It’s been just over three years since I last showed up in this space. I thought about showing up here last month, when the fifth anniversary of my first ovarian tumor removal surgery rolled around, but the emotions and thoughts from that week or two of anniversaries felt heavy and personal this time around, and not the first thing I wanted to use as a foray back into occasional longer form writing.
But the “Read My Shelves Project” feels like a good way to dip my toes back into writing that’s longer than an Instagram caption.
The “Read My Shelves Project” came about because I’m trying to find ways to tighten my budget, while I’m in a space of transition and needing to do some financial rebuilding. The truth of things is that the last seven years or so were a big hit financially – I had several extended leaves of absence from work to deal with either my mental health or with my tumors and the fallout from that journey, and when I did return to work, I worked less, to help manage my ongoing mental and physical health. While I was fortunate to have partially paid short term disability, those leaves in combination with bills from going back to school for my master’s degree in counseling psychology, and a lifetime of struggling with finances a bit, have left me needing to make some changes financially, just as I’m about to start transitioning career paths from nursing to counselling full-time.
All that to say that in the last few weeks I’ve found myself looking for creative ways to cut my spending, or save a few dollars, and one way I settled on is tackling the project of reading the books I’d already purchased. I knew I had a lot of books in the genres that I love to read the most, but I don’t think I had a grasp on just how many I’d purchased until I started looking for ways to gamify reading the books I already own instead of buying new books.
I settled on the following – I would gift wrap all of the unread books from certain categories (fiction, romance, memoir and poetry), keeping track on a spreadsheet of the title and genre. I wrapped each of the three categories in different types of wrapping paper, and numbered each package. If I’d bought a series of books, I wrapped the series together in one package, so I could read them all at once. Each package was numbered so that if I need a specific book that I’ve already bought for a book club or some other reason, I could locate the right package.
Y’all, I ended up with 107 packages of unread books, for a total of 112 books!
The next step is to motivate me to read them. I found a reading tracker online that I could print out, and decided that I’d give myself a mini reward for every four books I complete, and give myself the privilege of shopping for a new book with every 12 books I read. The 107 packages does not include previously purchased audiobooks or books on my kobo or kindle, or any personal development books, but I will count any book purchased prior to June 7, 2026, towards my challenge, and towards my reward system.
Also key for me was not feeling too restricted, so I made a list of my favorite authors and named them my auto-buy authors. If those authors put out a new book that seems interesting to me over the course of the challenge, I can buy the book, but other than books for professional development, or books by those authors, the goal is to not buy books.
I’ve been listening to an audiobook (Louise Penny and Melissa Fung’s “The Last Mandarin”) this week, which will count towards the challenge, but tonight I decided it was time to unwrap my first package, and tomorrow I’ll dive into the book.
The first paper book for this challenge will be “The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy” by Brigitte Knightley! I’m excited to dive in!
I make no promises that every book or package in the challenge will show up here, but I like the idea of blogging a bit more regularly again, or at least instagramming the challenge regularly. If you want to find me on Instagram, you can find me here.
Lisa From Canada 