added to the pile. And The Great AI Con is on my desk at work, not here in this pile. As someone said on Instagram recently, “I started last year with 175 unread books in my house. I have read 140 books this year. I now have 322 unread books in my house”.
But the physical pile is the tip of the iceberg. After that there’s the virtual pile. The books that sort of exist but sort of don’t because they’re just 1s and 0s and is that really a real book? Don’t misunderstand me, they’re definitely real books and I love the convenience of having my entire library with me and available at my fingertips wherever I am. It’s just that there’s no easy or convenient way to visualise that virtual pile. Press a button and I find I’ve got 331 unread books lurking in my Kindle library. But that’s just a number! How many books is that, really? I know it’s a lot but really… How many shelves? How tall a stack? And how do you go about prioritising that kind of stack? This is good but it doesn’t really do it for me.
So here’s the plan…
- Really? How many of these books are actually unread and how many of them are sat at 99% because I’ve not clicked through to the very last page? That’s going to whittle the stack down quite a bit. Or, for that matter, how many of them are reference books that are never going to actually be read cover-to-cover?
- The Opening Chapter. Going to read chapter 1 of a different book every night for January. The top 3 get picked for February’s reading. Lather, rinse, repeat.
- Journalise it. Some kind of reading journal or BuJo type thing. For me, this has to be a physical book. The world is full of amazing inks, fantastic pens, and ever-decreasing excuses to use them. I want to be able to dip a pen into Wearingeul’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and write a few short words to describe the opening chapter I’ve just read, rate it, save it for later. To get a pen loaded with Diamine’s Deep Dark Purple and score a line through a book that wasn’t for me. Each new book that gets snapped up because Amazon are offering it for 99p that day gets added to the list…
So that’s the plan. Thanks to the wonderful Lazy Witch Art and her fabulous stall at the Warwick Folk Festival I’ve got a gorgeous dot-grid journal for this stage of the plan. Now all I need is some time!
How are you organising your reading for 2026? Let me know in the comments.
This post is part of the Ink and Ember Ambassadors’ Program. I’m here to champion Urban Fantasy in its various guises from the cozy to the downright sinister. Remember, the world isn’t what you think – let me show you how the world really is…
