At the start of January, I finally accepted that I buy too many books. My TBR pile had 1,720 books in it and during 2023, I had added 130 books that I hadn’t read by the end of the year.

I put together a four point plan for getting on top of my TBR pile

1. Any book I add to my library in 2024 will be read in 2024.
2. During 2024, I will read or discard the 135 books I bought in 2023 but have not yet read.
3. I will read 30 books from my TBR pile, choosing 3 a year from 2012 to 2021.
4. I will reduce my TBR pile by identifying books to move from my ‘To Read’ shelf to an ‘Unlikely To Read’ shelf.

Now that January is over, I’ve reviewed my progress and, even though I’ve reduced my TBR pile from 1,720 to 1,695, I’ve accepted that my plan has to be a little more modest than I’d thought.

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I had fun with books in January. I read 15 books, 4 of which, A Morbid Taste For Bones, Moon Over Manifest, The Pride Of Chanur and The Lies You Wrote, were five-star reads.

I read 8 of the 135 unread books that I bought in 2023, two of which, The LIes You Wrote and The Pride Of Chanur, were five-star reads.

I read 2 books from the 30 that I selected from my 2012-2021 TBR pile. One. Moon Over Manifest, was a five-star read that I was glad finally to have gotten to and the other, The Man From Primrose Lane wasn’t for me so I set it aside.

The remaining five books that I read were bought in January. This leads me to talk about the 15 books that I added this month.

I added 15 books in January and only read five of them. That doesn’t sound like me getting my TBR pile under control, does it? So why did I let this happen?

Ellis Peters has to take part of the blame. I listened to the first Brother Cadfael book, narrated by Stephen Thorne, and then just had to binge-listen to the next two.

Amazon’s pricing policy also played its part: 6 of the 15 books that I added were provided by Amazon/Audible for free. What was I supposed to do when I saw that most of the Enola Holmes series was included in my membership? Of course, I downloaded them.

The remaining 6 books were continuations of series that I’m already following or recommendations that I couldn’t resist.

That I managed to reduce my TBR total in January is mostly attributable to my identification of 14 books to be excluded from my TBR shelf and moved to a shelf called Unlikely To Read.

I’ve selected books that I’ve lost the will to read, either because they are too long (IQ84 might be wonderful but I’m daunted by its 1337 pages) or they’re part of a series that I’ve abandoned or they were curiosities that it turned out I wasn’t curious enough to read.

I used to work with a technology firm that encouraged its development engineers to ‘Fail Early‘ because it was less expensive than failing late and left time to plan for success.

I’m declaring my plan for getting on top of my TBR to have failed early.

If I stick with the plan, I’d need to read 165 books in the next 11 months plus any other books that I add in 2024 meaning I’d have to read 180 – 200 books this year. To me, that would start to feel like work rather than pleasure, so I’m revising the plan.

My new plan is:

1. Any book I add to my library in 2024 will be read in 2024.
2. During 2024, I will read or discard at least 90 of the books I added in 2023 but have not yet read.
3. I will read 30 books from my TBR pile, choosing 3 a year from 2012 to 2021.
4. I will reduce my TBR pile by identifying books to move from my ‘To Read’ shelf to an ‘Unlikely To Read’ shelf.

The only change is that I’m accepting that I can probably only read 66% of the books that I added in 2023 but have not yet read.

I’ll still be taking down my TBR by 120 books plus whatever books I exclude from my TBR as ‘Unlikely To Read’.