Great Restraint

My mother-in-law had my kids this afternoon, so I could go to some meetings at work... kid free, and her generous childcare worked into this evening too. I called Brad to say I had a bit of free time if he wanted to meet me somewhere for a quick dinner, just us. We planned to meet at 7:30 so I had about an hour to kill downtown. Of course I had errands to run, Target, grocery store, the mall, etc.. but somehow in this pocket of time I managed to squeeze in a little personal trip to the bookstore. But I am SUPER proud of myself because I did NOT buy anything. Nothing. Nada. Zip. But it felt super good to just browse around and look at covers and read the backs. Honestly, I felt like I just sat and read something, after all of my perusing. Loved it.





Actually, I have been kind of bookless for about 8 days. It feels strange. I have one book that I started the last week of June, and was super excited to read it, but now that I have it, my interest has fizzled a bit. I've read like 10 other books in between since I started it up, just distracted. I think I have put it down so many times I am only on like page 80. My problem is that I read a bunch of reviews about it right when I got it, and one of them was full of spoilers and was pretty critical of the book in general. The review wasn't labeled with any kind of "spoiler' warning, I just kind of stumbled into it. Of course, I could have done the right thing and just stopped reading the review, but I was totally sucked in. But now I think I am finding those criticisms that were mentioned as I am reading the book, now that they have been pointed out to me.





But this week.... I am determined to finish it... no matter what. And actually it's rated super good by everyone else, so I am sure I'll be kicking myself at the end wondering why I even delayed.





Oh, but back to my magnificent book-buying restraint tonight. I have this "To Be Read" list of books on goodreads.com where I keep track of what I want to read, etc (obviously... thus the name of the list). But one of my other friends posted on her blog last week sometime about how she was trying not to add to her list or purchased books for like 30 days because her list was growing. I had already been thinking this same thing when I read her blog. Though I have not always been totally diligent about following her lead. My TBR list is currently at, I'm embarrassed to say, 201 books! Crazy huh, sounds daunting. Though really, if I read say 50 more books in the next 6 months, that takes a big chunk out of the number. And that would only be if I don't add anything new to the list in that time. But I too, have been trying to NOT add to my list or the number of books stacked on my shelf in our basement to read. I have NOT been successful every time I am out, and the Kindle makes things way too easy to download and difficult to resist (I mean one click, and poof... book downloaded, credit card charged).

But tonight, my friends, it was one small step for Corie. I won the battle against book-buying! Until next time anyway...Yeah Me!