...more than I can finish before the end of the year. This is what my pile looked like a couple of months ago. While it is appreciably smaller now, I don't think I'm going to manage to finish them all in the last six weeks of the year. Can you believe that's all that's left? This seems like a manageable stack, but I failed to share all the other books that I've started in the interim (meaning I'm basically back to where I began with this little end of the year project).
I've already set aside two of the short story collections that I had wanted to read (one went back to the library and the other will wait until next year--that's the nice thing about story collections--you can pick them up without missing out on anything). With everything else I'm reading I think I may only finish three or perhaps four of these, so now it is a matter of which ones to concentrate on. I'm sure I'll finish Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, as I am past the halfway mark. I hope to finish this WWII story collection. Three are review copies (The Empress of Weehawken, Emily Post, and The Seamstress), which I feel like I really should finish before the end of the year. One was for a reading challenge (which I don't expect to finish), and the other was simply a book I've long wanted to read.
I really did want to start the new year out with a nice, small stack of books, so a few of these will have to be returned to the TBR pile and I'll hopefully get back to them later. It's not that I don't want to read any of these, but more a matter of my mood has changed since I picked a few of them up and I feel like reading something else. What do you do when this happens? Just stick it out anyway and read the book until you finish? Or do you think nothing of setting it aside until later? I guess I'm somewhere in the middle. I mostly want to finish them, but then I am easily tempted by something else....