Let’s be honest, I will never read m entire TBR. Ever. I am too old to get through as many books as I want to read in my lifetime, especially with so many amazing new books being published every year. But I do want to get through as many of them as I can, so let’s talk about how I am clearing my TBR.

Reading

The obvious way that I am working on clearing my TBR is reading, of course. But it’s a little more involved than that.

• Focus on audiobooks- I can only sight read for a short time each day due to vision issues, but I can get through a lot of audiobooks each month
• Utilize the library- between my 4 library cards, I have access to a larger selection of books from my list.
• Read multiples- I’ve never been good at just having one book on the go at a time. I’m generally working through multiple books, which keeps me from getting bogged down if I’m not connecting with something because I can just switch to something else. This helps me from getting stuck deciding what to read next as well.
• Utilize master TBRs- I have my complete TBR broken up into 3 separate TBRs- audio, Kindle & physical. I know which books are available in audio format and which books aren’t. I also know which books that I don’t own are available from the library. As I finish a book, I just move on to the next book on the list. (I do move some things around to accommodate challenges, as needed).

Culling

The next step is culling the length of my TBR list. And this is a little harder, because I still want to read pretty much all of the books on my list.

• Add fewer books- I tend to add any book that looks interesting, or has a pretty cover, or is by an author I’ve previously enjoyed, or is by an author everyone else seems to really love. I plan to be more particular about the books that I am adding to my TBR.
• Request less- I talked about this in my ARC strategy post, but I will be requesting fewer ARCs and accepting only those invitations for books I really want to read
• Remove “obsolete” titles- My official TBR goes back to when I joined Goodreads in 2011, so there are some books that no longer interest me, as some of my tastes have changed over the last 15 years. This mostly applies to nonfiction stuff, but there is some fiction as well.
• Remove unavailable titles- With my current situation, I obviously cannot buy books. Anything that I don’t already own and isn’t available at one of my libraries, then I need to remove it off my TBR.

How do you manage your TBR?