I made a good faith effort. I did! I didn’t get but 30 min­utes to read Tues­day because I was under the weather among other things. I know, excuses, excuses. I plan to still do my review of my regency romance but it just won’t be today (duck­ing for cover).

Where does the time go? We only have two months left for this year’s chal­lenge! For those who are won­der­ing if I shall con­tinue this chal­lenge next year — the answer is yes, I will. There just won’t be any mon­e­tary incen­tive because I be broke. The rest of this post dis­solves into a long rant about my buy­ing habits so I am let­ting you know before you hit the ‘more’ link that the rest of this post is a rant that may or may not make any sense at all.

It begs the ques­tion though as to why we buy so many damn books. And then we don’t read them. It seems crazy when you think about it. I wish I had the dis­ci­pline to read all my new books when I first get them and not set them aside. What I need to do is not buy any­more books until I fin­ish read­ing the new books that I already own. Yeah, right. That’ll never hap­pen. Good idea though.

Another thing that I need to do is not buy so many new books if I am not ready to read them. Oth­er­wise, they get put on the book­shelf, night­stand, up in my closet, etc and so forth. What I need to try really hard to do is stick to my lists of favorites and there aren’t very many on it so scratch that idea. It would also be help­ful if I stop vis­it­ing reader blogs-just kidding-as you all have saved me money and unfor­tu­nately, you’re also help­ing me spend my money too. I need to get that er under con­trol, for real.

I need to uti­lize my local library more because most books I buy are impul­sive buys and more than a few were utter dis­ap­point­ments (and no, don’t ask me which ones).

Have you ever thought of how much your TBR moun­tain is worth? Have you kept the receipts? I don’t want to know because the num­ber would be astro­nom­i­cal (I’ve always wanted to use that word in a sen­tence — astro­nom­i­cal). I’d prob­a­bly faint because not only do I have a TBR pile of dead tree books but I also have a vir­tual library. At Fic­tion­wise, I have over 300 ebooks and no I haven’t read them all.

Any­way, this impul­sively turned into a long rant about my book buy­ing habits. On a more seri­ous note, I will be curb­ing my spend­ing on ebooks and dead tree books. While my TBR pile pro­vides me with com­fort for that rainy day in the future, I also need the space that they occupy.

Over­all, I plan to seri­ously trim down my TBR books and hey, we can do it together, or not. We bought these books and hell, they weren’t cheap. My goal for 2009 is to stick to my lists, try out new authors from the library and decrease my time on the Inter­net (hee). Just let me enjoy the fan­tasy, ok?

/end rant

Please visit the other TBR par­tic­i­pants and enjoy. I would like to thank each one of you for post­ing your reviews on monthly basis. With that said, be good, be bad and be safe as Maili use to say.