{"id":8393,"date":"2016-05-21T07:19:35","date_gmt":"2016-05-21T11:19:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/?p=8393"},"modified":"2016-05-19T15:27:30","modified_gmt":"2016-05-19T19:27:30","slug":"the-tbr-long-tail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/2016\/05\/21\/the-tbr-long-tail\/","title":{"rendered":"The TBR Long Tail"},"content":{"rendered":"

My “to be read<\/a>” (TBR) list is long. Too long. Over a thousand books long.<\/p>\n

Part of the problem is Goodreads<\/a>. I will hear about some book say on the radio, open up the app, find it and mark it TBR. Often enough, I will find that I already have.\u00c2\u00a0There are 207 TBR physical books I own<\/a> and\u00c2\u00a0156 TBR Kindle books<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That puts me almost\u00c2\u00a0in the realm of where the author of Coming to Terms With My Unread Pile<\/a> is. Enough are virtual I do not have the same problem. And I never have a fear of not having something to read.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I have several I am reading on at any given time, so finishing one means reading more on another(s) until I pick something else.<\/li>\n
  2. Given every year I have the goal of reading some specific, I separate out those books so I can make sure I pick up those when I need to start something new.<\/li>\n
  3. I buy books for cheap (used, sales), so I am not spending that much per book but still obviously a lot on them.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

    This section resonated:<\/p>\n

    For a while I made great progress [in reading through the books], cutting the pile down by a third. But eventually I once again started acquiring books faster than I could read them. Several factors contributed to this. Obviously I buy a lot of books but I get surprisingly number for free either as gifts or through library conferences and book festivals. However they were acquired, my unread pile has become a series of three piles.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Goodreads does point out a glaring issue. Some of them all have the date “January 10, 2008” which I am going to guess is when I imported my collection from LibraryThing into Goodreads. In eight years I have not read these seven books. The TBR counts by year:<\/p>\n