On Clearing Out Your TBR List

Photo credit: Au Kirk on Flickr

I currently have 275 books on my TBR list. This is actually a pretty decent improvement—not too long ago I had over 320, and while scrolling through my list it occurred to me many of those books had been on that list for years.

For some of the books, that's okay—when I opened the summaries again I found I still wanted to read them, so I'll probably pick them up from my library sometime. Others, however, while looking at the summaries I realized I...probably wasn't going to get to them.

The truth was, my enormous TBR list was starting to feel a little overwhelming. So I went through my list and started removing books for these reasons:

• Reviews of poor representation. While this isn't an automatic no for me, especially if there's multiple groups represented and only one has an issue, if I was already iffy about the book, this made it easy for me to remove. At this point, I've decided I honestly just have too much to read to make time for super problematic books. If an issue is small, and I'm still really interested in the book, then I may very well read with the criticism in mind—but if it was a huge problem, or an issue I'm sick of seeing, then this made it easy for me to pull a book off my TBR.


• Sequels for books I haven't read yet. I suppose I originally added sequels for books I haven't read so I wouldn't forget about them—but it occurred to me that especially for a series longer than three books, it really didn't make sense for sequels to take up space on my shelf when I wasn't sure how much I'd like the previous books.


• Books I'd added years ago that I'm not enthusiastic about anymore. I mean, this happens—and I had to remind myself it's okay that my tastes have changed over the years.


• Books I own...but don't really want to read anymore. I'll admit I felt bad about this one—I have ARCs from a conference in 2014 that I'd 100% intended to read and review when I got them, but I ended up not getting around to. Some of them I still plan to read, but some of them I've lost interest, so I've decided to donate them so someone will still get some enjoyment out of them. 

Between the four I was able to trim down my TBR a pretty sizable amount. And while it likely won't last because I stumble on new books that sound amazing every day, it did provide a useful refresh to more accurately represent when I'm currently interested in reading. 

Have you cleared out your TBR list recently?

Twitter-sized bite:

Is your TBR list overwhelming? @Ava_Jae shares how she recently helped trim hers down. (Click to tweet)