I’ve been feeling a bit of overwhelm lately looking at my ridiculously long TBR list, which I keep adding books to faster than I am able to read them. This feeling of overwhelm, coupled with the fact that I am running out of space for all the physical books I have in my house, has driven me to make a few much-needed changes to the way I plan my reading.
First though, let me explain how I got here. Ever since I discovered Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) around 10 years ago, my reading life changed dramatically in that a huge focus of my reading every year has been on new releases. Sure, I read backlist books as well, but except for my two years in graduate school (which, given my major in English Literature, required that I read tons of not only backlist but also classics), the majority of my time was spent trying to get through an ARC of a new release before its publication date. At the same time, I also suffer from a serious case of BOOK FOMO where I will often go on book buying binges and before I know it, I will end up with a stack of books (both new releases and backlist titles) that I have every intention of getting to as soon as possible but inevitably set aside because of some other book I need to read (either for review or book club or both). The result is that, over the past decade, I’ve accumulated hundreds (okay, it’s probably more like thousands) of books on my TBR (and bookshelves) that I want to read but haven’t found time to get to.
So going back to the changes I mentioned earlier: in addition to incorporating audiobooks into my reading (which has helped me get through many of the nonfiction backlist titles in my collection), I’ve also been more intentional about requesting fewer ARCs, which gives me room to incorporate more books from my own shelves when planning my list of reads each month. Three months in, I am happy to report that this strategy seems to be working, as my reading log shows that I’ve read 10 backlist and 9 new releases so far this year, which is very close to the one for one ratio that I was hoping to achieve (though this will probably change when all the “big books” come out in the summer and fall, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there – for now, I will take every win I can get, LOL).
Just today, I finished another backlist title – one of David Sedaris’s (many) essay collections, Calypso, which I had gotten as one of the Book of the Month titles back in 2018. I’ve read individual essays/articles that Sedaris has written over the years in various publications, but this was my first time reading an entire collection of them in book form, which, I have to say, is an entirely different experience from reading them individually. While I enjoyed this collection quite a bit overall, I didn’t find it as funny as I anticipated it would be, especially given Sedaris’s trademark wry, cynical, and candidly irreverent sense of humor that is usually right up my alley. I’m thinking this could be because I listened to this one on audio – which of course meant that I was also doing other tasks at the same time – so it’s possible that I may have gotten distracted and missed some of the funnier bits. With that said, one of the particularly enjoyable aspects of the audio version is that a few of the essays were recordings from his live performances, which definitely enhanced the listening experience for those (and not surprisingly, I found those to be the funniest essays in the collection).
I actually have several of Sedaris’s essay collections on my shelf, which I intend to work my way through by interspersing them wherever I can (though I probably will need to do some research first to see whether I should pick up the audio or the print version). I’m also looking forward to his newest essay collection coming out in May – just in time for summer reading!
