In October, I decided to make myself a TBR jar with almost all the books on my TBR in the jar. At the time of writing this, I have 98 books on my main TBR shelves. This does not include the books I want to borrow from my family, my miscellaneous books and releases/books for review. Basically, I have a lot of books on my TBR and I want to start to tackle them. This post is about why I've decided to use one to help me do that.
How Did I Make My TBR Jar?
I started by writing out the almost 100 books I have on my main TBR on pieces of paper. I then cut them up and sorted them into three categories. These categories are green (books I want to read in the next month/couple of months), orange (books I want to read within the next six months) and red (books I'm not too fussy about when I get to them). Once I had them sorted into these three categories, I put them in my jar, ready to pick my November TBR.
So, Why Did I Make a TBR Jar?
The short answer was to help me get to the books I will still have on my TBR in a year or two's time. These are the ones I've had for the longest and are starting to gather dust. Most of these are classics or sci-fi/dystopian as they tend to be the books I gravitate towards the least. I want to make sure I do actually read them at some point. My plan is to pick one of each colour every month so then I can have a range of books to read.
So for November by green book was the Loki comic I got for my birthday, my orange book was The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper and my red book was The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnet. I also have some books I need to read for review and a couple of library books, which is why my use of the TBR jar was so small.
Without a TBR jar, I would probably continue to avoid reading certain books as I have others I'd rather read. This will help me to make sure I do read them and that I can expand my reading beyond my comfort zone of fantasy and historical fiction. There's also something fun about having no idea what books I'm going to read each month.
So this is a short post about why I'm going to be using a TBR jar to tackle my ever growing TBR pile. I'll probably do an update about it in the future.
Do you use a TBR jar??