Building a Better TBR List
By: Lloyd O.D.
Tags: Efficiency, Books, Reading, Productivity

I love books. They can allow to learn deeply about someone else’s life story, you can immerse yourself in a virtually endless amount of creative and intricate stories, and you can learn about just about anything in a more detailed manner than any other medium. Also, I hate books. A lot of them are filled with filler and way longer than they need to be, and more than anything, books you might want to read are released and discovered at a faster rate than you can read unless you took the time to learn speed reading.

Does this scenario sound familiar to you? You’re halfway through reading a book that just isn’t capturing your interest. So you go on about your day and update your Goodreads reading progress when you notice an article for the ten books you absolutely have to read this season. You read the article and you find four books that intrigue you enough to add to your TBR, deciding to get to once you get through the other fifty books that were already on our TBR. A few minutes later, you encounter a YouTube video about all the books a woman read this month, the books she plans to read next month and the books that she’s excited to come out in two months. Add another nine books to the TBR. This is the seemingly endless cycle of the TBR and when it can be a serious roadblock from reading the books you actually want to read.

The purpose of a TBR (or To Be Read) list is to keep track of book you find interesting and will get to eventually. But from my experience what actually happens is that list winds up growing exponentially at a higher rate than I can read books. It also doesn’t help that I am a slow reader. And then that book is pushed to the end of the queue because theoretically it just makes sense to do things that way. That first book you added to your TBR should be the first thing you read because it was the first thing you discovered. But I think that’s the wrong way to go about things.

The problem with this approach is that it assumes your interests are stagnant and that they won’t change as you go down your TBR list. In reality, humans are fickle. What is interesting to you on Monday might be boring by Friday, dropped and never to be looked at again. Instead of using your TBR as a hierarchy, use it as a simple collection of the books you genuinely want to read. And when it comes to the book you want to read next, follow your interests. If a book speaks to you read it immediately. You’ll be more motivated to read that book at a higher pace if you’re reading it at the peak of your interests instead of it waiting its turn and having it feel more like an obligation.

Also, if you insist on having a TBR list, remove anything that no longer pertains to your interests because like I said before, everyone’s interests are constantly evolving and your reading list should reflect that. Before you recoil at the idea of removing a book from your list for good, it’s worth mentioning that nothing is DNF’d forever. That would be ridiculous. Even if you read half a book and you put it down, its DNF status will only last as long as you permit it to. One day your interest may lead you to that book again, or you could get bored one day and decide to give that book a second chance and have your perspective changed entirely.

Back to the topic of reading based on obligation, something that deters me, and I’m willing to bet a lot of other people, the insistence on reading every book to completion, no matter how much you hate it or how much it bores the hell out of you. I think it has something to do with some kind of reading variation of FOMO. You tell yourself, “I can’t stop reading now. It might get really good in a few chapters!” when you should really be telling yourself, “I’ve read fifty pages of this and it’s boring as hell. I’ll read this one instead.” Going back to my previous point, when you following your interests, you are more motivated to read. And if that book bores you too, you can do it all over again if you want.

You might think this approach is a bit ridiculous because if you stopped reading a book because it bored you, you would never get any reading done. Hell, you might have stopped reading this post because you found it boring and I can’t fault you for that (Not that you can read this). The reasoning behind my approach is that the goal of reading is not to turn the final page so you can say you did and check another box on your Goodreads Reading Challenge. While that is a nice metric and an indicator for how much reading you do, it shouldn’t be your motivation to consume literature.

To me, the joy of reading comes from reading stuff that interests. A story with an interesting setting and characters. A nonfiction book about a skill you really want to learn. A poorly-written dumpster fire that you are just enamoured with in its badness, and you want to read it all to see how bad it gets. All of these are completely valid reasons for a book to capture your attention. The important thing is that that is the book that has captured your attention in that moment, and the worst thing you can do with that interest is put it on the back-burner because you moved it to the back of the proverbial line.

Nuke the damn line and open the floodgates.