TBR Pile
Tell me the truth. Is mine the only TBR pile growing mold? Do you ever whittle yours down? Mine seems to have taken on the veneer of an artifact. When I choose the next book, it is seldom from this pile. The new man in town always looks better.
Does your suffer the same fate? Is it part of your decor by now. How long have you had the oldest book in your pile?
Ten years minimum.
23 comments:
I do whittle down the TBR stacks from time to time. I figure if the book has been there more than three years and I don't get an urge to read it when I pick it up, it's time to find a new home for it. Of course, usually I do get the urge to read it but have other books more pressing, and so it goes back into TBR limbo.
Sometimes I force myself to look away from the new books and take one out of TBR. Not often enough to make a dent.
There may be older books in my TBR, but the one that I know for sure exactly how long it's been there is John R. Maxim's MOSAIC. I bought it brand new, hardback, when it was published in 1999. I can't give it up. I WILL read it someday.
I've had THE LONG WEEKEND (about England between the wars) in my tbr pile for at least 20 years. I make periodic stabs at reading it and always get side-tracked. Right now, we're paying almost $100 a month for a storage unit, at least two-thirds of which is taken up with boxes of books--many of which are tbr. In the house I have several tbr piles, including several against the wall in the den. I say to my husband, "Better this than ax murders," to which he responds, "Only just."
I'm pretty good at knocking it down. Right now, I have about fifteen books and I'm reading five of them now.
I'm pretty organized about my TBR pile. (The technical term for "organized" is OCD.) I have a shelf that contains my books to be read, and they're read in the order in which I buy them, with two exceptions: gifts, and books for review. When the shelf is full, I take a hiatus from buying books.
It's overkill, but I found the growth of the pile was actually stressing me, making me feel as though I had too many things to do. Now, in the words of my Beloved Spouse, I feel as though I can "eat the elephant one bite at a time."
I sometimes think the books in my TBR pile are getting together and making little tbrs. It never gets any smaller, only growing larger, and I'm quite sure there are ten year old ones(since you set that as a benchmark) somewhere in there.
Naomi-ten years sounds sane. I still have books of poetry from when I wrote poetry I have never opened and that was the mid nineties.
Randy-that is so funny and I finally can give my husband a reason for its girth.
Deb-great idea. I wonder if he'll go for it. Of course, he gets to say all his books are for reference.
There are books in the stack I am dying to read, but I know they will be there and read ones from the library.
As I get older and the print seems smaller, I am less inclined to read some of them. Publishers should be aware of this. Your readers are getting older by the day.
Five books at once. I could barely do two.
Too late for me to do that, Dana.
With me, any book coming into the house is automatically a TBR book and goes to that area (once a stack, then a shelf, then a bookcase, now two bookcases and a box). Some things in the TBR have been there for four, five years, but I intend to get to them eventually
There are a lot of short story collections there, as I read a story now and then so it takes me a while to get through those, although several of them have now entered a new category, the "in progress" shelf. I guess there are about eight there now, maybe seven since I finished one last night.
Truth is I'm not making any progress because I've been buying faster than I read. THERE'S the real problem.
Obviously, I need to take a lesson from Dana, and take a hiatus from buying books. But then again, I didn't have nearly this volume coming in before I started reading all these blogs.....
Wow, Patti. That looks intimidating. I agree I tend to push the latest purchase to the top and several titles get the brush off yet again.
For a long time I was reading mostly library books, only reading my books on trips, etc.
I regard books as a buffer, anyway, so don't mind having a pile of things yet to read. After all, how do I know what I'll want to read next?
That said, I don't have a TBR pile as such. At the moment I actually have room on the shelves for all my books, so the unread ones are mostly in order, but pulled out enough that I can spot them. I do have a small shelf of recent acquisitions, things I'm more likely to read right away, along with the library book shelf.
Again, that said: some years ago in England I passed up a set of trade paperbacks of the 'official biography' of Winston Churchill, thinking I'd be able to get the 2-3 books I really wanted later on.
I never saw them again (and don't want to pay the exorbitant price for the hardback) and determined if I saw a book I really wanted I'd get it THEN and if it sat on the shelf for 10 years, that was OK too.
Jeff M.
2004 Bouchercon. I have at least three copies of Heart of the Hunter.
After that, I started putting them in the donation bin knowing I'd never get to most of them.
