On average, I read about ninety books a year. I pick them a bit randomly though, grabbing new releases from favorite authors and then anything else that catches my eye.

While I sometimes find new things to read by wandering the bookstore, it’s more common for me to hear about books through blogs, newsletters, or social media. These can be really great tools, but I’ve started to think about how relying on the same handful of sources has limited the types of things I hear about.

After looking at my book lists from the past few years, I mostly read genre novels by straight, white American authors. I tend to read more books by women than men, partly because I like female protagonists and fewer men write those.

So for 2018, I’m going to try to diversify my reading. I’m going to read more books by minority and LGBT authors, more books by authors who aren’t from the US or UK, and more nonfiction. I’ll also be looking for a few more novels outside my regular set of genres. My goal is to have these kinds of choices make up at least forty percent of my yearly total.

I feel like there are a lot of really interesting stories out there I’m just not being exposed to. And while the same can probably be said for any avid reader, I want to do my best to work on some of those blind spots.

Between last September and December, I went on a book diet. Anything I’d preordered before then was still fair game, but other than that, I tried not to buy any books. No popping in to my local shop for that new thing I’d just heard about. No long, slow used bookstore hauls. It’s been a pretty dramatic change in my behavior.

I did end up getting one small-press novella (that has since sold out) and a cheap used copy of something from of an author I’m collecting. But overall, I stuck with it surprisingly well.

The idea behind the book diet was to give myself time to work through my existing to-read list, but once I stopped buying books, I realized I was grabbing more random picks than usual from the library. So while I did get around to some of my backlog,  I also learned that I seem to have some need for novelty when it comes to book selections.

A visit to the library is easier on my poor, straining shelf space than hitting up the bookstore, so from that perspective, the book diet was a success. But I still need to work on prioritizing some of the books I already have over the ones that I don’t.

I’ve always been that reader who can’t pass a used bookstore without going in, and I’ve had to set a firm one-bag limit during my county’s yearly library sale. But when I reorganized a few shelves late last August, I finally realized just how many unread novels I had lying around.

Some of them I recognized right away. There was a short stack of vintage fantasy I picked up at the thrift store down the street and a couple of larger piles of adventure hardbacks from estate sales. I found a book that I borrowed a few months before, two dirt-cheap ebay purchases, and a handful of wild looking picks from this $1 book warehouse in the area.

But there were other books that I’d completely forgotten about. Why did I have two copies of Joseph Conrad’s Victory? And why had I ever thought I’d read those sleazy-looking spy novels? Yes, the lead character is apparently a “Killmaster,” which is hilarious, but skimming the first few pages makes it obvious that those books are never going to be my thing.

It was definitely time for another book diet. I stopped buying books in September, and the plan is to keep that up through December. In the meantime, I’m working on my to-read piles and grabbing new releases from the library. I didn’t cancel anything I cared enough about to preorder, and I might bend the rules if I hear about some really limited edition that’s sure to sell out before the new year. But other than that, I’m not buying books.

Thanks to some strange law of the universe that makes every one of my library holds come in at once, I haven’t gotten through as much of my book stash as I planned to. But now that I know exactly how many unread books I have lying around, it should be easier to resist some of my more questionable book-buying impulses. Maybe next year I’ll just skip the library sale.