My To-Be-Read shelf used to be overflowing. Books packed in tightly, others stored up above them, still more face-out tucked in front, and some rested on bedside table or desk, lacking the space to join their brethren. Some had just arrived, others had been there for a decade or more. All clamoured for my attention.
Now only two books remain:
I’ve written in an earlier post about how this mighty work was done, vanquishing each beloved foe 50 pages at a time.
Two things I wanted to talk about today: first, is it good or bad to empty this shelf, and second, what will I fill the gaps with? Oh, and then comes the most obvious punchline ever…
Question: To Empty, or not to Empty?
You know those books that have sat on your TBR shelf forever. There’s always something more exciting to read, or something newer. And yet, those older books glare at you whenever you opt for the glitzier model. After a while, you notice that there’s a tribe of them sitting there, all looking very disappointed with you and your pitiful choice of reading material. What are you going to do?
First, to paraphrase Jesus, the books are made for you, not you for the books. If you don’t want one of them, take it off the shelf and give it away to a community book appeal, a little library or an aunt you don’t see very often.
Does that feel better, to have it gone? I hope so. Why burden yourself with something you don’t want when reading should remain a pleasure?
And yet, it often transpires that there really was a good reason for the book to have made it onto the shelf in the first place. Perhaps there was a recommendation, or a good review. And, if nothing else, at least it gave you a choice – this book, or that one?
And that’s the potential drawback to clearing a TBR shelf: the fewer books there are on it, the less choice you have, and the more likely it is that you’re going to have to pick one you’ve rejected multiple times in the past. So, is it best to always have 10-12 books there, giving you a fine choice available whenever it’s time to start something new?
Yeah, perhaps. But I was desperate to clear the shelf, partly because some books had been there so long. And I realised that if I did clear it, the choice of what would next move onto it was an exciting one.
Answer: To Empty!
So, I made a plan. I gathered the books on the shelf in groups of four, and decided to read all those four before adding anything else. And then the next set of four, and so on and so on. At 50 pages a day, most books take about a week to read, so each set of four took about a month. And month by month, the shelf started to clear, until it looked like the photo above.
Throughout this time, I planned what would populate the shelf once it was fully clear. I scanned the bookcases around the house, and found a surprisingly large number of books I’d never read. Six on that shelf, four on that one, an incredible ten on another. Just wait, I told myself, just get through these last two books, and you can start on all these other ones: novels by Kate Atkinson, Amor Towles, Robert Harris and Janet Frame; biographies of Arthur Ransome and Charlotte Bronte, and many more. All I had to do to reach the happiness that would come with gathering up these books and putting them onto my TBR shelf was to finish these two remaining books. I was so close now…
I took one of the books you can see in that photo above – Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question. It was an interesting read, with some facets that reminded me of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, but not as good as J, a previous book I’d read by Jacobson. I decided it wasn’t a keeper, but its 50 pages a day went by smoothly.
Now there was just one book remaining! One lonely little book.
The obvious punchline happened. I was within a day of finishing The Finkler Question and removing the solitary book left on the shelf – Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, for those of you who didn’t zoom in on the photo – when a local school had a book sale. I couldn’t resist. Last time I went to this, I told myself, I only grabbed a couple of books. It won’t slow me down much if the same thing happens again.
I bought twelve. The TBR shelf looks so much happier!
And so was I. Interesting. The clearance of the TBR shelf can wait for another day…
