Welcome to From the Front porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South.

I am not angry. If anything, I am tired. Oyan Khan breathes weight, my sister the serial killer.

I am Annie Jones, owner of the bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia, and this week I am conducting our last round of literary therapy before 2022.

We'll be continuing this series in the new year, though. So if you have your own literary quandary, you'd like to bring to the metaphorical couch, just visit from thefront porchpodcast.com forward slash contact to leave me a voicemail. You could be featured in an upcoming literary therapy episode.

Without further ado, this week's conundrums.

Hey, Annie, this is Carrie, and I'm from Chicago. My literary conundrum is that I decided that for 2022, I'm going to pick books from my current library that I have not read to read in 2022.

I pick them out, and I have already added two to the list, and I feel like I have 30 days before 2022, and I'm going to be adding more and more and more along with when 2022 actually begins, and then new books come out or I hear books that you talk about from the front porch.

How do you do something like that? I know your job is different, but how do you recommend someone make a plan to just read books that they currently own? I don't know. Help. Thanks.

Hi, Carrie. I love this idea. I think it's such a great thought to go through your bookshelves to see what titles you haven't read, or maybe you've accidentally ignored, and to pull them off your shelves and read them in 2022.

I think this is a great goal, and it's one I've admired for a while back. It feels like many years ago. In 2010, I was following a woman on the internet named Jules Kindle.

She is a librarian out in California, and I loved her blog, Pancakes and French Fries, and I remember she did something she called the unread library where she did this exact kind of project, and she pulled all these books off her shelves, and that's kind of what she resolved herself to read that particular year.

I did some Googling for that original post. I also came across someone who is doing an unread shelf project. You may find her resources valuable as well. You can Google for the unread shelf or click the link in our show notes to go to that woman's project, but Carrie, I think this is a great idea.

However, I also understand your dilemma, which is what then are you to do with newly released books or books that you hear about on various podcasts or while visiting your local bookstore or even your local library? What are you supposed to do with all these books?

Here's my thing. I'd love to know if you were on my actual couch, I would love to know how many unread books there actually are. Is it 100 unread books? Is it 75? Is it 300? What is it so that I could get an understanding of, well, do you want to incorporate the occasional newly released book into your reading diet in 2022?

Like would that be okay? Or are you perfectly covered by how many unread books you have? So that would be kind of one question I'd use to evaluate the other question I would ask is why are you reading the books on your unread shelf? Is it to read the books that you own, which I think is an admirable goal? Is it to stop buying books, which I totally understand and can be another admirable goal? Like what is the point and purpose?

So if it's just to read the books that you haven't read that you own and that are in your home, great. But I think you can incorporate the occasional new title then because it wouldn't be diminishing your project to read the occasional new book.

If it's to prevent yourself from buying new books, then that's what the library is for, right? Or borrowing books from friends is for. So I don't think you have to necessarily abstain from newer works of literature if you don't want to. It totally depends on your actual purpose in reading these unread titles.

That being said, I don't have any of that information. So not having any of that information, my advice would be to keep a Google Doc, depending on your personality type, right?

A Google Doc, a note on your phone, a section in your journal, a section in your planner, keep a running list of books that you're hearing about in the world that you're interested in.

So I almost think of this. Look, I like to online shop, right? But what that occasionally means is I go online, like pretend to shop and then never check out. We all do that, right? That's really normal. This isn't my therapy session carry. This is your therapy session.

So we do that. I think I do that as a way to, yeah, I'm online shopping, but I'm not really buying anything. And sometimes it then gets it out of my system. And I don't actually need that item that I thought I needed.

But a few weeks later, if I stumble upon that tab in my iPhone or on my computer and I'm like, man, I really liked that shirt. And what do you know? Now it's on sale, or I really like that shirt. And you know what? I regret not buying it. So I'm going to buy it now.

...