This weeks’ Weekly Geeks topic is all about “the plan”:
Do you have a plan of what you’re going to read the rest of the year? Have you had a master plan all along? If so, have you stuck to it? What helps you to decide what you’re going to read next? Challenges? Book groups? Or do you have the luxury of closing your eyes and picking any book off your shelf?
I know some of you have spreadsheets and other devices to help you keep track of your books and challenges. (I even succumbed to using a spreadsheet this year after teasing my friends relentlessly about theirs.) If you have online spreadsheets, such as Google, can you give us a peek at them with a link or a screen shot?
Do I have a plan as to what I’m reading for the rest of the year? Definitely. Right now, I have this huge monster TBR stack that has been glaring at me for awhile now. I want it gone. Prior to this, I never really had a master plan. I joined a few challenges so I would have something to interest me if I ever hit a dry spot, but that hasn’t happened yet. I am so far behind on my challenges (even my New Author one), that I’m not even sure if I’m going to finish them. I’m not upset about that, but I have so many great novels sitting on my shelf that I want to get to them and I keep getting sidetracked with all the new shinies coming out. So I created the plan of reading only from that pile. I won’t be hitting the library or the bookstore anymore; okay, that’s not totally true since there are a couple of books coming out that I want to get, but no more random borrowing/buying.
I really don’t know how I’m going to determine what I’ll read next, but I do know that a selection of novels are going to be up next since they were sent for review and I promised to review them prior to their release date. There are not a lot of them and I still have time, but I don’t want to wait until the last minute. Once I finish the one I’m on and the library book, they will be next up. Picking which one is going to be the hard part.
I love lists and last year I started keeping track of all the books I want to read, have read and what challenges I’m in. I did it again this year because my TBR stack is just that big, but I love being able to go back and see what I read at the beginning of the year. It’s also amusing to see how many books I read a month. At the moment, my average is 11 books a month, but I’ve had a few slow ones (August) and a few huge ones (May). My list also gives me hope. By knowing what my average is, I’ve figured out that I should be able to put a huge dent into my TBR pile by the end of the year. The pile has around 50 books on it now (I’ve weeded some off of it to buy for my Kindle at a later date) and at 11 books a month, and 3.5 months to go, I should be able to get through 2/3 of the stack.
My reading plan (aka the TBR list) is always available for people to look at, so I won’t give you a screenshot, but if you do want to see it in all it’s glory, click here.
So what about everyone else? Do you have a reading plan or are you going to pants it for the rest of the year?
I only have a plan for about half of my reading time for the rest of the year. I plan on reading every book Harlequin releases from two of its lines (Presents and Desire) every month, and also plan on getting through about half of my physical TBR pile. My digital TBR pile scares me too much to plan for, so I figure I’ll just pants through it whenever the mood strikes me, and do the same with any new releases that look interesting. (Thanks for hosting your BBAW contest, btw, because it’s what helped me find this blog!)
I never plan my reading. It just happens!
Weekly Geeks: Planned reading and Spreadsheets