I'm afraid I'm hopeless with my TBR pile. My answer is, more than 10 years for sure, but I daren't think how much more.
This is not my photograph but it does about sum up the numbers, Eric.
You only regret the books you pass up. My husband passed up a book on monasteries once and has been looking for it ever since.
2004 is good, Jim.
I think some of mine are from the seventies, Martin.
Loads of short stories, Rick. I feel obliged to pick up any remaindered collections
When I started blogging 18 months ago, I didn´t even know one had to have a TBR. I have been busy hording books ever since, but still I only own c 70 books I have never read. Pathetic, I know, but ...
I am beginning to realize what you are talking about, however, because some of the first books I hoarded do not seem nearly as attractive as the new ones that arrive every month.
The new guy in town is always the cutest.
My TBR pile is actually three piles, but they are nicely organized in three high-rise stacks on the hardwood floor next to the piano. They don't quite reach the piano keys, but they're close. My wife forces me to keep them looking neat - if three jagged piles of books can look neat. Actually, i think they look beautiful. The towers are growing, too, since i buy books faster than i can read them. Re the "new guy" always looking the best, that doesn't apply to me. Next to reading and buying, my favorite thing is perusing the pile and choosing what next to read. And I agree with Richard, my book buying increased twofold when i started reading all the wonderful blogs available to us. So many books, so little time.
By new, I didn't mean new in date, but new to me. I have bookcases for all of them. But no room is without one-no wall, in fact.
I made a great purge of all kinds of stuff back in 2002-- books, records. video tapes-- so my pile has been manageable, until I started working at the library. I have made the commitment to myself, my local book shop and the industry to buy all the new Hard Case Crimes, The Richard Stark reprints and the Hunt for Adventure books, along with just about anything by a select number of authors.
One way that I have tackled the TPR pile is to make a point of reading one HCC each month and one book by a selected author for a year. Last year it was Donald Westlake, this year it's John D MacDonald. So far I have been able to keep up. One thing about working at a library, it I can check them out and take them back with great ease. Now if I could just get better about giving up on books that don't hook me in the first third, I think I'd get a lot more read.
I like to try and keep it manageable. I generally only have 15-20 books on the TRB max (though it did get up to about 40 books last year when I went on a buying spree - it's presently about 20 that I purchased, as opposed to being gifted). If I buy a book I intend to read it, and will generally do so within a couple of months (unless it turns out to be a stinker, in which case it's abandoned). There's nothing on the present pile older than about 6 months. For a very long time I operated a TBR of 4-6 books and would get skittish when it got down to the last 1 or 2 (which didn't take long given I read 2 to 3 books a week). I was regularly heading to the bookshop in a panic because I was halfway through the last book on the pile and I couldn't cope with the idea of not having another book to start when I'd finished that one. I'd generally buy then in sets of half a dozen. To be honest, I'd like to get back to 6-8 TBR; there's something nice about always being hungry to get new, quality stuff in for fear of being left short.
I've had some TBR books for quite some time but whenever I move, I make a serious attempt to whittle it down. If I've had a book for 4 years and have not read it, it's on the list to be donated. Too much to pack and since my moves have tended to be to smaller places, I have to make some serious decisions.
In the past year, I've made a serious effort to read books I have in my TBR by reading a TBR before a library or store-bought book. This is working well for me--I just recently read a book that was fantastic but had resided in the TBR pile for 3 years. But now it will be donated with me being able to tell a prospective owner what the book was about!
Sandi
In conclusion, I think it's a case of my eyes being bigger than my stomach. If I see a book, I know I should read, and it's discounted in some way, I pick it up. I saw all of James Sallis' stuff at a used bookstore last year and picked it up. I've read the most recent three but MOTh, HORNET, et al sit there with hundreds of companions.
I know I've owned books for 30+ years that I haven't read yet. The problem, as you astutely pointed out, Patti, is the NEW books that keep pouring in from AMAZON and various used book stores. I've tried, but there's no way to stop them!
At least I keep my pile (relatively) clean, even if it grows at an alarming rate.
When I moved residences in late November I had to get rid of the majority of my TBR pile because they couldn't come. The only books that stayed and came along with me were the signed hardcovers and the upcoming publishers' ARCs. Now that I've moved a second time and likely to stay at the new place at least a year, the TBR will begin to grow again.
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