Thoughts From Pruning My Book List
I trimmed my to-read list the day after my second vaccine shot. I was mentally empty and exhausted, but it seemed like a simple housekeeping task. Remove the books that no longer look appealing. Add the new books I’ve been bookmarking on my phone. Decide on the next buddy reads with my cousin. Cancel holds I have no intention of getting to in the near future.
I have a tab on my TBR spreadsheet called “Changed My Mind.” Instead of deleting, I move books onto that list. It’s an interest graveyard; the corpses of things that once upon a time piqued my interest.
Maybe it was the fact that I’m running on empty, but the task made me feel weepy. Life is full of too many interesting books, too many interesting places, and too many interesting people, and I will never get to all the things I want to read, or places I want to go, or enough moments with all the people I want to spend time with because that is the way reality works. No surprises there, but seeing it all listed out in a spreadsheet made me feel profoundly sad.
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I’m feeling my mortality today as well (just finished Olive Again). Hope there are surprise joys ahead of us anyway <3.
Hmmm – I usually look at it like “Life is too short to waste my time on things that are not grabbing my attention. I can move on without remorse and find so many more interesting things.” While I might be tired and sad, it’s not about books – those continue to be my escape from everything disappointing in the world.
My to-read list on Goodreads is loooooong – most of the things on it are things I will never bother with. They sounded interesting at the time, but I’ve changed, or the information around them has changed, or whatever. I don’t clean it up much, though. I probably should, but it’s still easier than browsing at the library (because my library’s selection is abysmal, but the library system is vast, so I’ve had to make adjustments on how to find books to read).
I do have a list of books I tried to read and couldn’t finish, though. Not sure why I keep that list.
My “want to read” list is long (currently 400+ books) and gets longer all the time as I hear about new books I’d like to read. Like you, I occasionally purge a few titles from this list that no longer spark my interest; I wish I’d thought of keeping a list of these titles!
My MIL — who is voracious reader like me — says that retirement is a big help in working one’s way through the TBR list. We shall see. 🙂
The hardest books for me to read over the past 14 months or so since the pandemic started are non-fiction. I generally like to read at least one non-fiction book a month, but I have found that I have difficulty these days reading anything dense in style or heavy in content.
But! It is possible to see the phenomenon you describe as a positive — to remember/believe that the fact that there are more things I want to do than time to do them is better than being able to get everything I enjoy doing, done, and have no more new (or worth re-experiencing) fun things to do. No?
I feel you. Due to over-enthusiastic use of Goodreads, my to-read list is longer than my “read” list. I loved adding books that sounded appealing, but I’ve added another lifetime of books! That’s depressing, especially as I’m always adding more. However, I can’t cull them – what if I cull the book that might be my greatest of all time? The FOMO is strong in me!
Like Mali, my “want to read” list on Goodreads is longer than my “Read” list (currently 326 to 276) (and the number of unread books on my bookshelves probably outnumbers the ones I’ve actually read). I rarely cull my “want to read” list. (I relate to Mali’s FOMO too, lol.) Realistically, I know I will never read all the books I’d like to read. But it’s sure fun trying, isn’t it?