Peccavi.
December 29. I almost made it through the month. But I read a review in my alumni magazine and I had a coupon and....
I knew I shouldn't. I could offer up a few semi-excuses, but that doesn't alter the reality of far too many purchased-but-unread books this year. In expiation, I'll try to justify it after the fact by making reading it a priority.
I do think that's it for the year, so I'll do my year-end wrap-up.
The very bad: I bought a boatload of books; my TBR has grown and not by a trivial number; I almost never fought the good fight with myself and won - that is, my reaction to temptation was invariably, "Why not?"
The pretty good at that: My numbers are way down compared to the prior few years, both in number of books bought and expenditure. While I didn't resist temptation at all well, I was tempted by far less - that is, I seem to have raised the bar quite a bit.
So, this is obviously still a process. I need to apply yet more discrimination, as I could probably cut from a quarter to a third of my purchases from the part year and feel the better for it.
I haven't quite formulated goals for 2017; I think I'll take it a month at a time and resolve not to buy anything in January, with exceptions for anything that would be read immediately or a 90% Kobo coupon (a girl's not made of stone, after all -and I think those will be rarer than hen's teeth going forward anyway). As a salutary lesson, I'm going to try to get through a reasonable number of my 2016 purchases, but not to the extent it impinges on my 2017 goals or my general enjoyment - more just to make the point that I already own a sufficiency of quite readable books!
My bottom bottom line is that I'm quite comfortable with how much I spent in 2016 and spending that amount on fewer but pricier books would feel like success to me.
Here's to an abstemious 2017 for all!