Normally if I’m going to talk about books, I’d save it for Fridays for the Geekness posts. But since today is December 1 and it falls on a Monday, there’s a reason why I’m writing about books today.

2014 is almost up. My reading goal for this year is to read 225 books. I have currently finished 200 books. I have 31 days left to read 25 more books. This shouldn’t be a problem if all goes well.

Now then, why am I talking about this on a Monday instead of a Friday? Because I have one more reading goal for 2014. To read as many of the library books I have currently checked out before I get new ones.

I was inspired by this post on BookRiot, One Man’s Diary of a Month-Long Library Closure. In it, the author’s library was closed for a month for renovations and he prepped in advance by checking out as many things as possible to get him through the month. He thought he had gotten WAY more than he would be able to finish. He ended up finishing everything a week before the month was up and in such realized how important libraries were.

That post made me want to challenge myself to do the same thing by getting a huge number of books beforehand and prepare myself for a month without checking out new books.

This is actually harder than it seems. See I work IN a library. Plus I have library cards to three other libraries. I currently don’t have anything from one library system but between the other three systems I have 44 books checked out. This also doesn’t include all the music CDs, DVDs, and audio books I have checked out as well. My problem is that I keep checking out new books before I read the old ones. And since I work in a library, this doesn’t help at all when I keep seeing things I want to read on the shelves or being returned as I work.

Therefore I made a challenge for myself. From December 1 to December 31, I will read books that are from my current library TBR pile and NOT check out any new library books. The only exceptions are if I placed the book on hold BEFORE December 1 and I am allowed to put books on hold ONLY if they are new books to be ordered and not currently in the library system.

This challenge should then fulfill two purposes: 1) I’ll meet my 225 book goal for the year and 2) I should whittle down my library TBR pile and stop stockpiling books I should be reading.

I know to a lot of you this is slightly crazy and yeah it probably is. Still, making challenges and goals for myself is how I seem to work the best.