My 2024 TBR Challenge is a four-point plan to focus my reading on the (many, many) books that I own and to avoid buying books that will sit on my shelves unread.
How’s it going?
On the upside, 15 of the 27 books I’ve read so far this year are from my TBR.
On the downside, I’ve added 34 books so far. That’s enough to make my TBR rise by the end of the year if things don’t change.
Here’s the status of each of my four goals:
- Read all books added to my library in 2024
- Year to date I’ve added 34 books (yes that’s about 1 book every 2 days),
- I’ve read 11 of the 34 books that I’ve added,
- I now have 23 new books on my TBR shelf.
- Read 90 books from my TBR pile that were added in 2023
- Year to date I’ve read 13 of the 90 books, which means I’m 2 books behind plan.
- Read 30 books selected from my 2012-2022 TBR shelf
- I’ve read 4 of the 30 which means I’m 1 book behind plan.
- Move some TBR books to the Unlikely To Read shelf
- Year to date I’ve selected 24 books which sounds good but I think that will be it for the year.
So, I’m not on plan but I’m not far off it either. To get back on plan, I need to read 124 books which would give me an annual total of 151 which is a few books less than I normally read and 19 below my target for 2024.
Two things are clear though:
- I’m still adding too many books.
- I already have some really good books on my shelves.
I read 12 books in February:
- Five counted towards my target of 90 unread books that I added in 2023, including two five-star reads ‘Holly‘ and ‘Four Seasons In Japan‘
- Two were from the 30 that I selected from my 2012-2021 TBR pile, including one five-star read ‘Under The Skin‘
- Five were books that I added this year, two of which I set aside ‘Almost Surely Dead‘ and ‘Holmes, Margaret & Poe‘
I added 19 books in February, a month with only 29 days in it. That’s seven more books than I read in total in February. Five of them were free. Four of them continued series that I’m already reading. 14 of them remain unread. This is obviously why I have a problem with my TBR pile.
I moved 10 books from my TBR shelf to a shelf called Unlikely To Read. This helped to slow the growth of my TBR pile but it’s really a measure of waste rather than a sign of progress.
Mike Finn's Fiction 
I think you’re doing great! And your blog is truly by far my favorite reading-related one. I have discovered many new favorites via your blog.
I don’t have quite such lofty “tbr” goals– also I have the advantage that about 50% of my “tbr” are just tagged on my public library app, although I do have about 20 physical books waiting their turn & plan to purchase a couple of e-books in Spanish for practice. But as my daughters recently pointed out, “Mama goes through books like [new grandchild] goes through diapers.”
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My “slow down boom purchasing” plan for the year crashed and burned in Jan. I think I might have added almost 40 books! Though to be fair, some of those were orders from Dec that arrived in Jan. Feb, I managed to turn that around to 2. Hopefully March will be a good month for you on that score. Or that if you pick up “too many” again, that at least they are all highly enjoyable.
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