quinta-feira, 17 de março de 2016

This is why staying out of the bookish community is making my reading better

Boy, that is a big tittle but I couldn't think of anything else so it's gonna be that. So, as I said on my TBRs posts on the last few months I've been feeling a lot of anxiety towards my reading, some of this anxiety is due to:
1. the fact that there is so much books and my reading can't compete with the velocity they are being published
 2. plus all the amazing blacklist books that I still want to get to
3. the fact that I'm not a speed reader, in the last two years I read 100+ books but this isn't something natural to me, since the end of last year I've feeling myself more and more slumpish and not wanting to read at all 
4. feeling anxious towards my reading because OH MY GOD WHAT TO READ NEXT between the options of ARCs, physical TBR and digital TBR, I know this seems so much like a first world problem and it's, I'm very grateful for the fact that I can afford to have new books to read but it doesn't dismiss what this does to me when I need to choose something new to read. 


So on February when I re-started studying I felt like reading was kind of getting in the way of that, because it was supposed to be my fun time and instead it was being a source of anxiety, I knew I needed to change that so here a few things that I've been doing on my daily life that helped me get past this anxiety, at least so far:

1. Limiting my Goodreads time: I used to enter GR every time I entered my browse, it was one of the first sites that I was gonna check out, definitely the first social media that I would, and that wasn't helping me because, of course, there is where people update about their readings and books, so which time I entered I would add a new book to my ever growing TBR, or I would see a new super exciting review about that ARC that wasn't even on my radar but now I really wanted to get to. So I cut it down, a lot, now there is days that I don't even enter there. 
2. This above serves also to Twitter, Book Blogs and any other bookish related website, like Netgalley and Edelweiss. 
3. That GR thing, you know the one where you put your goal number of books for the year always haunted me: even thought I'm always on track or even ahead of schedule since I started doing it I keep thinking that I need to read MORE, to cross that challenge out of my list, the crazy thing is that I know that even if I reach the originally goal sooner I will just update it and get the anxiety to reach it the as quickly as possible again. 
4. The currently reading shelf of GR also haunted me: I don't know if anyone feels like me about this, but for me leaving a book on the currently reading shelf for more than three days starts to giving me anxiety, I feel a pressure to finish it and this pressure takes a lot of the pleasure of reading, it also makes me want to read less. 
To make 3. and 4. better I did number 1. and also I don't update my currently reading shelf anymore, so if I take more than a week to read a book is fine, I know it may sound silly, like I totally could still pressure myself to finish it sooner but somewhat the fact that it isn't on the marked on my GR account I don't feel it anymore, this also helps number one because I don't enter GR unless I've finished to read a book and need to update that. 
5. to the anxious of what to read next I've doing TBRs and it's working, I may not follow it 100% because I'm still a mood reader but when I finish a book I already know what the next one can be, so far it has worked and made me read more from my physical TBR which is great.

So, if you ever felt anxious towards your reading tell me all about it on the comments bellow.

Um comentário :

  1. There are so many backlist books I want to read but so many shiny new, upcoming books I want to read too!! It's too hard to keep up. ARCs give me constant anxiety too because I feel the pressure to read them before they come out, but there's just no time!

    Rachel @ A Perfection Called Books

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