The Discussion Post – Keeping Your TBR In Check

Evening! I hope everyone has had a lovely start to their weekend. My mum is visiting next week so I’ve spent the morning tidying the spare room ready for her, and the afternoon catching up on some TV.

Today I’m talking a little bit about TBRs, and how I manage mine. To be completely honest mine is still relatively new, I’ve only really been actively keeping it since I started blogging at the start of the year, so while it’s long I’m perfectly sure there are a whole heap of books that should be on there but aren’t because I’ve wanted to read them at some point over the years, not got around to it and then have forgotten. That’s not to say it’s short though…

So the primary place I keep my TBR is my Goodreads account – which you can find here – feel free to add me as a friend! I’ve been a member of Goodreads since 2009, but I’ve certainly not kept my shelf up to date since then, years definitely went by where I forgot it existed so it’s only this year I’ve been updating it regularly. My To Read shelf is pretty extensive – it’s currently 183 books. That number seems huge but it includes all sorts of things

• The books I actually own and want to read soon
• Kindle freebies I’ve downloaded and will get to at some point but there’s no rush
• Books that’s I’ve been bought, or picked up myself but not got round to reading yet (Waterstones buy one get one half price is largely to blame here)
• Books I’ve spotted reviewed and think sound great
• Books that aren’t released yet – things I’ve spotted, like the look of and don’t want to forget

Because of this I’ve recently added some other shelves to make it a little more manageable, there’s some crossover between some of the shelves but it doesn’t look quite so scary like this.

• Books I Own To Be Read Soon – As the name suggest this shelf contains the books I actually have copies of and want to read reasonably quickly. It’s currently sitting at 43 – which doesn’t seem quite so bad
• Books I Own And Should Really Read – These are books that are sitting on my shelves in the flat, or Kindle books I’ve actually paid for, that I do want to read but there’s not really any rush to get to them. It’s currently sitting at 12; it’s a bit of an artificially low number as it only includes the physical books in my flat and a huge number of them never moved with me to university, and most of the ones I did went home in dad’s car after graduation, while I stayed in Scotland, since I started renting my own place I’ve never bought them back with me, I don’t drive and it’s not overly practical to drag hundreds of books 500 miles on a train. Also if I’ve got more than one book in a series to read it only contains the earliest one I have to read. Key example of this is the Inspector Rebus series – I’ve read some of the more recent books but I have the first 10 in series sitting on my shelf to read, but only Knots & Crosses is on this Goodreads shelf.
• Kindle Freebies – These are the books I’ve downloaded for free. Some of them are by some quite well-known authors, others are less well known but sounded interesting so for free I figured why not give it a go. I’ll get to them at some point.
• My NetGalley TBR – NetGalley books I’ve been approved for and are currently sitting in my Kindle app. Shamefully this is currently sitting at 37 but includes books scheduled to be published right through to August.
• Potential NetGalley requests – Books that look interesting and are currently on NetGalley and I might request if I bring my NetGalley TBR under control and they’re still available
• Other ARCs TBR – These are the physical ARCs I’ve been sent – mainly after requesting on Bookbridgr. This is currently 7 so not too bad.
• To buy – These are books that have already been released that I want to grab a copy of. This shelf is a bit of a mixed bag, some are older books that I missed at the time and want to pick up, some are quite new releases and some are books I’ve actually already read via NetGalley but really enjoyed so want a physical copy to keep. There are other books that could probably be added to this list but these are the ones towards the top of my buying priority list. It’s currently sitting at 16.

I also have an excel spreadsheet to keep track of my reading in general for the year. It includes all the books on my TBR, plus captures the books I’ve read this year, including the format and number of pages, whether I’ve written the review for it and if the review has actually been posted online, it also captures which of the challenges I’m participating in they count towards.

How do you manage your TBR? I’m thinking of starting another shelf to use as a current month TBR – That way I can take at least one thing from each of my shelves and make sure I’m reading the books I own as well as the ones I’m requesting from NetGalley and Bookbridgr.