The Care & Keeping of a TBR – Let’s Talk Bookish

Good afternoon friends, and welcome back to another discussion. As always, Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme, hosted by me & Dani @ Literary Lion, where we discuss certain topics, share our opinions, and spread the love by visiting each other’s posts.

Today’s topic is: The Care and Keeping of a TBR (suggested by Lydia @ Lydia Schoch)

Thank you to Lydia for suggesting this topic. Also, if you missed it, be sure to check out the topics for November that I published earlier today.

I don’t have much of a TBR beyond my want to read list in GR, but I have had monthly TBRs in the past. So I’m just going to talk about how I don’t organize my TBR and how I decide to add books.

Let’s get started!

If you don’t already know, TBR stands for to-be-read and we usually use this when we’re talking about books that we want to read or plan on reading soon.

The reason why I said “plan on reading soon” is because most of the time, adding books to my want-to-read shelf on GR doesn’t really mean that I plan on reading it soon. I’m just adding it because it’s interested me and I might read it in the far future (aka, almost never).

What makes me add a book to my TBR? I usually add books that I think are interesting, or have been recommended to me and I think it’ll be a great read. I don’t always add books that are recommended to me because the premise or genre isn’t something that I’m interested in. Other times, I do add it, but then never read it.

Sometimes, I also books that are super hyped just out of curiosity, and not because I really really want to read it.

Currently, I have 308 books on my want-to-read shelf, and 81 on my maybe-tbr shelf. Honestly, the only reason why I have a “maybe-tbr” shelf is because I’m lazy, and I don’t want to properly categorize the book that I’m adding right away, so I mark it as maybe-tbr and move on.

Creating the maybe-tbr shelf was part of my effort to clean up my want-to-read shelf, since I used to just add books without shelving them according to genre, diversity, themes, etc. and it just made everything so chaotic and hard to find.

So now I try to shelf the book according to genre, diversity, themes, etc. before I add it to my want-to-read, and if I’m too lazy to do that immediately, I mark it as maybe-tbr so that I can go back later and shelf it appropriately.

Has that ever happened? Of course not. I’m lazy! I have no idea why I thought I’d go back and clean it up. It’s now just a way for me to not shelf anything.

I have tried doing monthly TBRs in the past, and they really helped me figure out what I was going to read each month. Honestly, I read more when I had an idea of what I want to read than when I just pick up books on a whim.

But it is a little time consuming to look for books and then figure out if my library has it or not, then put it on hold, or look for another book to replace the one my library doesn’t have so I’ve stopped doing it. But I think that once I get my reading life back together, I might do it again since the monthly tbrs were so helpful the few times that I did try.

And that’s pretty much it when it comes to my TBR.

This Week’s Participants:

Siena @ Booksophobia | Jane @ Blogger Books | A Couple of B’s

Heran @ Be Frisky | Nicole @ Thoughts Stained With Ink | Dani @ Literary Lion

Jillian @ Jillian The Bookish Butterfly Blog | Rian @ Dogs and Books | Evelyn @ Evelyn Reads

Aayushi @ My Bookish Banter | Sammie @ The Bookwyrm’s Den

How big is your TBR? Do you keep it organized, and if so how? Do you just add books that sound remotely interesting, or do you have a stricter process when it comes to adding books? Have you done a monthly TBR before? How did that go? Share your thoughts in the comments below!