Do You Deep Freeze Your Books?

Do You Deep Freeze Your Books?

Do you remember in Season Three of Friends, when Rachel discovered Joey’s copy of The Shining in the freezer?

Joey put his books in the freezer because he found them too scary to read.  I always smile because he ended up putting Little Women in the freezer, because he could tell that Beth was going to die and couldn’t handle it.

There is another way that you can deep-freeze your books. In this case, you do not literally put your books in the freezer.

Deep freezing your books is something you can do for those books which are on your keeper shelf, that you keep reading over and over.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I read favourite books so often that I can recite lines word for word.

I feel a sense of disappointment when I reach that stage, because I can’t enjoy the story anymore.  It doesn’t feel fresh.

Deep freezing a book involves putting it away for a predetermined period of time.  The amount of time is up to you.  You may have to experiment a bit.

The ideal length of time is one that “freezes” the book.  In other words, it comes out of the freezer and you can read it almost as if it was a brand-new book.

This works especially well if you can stop yourself from reading the book over and over before you put it in the deep-freeze.

Letting time pass before you read them again lets you forget a lot of the phrases and words in the book.  Often, you can also forget what comes next in the story — if you can leave the book alone long enough!

It requires a little bit of discipline, but if you have a very large stack of keeper books, then you can cycle them in and out of the deep-freeze, and get to enjoy them all over again.

How do you deep-freeze?

  1. If you read e-books, you can delete the book off your reading device. This is assuming, of course, that your e-books are stored on a hard drive somewhere.If you use the Kindle, then the book is most likely on your Amazon bookshelf.  When you delete it off your device, it stays on the shelf.  After the book has frozen long enough, you can go back to your Amazon shelf, and instruct Amazon to download the book to your Kindle again.Most of the other readers have a similar setup.If the book is one that you sideload, then you can keep it hidden away in a subdirectory on your hard drive until you’re ready to unfreeze it again.Whatever you do, make sure you have a backup copy of the book somewhere safe.  Then delete it off your device so you don’t see it, and you’re not reminded to open the book and start reading it again.
  2. Set a reminder for yourself to reload the book once the set amount of time has passed. You can try for three months or six months or even a year, or even longer if you think that will help!  It’s entirely up to you.If you use some sort of task manager, like ToDoist or Outlook, you can put a reminder on there.  Or you can add a note to your calendar.
  3. If you read print books, or your keeper is a print book, then it is even easier to put it in the deep-freeze. While I do not suggest that you put it in the actual freezer, you can tuck the book away in the basement, under your bed, or somewhere else where you don’t look very often.  If the environment you’re storing it in is chancy, make sure you store the book in plastic, or put it in a resealable bag.  Then it will be protected while it’s freezing.
  4. Just as for e-books, set up a reminder for yourself to pop-up once the freezing time has passed, telling yourself to go get the book out of the freezer, then enjoy it once more.

Once the book has been successfully frozen, then unfrozen and enjoyed, you may consider refreezing again.  Then you’re stretching out readings, and getting full enjoyment from each.

Plus you always have surprise reading treats popping up on a regular basis.

In between reading unfrozen favourites, you can be finding new-to-you authors, and new favourite reads.

Bon appétit!

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