One of the things that I set up in my Leuchtturm1917 Bullet Journal is a list of the unread books on my Kindle. It’s supremely easy to buy books on a Kindle, as the whole system is set up a way to make book purchasing as fast and frictionless as possible.
This is a problem for me.
I love books, I adore reading, and I have pretty large group of friends that love reading too. This means that I’m inundated with great recommendations that run the gamut from light hearted fantasy and sci-fi to contemporary and classic literary fiction, with a whole host of fiction and non-fiction books in the middle (I don’t read horror and I don’t read romances and I rarely read poetry but that’s about the only limits I have in terms of my reading tastes). I get several such book recommendations a month, and with my initial impulse to rush out and buy them, and with the ease of purchasing books on a Kindle, things could get out of hand very quickly. This was one of the reasons why for years I was so resistant to buying a Kindle.
You see, it’s very easy to lose track of just how many unread books you have on your device. Even if you sort by unread books, you just don’t get a real feel for how many of them are actually waiting to be read. There’s no bookshelf groaning with the weight of unread books, and I was feeling the lack of that.
Enter my list of unread books on my Kindle:
It’s a simple numbered list of books that I haven’t read and are on my device. As I read a book, I cross it out. As I purchase more books I add them to the end of the list. As I’ve gotten into the habit of downloading samples, I’ve started to write them down too so they don’t get out of hand. It’s super simple, as bare-bones as it can be, and as practical as possible. The point is just to give my brain an idea of the scale of unread books on my device, and it works.
It works.
I’ve stopped compulsively buying books in the fear of “running out of something to read” or “forgetting what I was recommended”. Recommendations go into my GoodReads “Want to Read” list. And my brain can now see that there’s just no chance that I’ll run out of things to read any time soon. If I buy something I have to go over the list and convince myself that what I’m buying deserves precedence over the lovely books waiting patiently in line, some of them for years. I also photograph this list and keep it on my phone for reference, to prevent me from accidentally buying the same book in physical format (unless I purposefully intend to, which is rare).
What about the physical books stacked on shelves, some of them two books deep? I would love to have such a list for them as well, but that task is too daunting for me now. I remember where my books are visually, and moving them all just to catalogue them not only seems like an awful lot of backbreaking work, it will destroy my “memory catalogue of books”. So it seems that my physical books will remain uncatalogued for years to come.
Do you keep a list of all the books you own but haven’t read yet? Do you just keep a list of the books you intend to read next? Do you track your physical books in some way?
Writing at Large 
C Dyson
Great post!
As an avid reader I too have lists. I have a Filofax notebook cover which holds two notebooks and two pens together in a nice package (especially as I hacked it to add ribbon place markers and a bee charm). One slim notebook lists all the book recommendations I’ve had/seen in the paper and I cross them out when I get them from the library, bookshop, Kindle store etc. The other, thicker notebook is my “Year of Reading” book – I write up to a page on each book I’ve read so I can look back and see what I’ve read that year. The first notebook stays put and the second gets swopped out at the beginning of a new year (so now I have a lovely fresh one!). When I feel like it, I add the recent additions from the recommendations notebook plus any Kindle or Audible titles I’ve bought to my Excel spreadsheet and mark off those I’ve read/listened to so that I can sort them easily and play around with looking at how different authors are represented in my reading etc. It’s a bit redundant in that I could just have the spreadsheet but I enjoy using my stationery and love having a ‘reading pack’ ready to pick up to scribble in next to my current book and it’s a bit more portable than my laptop. It sometimes seems as if my recommendations/new purchases to read is the hare and my finished list is the tortoise but it does mean I’m unlikely to run out of ideas…!
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Sam Knutson
I keep a collection “Unread” on my Kindle and try to add to it right away when I buy and won’t immediately start reading. I do have a good store of books to read often buying the book that inspired a movie or TV show that looks really interesting. After only reading on Kindle (currently really an iPad mini with the Kindle app) for years I have also recently started reading paper books again regularly. This is partly due to chasing older space and aviation titles usually biography or memoir that are not available as e-books. I do believe the single best gift my parents ever gave me was to foster a love of reading. No other skill for work or just enjoyment has been as much of a blessing.
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writingatlarge
A love of reading is the best gift parents can give to their children.
