My first Thing was starting this blog. The next Things I tackle will be book related. Next up, I’ll be rereading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, which inspired the project. I love the books, but I can’t claim Super Fan status. I’ve read Hitchhiker’s and Restaurant at the End of the Universe twice, but I’ve only read the entire series through once — and I might not have finished the last one. I’ve enjoyed the BBC radio full cast productions and I really liked the movie version. It seemed fitting to reread the series as one of the Things. I’m about two-thirds through the first book already and I still love it. Douglas Adams was so funny, witty, and imaginative. I’m looking forward to tearing through the rest of the books over the next few weeks.

I am an unabashed book nerd. I love reading and I have had a huge collection of books since I was a kid. When I was 13, my birthday present was two bookcases, and I was thrilled. I still have one of them, along with many more that I’ve accumulated along the way. And I married a book nerd too  (The picture at right is from the table decorations at our wedding. Each table was named after a favorite author and featured pictures of us holding the books and making weird faces. Because we are cool like that.) so our book collection really is out of control now.

The next two Things I will be working on are: updating my Librarything list and reading books that I have owned for years and never read. For those who haven’t heard of it, Librarything is a website where you can catalog your books. It’s basically a less popular Goodreads, but Librarything came first and I signed up right away. I even paid a one-time fee to get the unlimited, lifetime catalog. Back in 2005, I enjoyed creating my catalog. You can search by ISBN and find the exact book cover that matches your editions. I created lots of tags to categorize things. But life happened and I stopped updating it somewhere along the way. My list is super outdated. I’ve moved several times, done quite a few Half-Price Book purges, merged with my husband’s library, and we’ve added probably more books than we’ve purged. I’ve been itching to update my Librarything for a while now. I know it’s silly and inconsequential. I don’t use the social features of the site at all. It’s totally for my own enjoyment. Getting it all up-to-date and organized has been on that amorphous “to do when I have time” list of things that I never seem to get to so I decided it was a perfect Thing for my project. It definitely reflects my authentic self — bookish, disorganizedly organized. And it will make it easier to do the Read or Rid Thing.

For a book nerd and reader, I’m also a horrible finisher. I buy books and get a few pages in but never finish them. I have so many books that I have owned for years and never read all the way through. So in the interest of decrapifying and not owning things just to own them (a key way I numb myself from what’s going on in the world, another Brené Brown concept), I have decided to make sure I’ve read all the books I’m keeping in my library and if I’m not going to read it, it’s gotta go. It will be a little tricky as my books are merged with my husband’s but we actually have very little overlap. I’ve decided that I’ll take his input into consideration before I get rid of anything, because I don’t want to take away something he’s planning to read, but I’m going to be strict with him too. He’s much better about finishing books than I am but we both buy way more books than we read.

So for the next month, I will be reading the Hitchhiker’s series, cataloging my books in Librarything and tagging the ones that will be read or rid, and depending on how many books there are, I will create a game plan to make sure I read them all over the next seven years. Yes, I realize how that sounds. It really is going to be an embarrassing number of books that I will be tackling. It’s hard to admit what a hoarder I am in this respect. But onward and upward, vulnerability, etc.!