Guest Post! Peekaboo's Corner: Reading Anxiety

It's time for another guest post from our lovely friend Peekaboo. Enjoy! :)

Hi-ho, Peekabo here, for another edition of Peekabo's Corner. I saved you a seat by the fire. Grab your yummy beverage of choice, and let’s get chatting.

As a librarian and a book lover, I spend not only a lot of my personal time around books, but a lot of professional time as well. Is it as awesome as it sounds? Absolutely. I love my job. Wouldn’t trade it for the world. One perk is I get the downlow on all the new books that are being published often six months before they come out. The downside to that though, is I am constantly bombared with amazing, awesome new books I want to read, and there are only 24 hours in a day. (And no, I don’t get to read on the job. Sadly.)

Did you know that over a million new books get published each year now? That’s A LOT OF BOOKS, GUYS. My TBR pile on GoodReads is nearly 3,000, and that’s only because I’ve been doing heavy weeding. I will never be able to read all the books on that list, and the list grows every day. And that makes me anxious. (Also disclaimer: I have anxiety, like, as a disorder, so that probably doesn’t help.)

I order in books to read all the time from the library, and they get returned unread, because I can’t read them all. Sometimes when I finish a book, I sort of panic because I have so many good romances/apocalypse fiction/weather related books to read, it’s overwhelming, and that’s just if you count my go-to genre favorites.

To combat reading anxiety, I’ve started to do a few things.

1. Weed my GoodReads list. I’ve had this thing going for nearly a decade now, and my reading tastes have shifted since I started adding books. Also, do I need every book that Nora Roberts ever wrote on there? Probably not. I know I want to read them eventually.
2. Don’t feel like just because a book is popular, or everyone is reading it that I need to read it. I probably won’t read most of the unreliable narrator thrillers because frankly they too are anxiety inducing, and I don’t need that in my life.
3. Enjoy reading. Don’t worry so much about trying to reach book count goals, or finish series, or do anything more than simply enjoy the book.
4. I should probably order less library books. I’ve got 30 checked out right now, and a list of about 100 waiting in the wings, and I simply don’t have the time to read that many. But I don’t know if this goal is going to happen.

What about you, gentle reader? Do you suffer from reading anxiety at times? And if so, what do you do to combat it?

WOW! Thanks Peekaboo! What a great topic and what amazing insight! I've also been weeding my Goodreads list, and I can see there are a LOT of instances where I read one great space opera (for example) and then went and added EVERY SPACE OPERA EVER to me to read list. LOL. I think your point #3 is the most important to always remember: ENJOY READING. This is something I find myself losing sight of sometimes, especially trying to keep up with ARCs and reviews for this blog... Hmm.