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It's Booktober! Tame Your TBR Tiger

It’s a big month for books. I love Booktober!

I’m not sure it’s a thing; I just made it up. Previously I have done book reviews. This year, I’m tackling the dreaded TBR (to be read) pile. Specifically, how to tackle and tame the out of control wild beast that is your wild book list.

Amongst readers, there is an existential dread of the TBR (to be read) pile. So many books, so little time. Depending on how many books you read per year, you’re facing a mountain whose summit you will never reach. So, get real with your TBR.

  1. Do the numbers. If you read twelve books per year (one per month), you are forty, and you expect to live to eighty, that’s forty good years of reading left. That’s 40 x 12 = 480 books left to read in your lifetime. Even if you increase your reading rate, you’ve got to triage the wazoo out of your reading options.

  2. Decide your purpose for reading. Yes, reading can have a purpose! It might be to research a topic for work, or to expand your leadership skills, or to explore a historical period that fascinates you, or for mental stimulation, or for pure escapism. You might have several reading objectives. Choose them. 

  3. Cull your TBR. Now you have criteria to help eliminate - yes eliminate - those books on your TBR. Start with the ‘shoulds’: ditch the books that are in your TBR because ‘aunt Susan gave it to me’, or ‘it will make me smarter’, or, ‘it was the hot read from 1992’, or whatever feels like an obligation, Life is too short. Cull those suckers. If they’re paperbacks, give them away. Your TBR should be filled with awesome books that make you tingle with excitement. 

  4. Get real and stretch. How much time and energy can you dedicate to reading? Ten minutes per evening? Half an hour at lunch? Can you stretch it a bit by being creative? How about trying audiobooks and listening at 1.5x speed? You’ll be amazed at how much you can get through this way.

  5. Get set for Booktober! Pick a book (or books according to your reading rate), and commit to enjoying those suckers this month.

I ran through this process for myself. I read 150 books per year, and I have 24 years left to 80 so I have 3900 books left to read. 

I currently have 46 paperbacks hidden in my office cupboard and on the dressing room table, plus 27 fiction ebooks, and 20 nonfiction ebooks for a total of 93 books in my immediate vicinity ready to go. I did not even look at my wish lists on Amazon and Goodreads. Later.

For Booktober, I know I can get through 12.5 books on average per month, so this is what is on my shelf: 

In Progress for my fun/distraction list:

  1. Two Spies In Caracas - Moises Naim

  2. Moscow Nights Return - Beth Macy

  3. Central Park West - James Comey

  4. Night Soldiers - Alan Furst

  5. The Spy and the Traitor - (Audiobook)

  6. Das Boot (audiobook)

Nonfiction - research for Power Games:

  1. Broken to Safe - Tackling toxic workplace cultures and burnout - Fay Calderone

  2. The Hollow Crown - Shakespeare on how leader rise, rule, and fall - Eliot Cohen

  3. Women and Power: A Manifesto - Mary Beard.

The other 3.5 spots I’ll leave open to allow for impulse.

Share what you’re reading on my newly minted Bookish Facebook page.

Happy reading!

P.S. Want more book recommendations and writing/reading insights?

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Zoë Routh is a leadership futurist, podcaster, and multiple award-winning author. She works with leaders and teams to explore what's coming and what it means for leadership of the future.

Zoë is an outdoor adventurist and enjoys telemark skiing, has run 6 marathons, is a one-time belly-dancer, has survived cancer, and loves hiking in the high country. She is married to a gorgeous Aussie and is a self-confessed dark chocolate addict.