My TBR Pile... and a Book Buying Ban?

Hello!

Long time, no speak. I have abandoned this blog for about a month now, which I feel super terrible about. It's not because I'm not reading, but because I have started... grad school. That's right I have just started my PhD (I do Molecular Microbiology) and it has been a little all consuming lately, so when I am free I have just been blobbing and reading or watching Gilmore Girls rather than writing.

But! I feel lately like I have really been missing this blog, so I want to start posting again, probably not every other day like I was managing before I started school, but I'm aiming for a few times a week. I wanted to start of with a little bit of a hot topic lately: Book buying bans. As you can guess, being a PhD student means having a PhD student stipend. I have enough money to live but I don't have nearly as much disposable income as I did when I was working full time. I went through my bank accounts and added together what I have been spending on average on books in the last few months and...yikes. I need to make a change.

First step was cataloging my books. I have been using Libib for a while now - It's really useful to reference at a bookstore, so I know not to buy duplicates of books I already own, but I went through and organised my books on the app based on their status...'to read' or 'to be read'.

So out of the 352 books I own personally.. I have 201 unread. 201!!! That number is completely insane. That means currently in my collection I have more books unread than books I have read. After seeing this crazy number I made a pact that I need to read my bookshelf. I have so many amazing books on my shelf (I thought they were interesting enough to buy at one point) and I need to get to them, I want to put myself on a book buying ban until I manage to get that number down to 150. I know that is still a lot of books to have but then I will probably start a semi-book ban afterwards and allow myself to buy a book for every one book I read.

I used to accumulate books at roughly the rate that I read books but after discovering book blogs and booktube, I was introduced to all these amazing books and suddenly the rate at which I was buying books far outweighed the rate at which I could read them. I want to go back to buying books and reading books being at an equal level, but first I want to get to some of those poor abandoned books on my shelf, which I am still super excited to read!

Another thing is when I was going through the app and sorting out which books I have read and which ones I have not is there are quite a few books on my shelfs (I would say 30-50) that I have no interest in reading, and I bought at either a library sale, or heavily discounted for around $2. I am moving in soon with my boyfriend and do need to prune my library a little and so I will post when I do a book declutter.