An Inconvenient Truth: Reading ⭐

I've written many times of my love of reading, but there's also an intersection between that activity and what I assume is an ADHD-based need for completeness. Which, in this case, led to the stockpiling of paper-based books in my younger years to the stockpiling of digital content (and not just books) in more recent years. I am a collector, a hoarder, but also a completionist. I can't have most of the James Bond books in some physical or digital collection, I have to have all the James Bond books in that collection.

This is obviously a mental health issue, but it's one I can't solve for myself per se, and is instead something I can only try to improve. And rationalize: Where the bookcases full of paper books we shipped back and forth across the country were both heavy and kindling for some fire that fortunately never came, I might argue that a similarly-sized digital collection of e-books and audiobooks is at least efficient. It would fit easily on my smartphone or a Kindle, devices so small that we could just carry them everywhere, and do.

But this kind of rationalization is dangerous. That content costs a lot of money, even if I did buy a lot of it on sale or whatever. Related to that is reusability. Books--whether in paper, e-book, or audiobook form--and other reading content are a bit like movies and TV shows and not at all like music in that most people read whatever content one time and then never re-read it.

Here, I am a bit of an exception in that there are books that I've re-read (or, on audiobook, re-listened to), perhaps even many of them. But there are far more books I read once and will never read again, or read only partially or not at all. (I've had similar experiences with other content, of course. The most obvious being movies, some of which I keep buying, repeatedly, in multiple formats over time, but let's keep this to reading.)

When you're a digital hoarder, as I guess I am, you aren't thinking clearly when you buy a book in any form. I just love to read. So I see a book on sale and I buy it. I see a book that's not on sale, but it's by some author I love and/or is perhaps a new release, and I buy it. I put books (and other content) aside like a squirrel puts acorns aside for the winter, a you-never-know or just-in-case justification for a person, me, who never wants to be stuck anywhere without something to read. I mean, I used to read every inch of every side of a box of cereal each morning as a kid before I finally discovered newspapers. I really like to read.

But I also really need to rein this in.

In early May, I described my escalating monthly subscription service expenses and my desire to get out from under that in From the Editor’s Desk: Inconvenient ⭐️. And in June, I described the first major step in achieving that goal in An Inconvenient Truth: A Day of Reckoning, A Month of Savings ⭐. Among the savings, I canceled my Audible subscription after nearly 20 years because I have so much to...