Lovely Little Shelf

So last month, I was proud of my TBR pile. I read a good chunk of books in December despite the holidays and ended up with a shelf looking like this:

All contained to one shelf, which is great. I really felt like I started the year in a pretty good place… the problem? I was in a horrible book rut. Nearly all of the books I had were heavy non-fiction and literary fiction. And I’m not one to pull the pregnancy card, but for some reason in early pregnancy, reading becomes very hard for me. When I was early-pregnant with Izey, I had to start reading graphic novels. Seriously. Check my archives. December-January 2009. Graphic novels and chic lit and stuff. I don’t know if all of my brain cells have to focus on baby-making or if my mind is in other places or… I really don’t know, but books that I would normally enjoy were just falling flat and literally nothing on my TBR shelf looked readable.

So here’s what I did:

Yup. That’s right. I kept four books, one of them (Great Gatsby) that I have read before and have on my TBR shelf so I remember to read it again before the movie and another, Bonhoeffer, which I only kept because someone loaned me and keeps trying to engage in conversation about.

Here is the pile that I made to donate to the library:

Can I possibly tell you how good it felt not to have those books that I have no intention of reading off of my shelf? It is like they were mocking me and now they are just gone. Sheeeew. Feels so good.

Funny side story: I was sitting in front of my little shelf sorting these books into different piles and Izey watched me for a few minutes, went over to my big shelves and started making piles of his own. He was even flipping through the pages of each book like I was. It was the cutest thing ever.

The library a few towns over that has a book sale every first Saturday was, of course, having their monthly sale, so I took my pile of books there with the intention of re-stocking. They always have such good books, and here is what I came back with:

One of those (Thirteen Reasons Why) I have already read but had gotten from the library. I loved it and wanted to have it around to re-read. The rest are total unknowns to me. They are all novels with pretty basic story lines and I think that they will be a lot better for me in the next few months.

So! Yay for impulsive decisions! Have you ever read any of the books that I ended up with? Have you ever decided to ditch that many books (17!!) at one time? Am I crazy?