Murder by Death

At the beginning of the year, in an effort to tackle my out of control TBR, I came up with a plan whereby, in any given month, I could only buy 1/2 the number of books I read the previous month.  With the exception of a library book-sale incident involving Agatha Christie, this plan has worked remarkably well.  My TBR numbers have gone continuously down without anybody cancelling my debit card.

Until today, when I went completely off the rails. BUT I did it with a plan.  A plan that will keep me on track with my TBR program.  I think.

As succinctly as possible: Australia is taxing all online purchases, no minimums, starting July 1st.  I'm not interested in debating the merits of this tax on an academic level (there aren't any); at a practical level though, it's going to be a cluster*ck.  The government expects international companies to collect the tax for them, register with the AU tax office voluntarily, and submit the tax.  Companies earning less than 75k AU don't have to do any of this.

The result is nobody knows which companies - small or large - are willing to continue doing business with the Australian market.  Add to this my conservative bent, coupled with my disgust over the ineptness of the implementation, and I just said 'screw it' and bought/pre-ordered every book on my list with a publication date between now and the end of 2018.  

30 books.  So far. There are still 12 days left in the month.  

I plan on making this work with my TBR project by subtracting my pre-ordered books for a given month from my book budget for that month.  So if I've pre-ordered 5 books released in August, my August book budget is immediately adjusted to be 5 less.  I could just not buy any books until I've read 60 off my TBR, but I need wiggle room. You know, for those books y'all review that I just have to have.

Still need the bookshelf fairy though...