I’m thinking of trying a month where I read a different book every day. Not the entire book, and not necessarily just starting at the beginning and plowing forward.

Why?

Now that I’ve moved all of my stuff to a single location, I have come to the (not-at-all-surprising-to-anyone-who-knows-me) realization that I have a lot of books.

While I did go through some of the books I’d brought with me to LEVN, I also worked at a placement site with a social enterprise online bookstore. (It had a longer name, and an acronym, but we pretty much all called it “the Business.”) The purpose of the bookstore is to give the clients work experience; they processed donated books to see if they could be sold; if they could be sold, clients listed them online, and if not, we donated them to Goodwill, or clients and staff could keep them. It was wonderful to see clients eagerly picking out books to keep for themselves.

Now, you may be thinking, “That’s great, but how is this relevant, random internet person?”

It’s relevant because I worked there for months… And by the time I left, I had also acquired at least a couple boxes of books, and for the most part, I haven’t had time to read them.

I love books. I don’t want to just give them away, these ones that sparked my interest, unless they don’t seem like they’d be interesting at all.

I know the standard test from that one book I love, Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” is to ask myself, “Does it bring me joy?” But before I just go through all of them (granted, I did go through them as I was unpacking some of them, a process not totally complete yet), I want to see if I like their style or content at all. I don’t want to keep one that looks interesting but I can’t stand, and give away one that seems sort of “meh” but has just the information and presentation I need. At the same time, I can’t keep all these books around just in case indefinitely.

With that in mind, I came up with the concept of breaking it into smaller skim-reading breaks to do regularly. It works out because I also want to be reading more books, and this way, I’m accomplishing two things at once: figuring out whether I want to keep objects in my home (or at least giving me an idea what the object consists of) and making a habit of reading regularly.

This will be my goal for September, a personal goal, not a work goal for BE Budget Explorers (exciting things are coming in that arena, and I can’t wait to share more details).

I’ll post my mini-reviews once a week, all in a single post each week, so as to not bombard followers with emails.