How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the TBR Pile

I subscribed to Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter just in time.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t previously aware of Burkeman—I loved his Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, which I’ve written about in this column before—but in the way of the internet, I didn’t know he had a newsletter. (Who can keep track?) Upon discovering it, I signed up, and the first thing to land in my inbox contained this extremely-pertinent-to-my-life string of words:

“I think you should treat your ‘to-read’ pile not as something you have to get through, but as something you get to pick from.”

Did the same bells just ring in your brain?

I’m sure there are plenty of people who already have this mindset, and who look askance at those of us who are out here bemoaning the state of our TBRs, be they piles or shelves or entire bookcases or, heck, entire rooms. (I’m not that bad. Yet.) How can you complain about such bounty? I imagine them saying. What’s wrong with you?

What’s wrong with me is a long list, much of which I shan’t get into here. But this problem is hardly mine alone. You can’t venture into a bookish online space without encountering the problem of the TBR—which I have had to accept is, at least for me, a little bit of the problem of mortality, in general. I’m an anxious person. I’m anxious about time. I’m trying not to be.

But still, I exist on the internet, which is a slurry of enthusiasm, opinions, and curiosities that is hard to ignore, even if you want to. Every single day I hear about another book I want to read: My currently open tabs include pages for Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History and Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh, neither of which are out until January. (Will I keep those tabs open for seven months? Uh, I hope not.) My reading spreadsheet has a whole tab for books I want to read someday, some of which have been on there so long that I no longer remember why I added them in the first place. (Keeping notes about why you add a book to such a list is something I highly recommend.)

I don’t believe reading is or should be a competition, but at the same time, I look at my TBR and despair: Why haven’t I read How Long ’til Black Future Month yet? Why is Plain Bad Heroines still just sitting there? What about that book I bought in Australia in 2014, or the copy of Iain M. Banks’ The State of the Art that I ordered from the UK because I couldn’t find one here? Do you want to know how many books on this shelf were purchased when I worked at a bookstore, which I haven’t done since 2015? I sure don’t. But I remember every time I look at them.

What Burkeman means, if he will forgive me for the paraphrase, is that this is not a helpful way to look at it. It is not a to-do list. It is not a mountain with a summit that can be reached by human minds or bodies. The giant TBR pile is not a bug; it is a feature. (If you have moved semi-recently, as I have, you may have a harder time with this concept. I understand.) He calls it a problem of “Too Many Needles,” a phrase he borrows from Nicholas Carr, who wrote:

When we complain about information overload, what we’re usually complaining about is ambient overload. This is an altogether different beast. Ambient overload doesn’t involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles.

A haystack-sized pile of needles. A bookcase-sized pile of options. A thing that can’t be optimized or productivity-hacked because (a) there’s truly never enough time and (b) it’s not a to-do list or a series of tasks and (c) we’re talking about experiencing art, not some kind of bookish hustle culture, god forbid, please forgive me for even putting those words in that order.

Burkeman’s answer is to treat your TBR mountain “like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it).” Being a former hippie child from the Pacific Northwest, I especially like the imagery here: A bucket is something you use to catch leaks or bail out a boat, neither of which is a particularly enjoyable experience. A river is something you gaze at, float on, appreciate; it’s something natural and wild, not plastic and tamed.

And at the best of times—when I’m not overwhelmed by the bigger problems of the world, worrying about the smoke my friends are breathing or the viruses people are still transmitting or the rising sea levels or student loans or just the general destructive trend of the world of late, full stop—when I look at the books I have yet to read, I do see a river, one absolutely full of stories that are going to be their own magic, their own journey, when I get to them. I don’t have to read the next shiny bright popular thing immediately. Neither do you. I don’t have to keep up on series or predict the future or know everything about an author before I dive into their full backlist. I have to do what I always do: try to read widely, diversely, fervently; try to read the things that will fill the well from which I write. Or rather, to keep water in that well, which also can never be full, and never be finished.

The title of this piece is purposely optimistic. I have not yet learned to stop worrying. I am learning, though. Slowly, belatedly, but better late than never. All these books I have piled up before me are a bounty, not a task. All the books in the library, all the books I could read, will read, might read: the same.

The river doesn’t even notice how I look at it. It just keeps flowing. Or sitting and gathering dust, if we set aside the metaphor. But that’s okay, too. Touching the books is, after all, part of the process.