So Many Books! or TBR Woes

Just having a little fun, I don’t really think my bookshelf is better than anyone else’s. 😉

I thought I would do something a little different for today’s post. It has to do with Goodreads and the ‘Want to Read shelf’. I have always found Goodreads a little cumbersome and can’t manipulate my lists the way I really want to. I keep hoping that they will keep improving it, but lately it seems a little stagnant in that way. I keep hearing about some new platforms but so far nothing I have come across is any better. But I digress.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that my Want to Read shelf had gone over 200 books. I know that isn’t much compared to some of you out there… but it was impossible for me to find books on the list that when I wanted something new to read. So I came up with a plan.

First I decided to go through all of the books and eliminate ones that I no longer wanted on the list. I had several criteria for this:

1. Books I no longer was interested in
2. Middle grade books
3. Sequels of books from series I haven’t started yet.
4. Books I own

Let’s look at all of those a bit closer.

The longest and hardest part of this was deciding which books I no longer wanted to read. I made decisions on these by first looking at the summary of the book. If it still peaked my interest, then I would look at the ratings summary. How many 4 and 5 star reviews did it get? Finally I looked at the reviews, but not the 5 or 4 star ones, but the 3 star ones. I always feel like these are the most honest or interesting ones. The 5 star ones only focus on what was great about the book, not necessarily the bad, where as the 3 stars tend to be more neutral.

I decided to take middle grade books off my list because I keep a separate list elsewhere for my work and most of these were on that list anyways.

The sequels I took off, because if I hadn’t even read the first book, how would I know I wanted to read the next book?

If I own the book, I know that I want to read it. I don’t need it on my GoodReads list to remind me of that fact.

So far this has been working pretty well for me, I’ve gone through about a third of the books and gotten rid of many of them. But I still have the problem that when I am looking for a book to read I have to scroll through way too many books.

My solution was to create some TBR shelves and divide up all of my Want to Read books onto them. I called these shelves TBR-fantasy or TBR- science fiction and then my favorite TBR-Dragons. This way the next time I am in the mood for a certain type of book I only have to look at a few books. Of course dividing them by genre can get tricky and I am sure there are some on the wrong shelf, but I think it is better than looking at a giant list.

I am super excited about about my new system. I already found a couple of books that I had totally forgotten about but really want to read. I even created a shelf I called next read for those.

How do you feel about GoodReads? Have you found anything better? Or a better way to organize your Want to Read list? Let me know in the comments.