Not My Cup of Tea

I am on a mission to shrink my ridiculously long to-read shelf on Goodreads, and I'm doing that by reading the first page of as many books as possible to decide whether or not I want to continue.  Yep, you heard right: the first page; not the first chapter.  Oh yes, I am that strict.  I usually know right off the bat if I'm gonna like a book, and I've removed quite a few so far.  

For instance, I just removed all of Rainbow Rowell's books.  I've heard so much about her through booktube over the last year+, so I added her books.  I finally went on Amazon to use the 'Look Inside' feature and ended up deleting all of them.  Go ahead and hate me. :)

I have to admit, it's kind of freeing to clean up the clutter of all these books I've blindly added simply because they've been mentioned a lot or because I took a quick glance at the synopsis without actually sampling the book.

I'm sure most people are aware of these, but a couple ways you can sample several pages (even possibly the whole first chapter) of pretty much any book you're interested in reading is by...

-using Amazon's 'Look Inside' feature (my preferred method).

-downloading a free sample on Kindle or Overdrive.

The only downside is that if there's a lot of extra fluff at the beginning, such as forwards, prefaces, introductions, etc., sometimes the free sample runs out before you get to the actual prologue or first chapter.  This is especially true for classics.