So I talked a little about this idea a few weeks ago: the dread read rating. If you’re familiar with Netgalley and the approval rating, this is similar to that idea. If every time you bought a new book you had to justify, ‘hey this is my read rating, dear book, please come home with me’. So if you had a read rating what would it be?
How To Do It
What you do is count all your books and how many you’ve read. This can be anything you want. Your read rating, say that five times fast, of a genre, or your childhood books. I did not include any of my literary theory books because there’s no way I’ll read all of them. Then divide the amount of books read, by the total and TA DA!
Why?
So at first I was so against the idea of a read rating. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more sense it makes. Don’t get me wrong. At the beginning I didn’t want to do it out of fear. I knew it’d be bad. But this is my effort to be more conscious about 1) buying less books and 2) actually reading the books I have. Books are not just gorgeous to look at, but to also read – that is their primary purpose. I don’t want to guilt anyone into doing this. But I can only speak for myself and say that it’s been a surprisingly uplifting process. I don’t see my ‘rating’ as something negative, but a spring board. It gave me an excuse to look at all these lovely books I haven’t read, all these friends I haven’t made yet.
Mine
So what is mine? Mine is 38%. This isn’t as bad as I was thinking, but it isn’t as good either. My goal was 40% so this is close, but I secretly thought mine would be over that.
Discussion
What is your read rating? What do you think it might be?
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I am not home right now but I would like to count my books and get my read rating too. Secretly, I am thinking my rating will be better than yours (haha) but I am almost sure it won’t be. I’ve bought a lot of books in the last year or so that I haven’t even cracked the spines yet.
I bet it will be 😉 You are such a champion! Also mine is pretty low – so easy to beat!!
Oh man, I am really afraid to look at mine. Do you count both your physical books and your ebooks? I tend to buy more ebooks then physical due to space and also having three littles. I actually need to rearrange my books so this might actually be a post I do later on in August.
Just physical, if I did ebooks, my read rating would be so hard to calculate and go down to like 1%…
Wow! I think my score would be a bit lower, haha. I am very picky about buying books…. I don’t buy many and I’ve usually already read them if I do buy them. Maybe mine would be 15%? (But I did just unload a bunch of books I’d had for years and hadn’t read at the book exchange, haha). I will have to count and actually find out.
It’s phenomenal that you’re picky about buying book! I wish I was more…but I’ve been trying to get better! Once you find out, be sure to let me know!
My read rating would be absolutely horrible, but in my defense, I try to get rid of a lot of the books I’ve read. But, yeah … still, it would be horrible.
I have beee slowly trying to improve, but it’s a real struggle