In Defense of Your Completely Out of Control TBR Pile
Somewhere in your home there is a stack of unread books, and you have excellent reasons for every single one of them. Or it’s digital, hundreds of titles deep, acquired one perfectly reasonable decision at a time. Every January an article somewhere tells you to feel bad about this. The article suggests a system. The article uses the word backlog, like your bookshelf is a support ticket queue.
I’m here today, as your friend, to tell you the article is wrong.
A to-be-read pile isn’t a debt. Nobody’s charging you interest, and there’s no exam at the end. It’s a pile of things you chose because they made you feel something in the moment you found them. It’s a record of what caught your attention at the time.
It’s also, and I can’t stress this enough, a pantry. You don’t stock a pantry because you plan to eat everything in it tonight. You stock it so you’re ready for whatever mood hits. The night you need a small-town second chance, you have one shelved. The night you need a morally gray man with a tragic backstory and questionable coping mechanisms, there he is, right where you left him, still gray. That’s not clutter. That’s preparedness.
And the pile does something quieter that nobody gives it credit for. Every book on it is a version of you that existed for a moment. The you who was going to get into fantasy. The you who bought three cowboy romances in one sitting for reasons lost to history. Deleting the pile means deleting her, and frankly she had range.
The one thing I’ll grant the productivity people: a pile you can’t see into is a pile you can’t use. That’s not a reading problem, it’s a finding problem, and finding problems are my entire love language. It’s why everything here is sorted by trope, subgenre and heat level, so the mood and the book can locate each other before the mood expires.
So no, I won’t be helping you shrink your TBR. I’m going to make it worse, on purpose, and I’m going to feel great about it. The pile isn’t a problem to solve. The pile is proof of an appetite, and an appetite is the whole reason this place exists.
Add one more. You know you want to.
Obsessively yours,
Sofia
