A different kind of book bingo for the holidays: read the books you already have. (Weird, I know.)

Bingo runs from November 10, 2022 through January 1, 2023. The goal is to read what you already own as of Nov. 10.

First square: Count Your Collection

Count up all your unread books! Ebooks, physical books and audiobooks across all your rooms and apps. You don’t have to share your number, but it’ll make us all feel better if you do.

For my sanity, I only counted physical books. Why? Because I own a ridiculous number of books.

That would be 4982 kindle books, and 5908 ebooks in my Calibre database.

Is this an unreasonable number of books to have? Possibly. Probably. But I do, truly, read a lot.

That’s 3456 books I’ve read since 2003, however, 37% of those are rereads. Which is, you know, why I buy books. Because I love to reread.

So, I only counted physical books I own but have not read.

Fiction: 2
Romance: 3
Photography: 4
Art: 4
Health: 4
Food: 5
Folklore: 5
Biography: 11
General Science: 12
History: 14
Nature: 16
Religion: 21
Mysteries: 22
Comics: 48
SFF: 111

That’s still 282 unread paper books, and I did not look at cookbooks, because what counts as “read” for a cookbook? Trying one recipe? Half the recipes? So, cookbooks were skipped. (How many cookbooks do I have? An entire bookcase of them.)

Of those 282 unread books, 48 of them are highly likely to be read. Because I prefer reading comics and cookbooks in paper format. The rest were mostly bought prior to switching to an ereader as my primary form of book consumption.

But at least I’m now mostly hoarding electrons rather than paper?

So that’s square one, done!

And I went ahead and made a working list of books that match some of the other categories. (Because of course I did.)

Published in 2022: These are only ebooks. Because I rarely buy paper books.

I own 126 books published in 2022. Of those about 97 are unread. And of those 126, at least 31 were free books / stories. 17 of those 2022 published books are towards the top of my TBR.

I have 15 books that are part of a series at the top of my TBR.

There are four books by debut authors a the top of my TBR and all were published in the past year.

And there are six books towards the top of my TBR that were purchased for the cover.

And the book I’m currently reading fits five of those categories. :D

Anyone else playing?

Charts from Alfa eBooks Manager
Calibre e-book Manager