Tsundoku (Japanese: 積ん読) is acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them.
Source: Wikipedia
If you are like most others, you keep buying books indiscriminately, start reading some, and hardly finish any. A thought about your reading progress dreads you as it is just all over the place! The pace of reading varies from person to person and it also depends on how busy you are with the other commitments. A reading ritual (as mentioned in my earlier post) is essential. But what is also critical is that you must manage what you are reading. Let me show how:
1. Maintain a wish List – Let’s say someone recommends you a book. You neither need to buy it at that moment nor you need fear that you would forget about it. Simply add the book to your wish list. The best form of the wish list is what Amazon offers. You should choose to create a bunch of them, theme-wise, say, self-development, technical, management, etc. Do not forget to add comments, else we soon forget the reason why it landed up on our wish list. See the featured image for a snip of my wish list, just to make the idea clear.
2. Make sure that the book is suitable for you – Other than reading the book reviews and referring to GoodReads, you could simply get yourself a free sample of the e-book (most have e-book versions now), go through & decide if it suits you.  That’s one advantage of choosing to read e-books. Ok, so you like the book, but wait! you are not going to buy it yet.
3. Maintain a reading plan – Keep an up-to-date list of all the books that you own and maintain a pecking order of reading. Once you read a book, mark the month/year of reading in the list itself and continue with reading the next. As for me, I make a mind map of books read as it also allows me to group them across various themes. This makes a nice journal for you to reflect on how much and what you are reading year on year!
4. Buy books – As you are about to finish reading books from your reading plan, look through your wish list and choose a book or two as per your priority of reading and buy.
The time that you get for reading books is already scarce and so precious. You should be choosy in picking up the books that you read during that time. An organized approach will help you to achieve that. It will also help you to develop a habit of finishing the books. Happy Reading!