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Daphna Kedmi
It’s very easy to have separate files (they refer to them as Collections on Kindle) and one of them is my TBR (you can name the collections, of course, and that is where I keep my list of unread Kindle books). I see no reason to copy out the list. Once I finish reading a Kindle book I erase it from my TBR and transfer it to the relevant Collection. Both my print books and my Kindle books are ordered by geography if they’re not specific, with additional shelves/collections for specific subjects such as Classics, Shakespeare, Holocaust, plays, philosophy, etc. I’m quite an order freak so for my print books I have a TBR shelf or shelves, depending on how many I have at a given time. I know where everything is and I know what I have on my digital and print TBR lists. Did I say order freak?😀
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writingatlarge
Wow you really invest in ordering your books. I copy the list out because seeing it on paper gives me a better idea of just how many unread books I have and prevents me from buying 4-5 books every single month.
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Alice
I keep a list like yours of books to review. Books I want are digital images on my phone. But listing all the books I read, have, or still need to read… impossible.
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louellem
I love your approach. My to-read list is very fragmented. I read from both my Kindle and the Libby app, plus my physical book stack, and I track things on Goodreads but am not totally consistent about it. I also find myself wanting to keep this list alongside ones for other media (movies, music, games, podcasts, etc.), and to make notes to remind myself why I chose each one.
I’ve been toying with Google Keep as a way to organize this info. But an analog approach like yours might suit me better. It seems less overwhelming – plus I love any excuse to use stationery, of course. 🙂
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rupertarzeian
This sounds like a good system and, crucially, it works for you.
I share your problem, (although it is not really a problem) of having lots of books that I have not yet read. I too love reading and have a lifelong love of physical books. Recently I heard about an app called Bookmory for android phones, to keep track of your reading. It is very quick and easy to enter the books for your To Be Read list: you simply scan the bar code of the book and the app instantly finds all the info- title, author, cover art and number of pages. If the book does not have a bar code, or the app gets any of the details wrong (eg the wrong cover design) you can correct this manually.
You end up with a display of book covers, like being in a shop and every book is one you want.
The app also allows you to log which book or books you are reading currently, and to record the time spent reading and page number reached each time. It works very well.
One of my aims this year was to spend less time playing with my phone and more time reading books. I aim to read for say 45 minutes before getting sidetracked with the phone. I know it is ironic that I am using the phone to log my reading, but fortunately the time spent reading, which the app measures with a timer, does not count as “screen time”.
I would recommend giving it a try!
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Laura @ Inky Imaginings
This is such a good idea! I probably have over a hundred unread books on my Kindle at this point (every time there’s a sale, I buy a few more!), and so no longer have any idea what I have or don’t have. I’ve even gone to buy the same ebook again because I forgot that I bought it already! I may have to try this, although at this point it would be quite a task to write them all down.
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writingatlarge
If you’re trying to get a handle on the list, I’d invest the time in listing the books in a notebook or a spreadsheet. It’s likely to prove itself useful, if only to prevent you from buying the same book more than once.
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Arturo Rubio
I keep an Excel spreadsheet that has two worksheets: one for books I own and will read eventually and another for books I would like to buy someday. Right now I have 67 books to read, the vast majority in my bookcases. I mark Kindle books in my spreadsheet so I don’t waste time looking for them in my bookcases when it’s their turn to be read.
I sort my book list starting with the ones with the lowest number of pages. This allows me to check off more books as read, which makes me feel like I’m really putting a dent on my To Read list. I filter the list so that it only shows me unread books.
Unfortunately, my method guarantees that it will take a very long time for some books to get their turn to be read, if ever, like “Aristotle: The Complete Works (2,926 pages).”
I tell myself that I will not buy any more books until I read every single book on this list, but there’s always some books coming in (book sales, second-hand books I find, etc.), so who knows when I’ll be able to go through the whole list.
And since I’m trying not to buy more books, my “Books to buy someday” list keeps on growing. Right now I’m at 111.
For me, it’s just easier to keep these lists in Excel format as opposed to writing down everything in a notebook.
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writingatlarge
Amazing – that’s a much more comprehensive and impressive system than what I’ve got going on.
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Kate
A really good, very simple idea. I use the Kindle app on my Android tablet and phone, so the Collections or whatever they were calling it, didn’t transfer across devices and now it seems to have vanished. I’m so tired of opening my Kindle library and being surprised by the ebooks I have and forgot about, especially since I try not to buy any more books til I cull the vast pile of unread books I already own.
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writingatlarge
It is really hard to keep track of things there, and boy do I get having to cull a vast pile of unread books 🙂
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