Saw this at Dragon & Zombies a little bit ago and decided I’d save it and do it later. Later is now Now.
Picture heavy and complicated. I had a lot of fun putting this together though, as organizing things brings joy to my heart.
How do you keep track of your TBR pile?
This is a complicated procedure, at least the setup. Once it’s setup, then it rolls along like a well oiled machine.
- Choose a book to put on my TBR
- Put said book into Calibre with the TBR tag and sort by “date added”
- Load 100’ish books onto my Kindle, sorted by Series
- Remove TBR tag from those books in Calibre.
- Repeat Steps 1 & 2
- When I finish a series on my Kindle, I remove said series from my Kindle
- Replace finished series with the next series that has the TBR tag from Calibre
- Keep my Kindle filled with 100-150 book so I’m not reading the same thing within weeks
- Keep my Calibre TBR library at 100-150. Ruthlessly not adding books does this just fine.
All picture should be clickable for more detail.
Is your TBR mostly print or ebook?
Ebook
How do you determine which book from your TBR to read next?
By whatever is next. My reading is like a grindstone. It goes slowly, but I crush that TBR into fine meal.
A book that’s been on your TBR the longest:
In Calibre, the Starfisher trilogy by Glen Cook has been on my TBR since August of 2016
A book that you recently added to your TBR:
Stinger by McCammon and Mr Mercedes by King. Both are Halloween’ish reads and the King book is in preparation for doing a buddy-read with BookCupidity.
A book that’s on your TBR strictly because of its beautiful cover:
Stranger of Tempest
With my avatar coming from the game Heretic/Hexxen, something like this is going to instantly appeal to me.
A book on your TBR that you never plan on actually reading:
I’m not one of “those” kind of people. I used to be though. But now, I only add book that I know I’ll read.
An unpublished book on your TBR that you’re excited for:
The Disappearance of Winter’s Daughter by Michael Sullivan.
The kickstarter for the hardcover should be starting up soon and I’ll be doing a post for that.
A book on your TBR that basically everyone has read except you:
Once again, I’m not one of “those” people. I only add a book if a reviewer I trust has reviewed it or if there are enough other reviews for me to figure out if it will push my button or not. The whole “popularity” reading thing is for a different generation than me.
A book on your TBR that everyone recommends to you:
Thankfully, almost all of you never recommend books to me. I’m thankful for that. I read your review and make up my own mind.
A book on your TBR that you’re just dying to read:
For these kind of book, I have a High Priority collection on my Kindle. I keep that Collection on the front page of my kindle and cycle through it whenever it gets to the bottom of the page. I also try to follow this same procedure for my manga reading.
The books in it right now are:
Sixth Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko [Currently Reading]
Dancer’s Lament by Ian Esslemont
The Punch Escrow by Tal Klein
The number of books on your TBR shelf:
130’ish on my Kindle
130 in Calibre
260’ish in Total
That does it! It’s about time I start using the Calibre properly.
Frigging good post for a lazy bastard like myself.
Post saved.
NB: I’m the sort of guy who dumps everything into my Kindle…3K books and counting…
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Yeah…. if you don’t care about organization, then dumping it all on the kindle is fine.
But most “serious” book readers have to have some kind of organizing thingy.
Thankfully, calibre is free and has the best support forum over at mobilereads.com where the mods can answer just about ANY question.
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You’re right.
Thank God I’m not a serious reader. I’m just an inconsequential dabbler when it comes to reading. So all is good. Every time I try to put a little bit of organisation into my TBR pile it starts looking like work, and say to myself: “Nah.”
But once in a while I read a post like yours and I wonder what it’d be like to have an organised Kindle…
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Hahahahahahaa!!!!
If it is work to you, then this kind of system will frustrate you to no end. Of course, once it is setup, then it is self-sustaining. It took me a couple of months to figure out what worked best. Experimented with X or Y number of series on the kindle and it took me quite some time to figure out the High Priority and Manga thing.
But it really works for me. but as you said on your blog, tastes and whatnot differ 😀
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Omg the way you set up your TBR is pretty cool :O ! With Calibre, is it only for ebooks ?
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Nope,not at all. It was “meant” for ebooks, but it can handle “empty” data for paper books. So you could add “Trang’s Next Big Read” as an empty entry, ie, no ebook file associated with the title.
I have a library in calibre that is just for my reviews. It has all the data from my reviews but no ebook format.
It takes a little bit of getting used to, but it sure works great.
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THAT’S GREAT!! Exactly what I need 😍 I look it up tonight when I’m home and get back to you if I have any questions!
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Always glad to help.
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Everything is so clean and structured. Makes me wonder if you’re not just an A.I. now… 😀
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Darn, you found me out. Now I’m going to have to send a super buff killer robot after you to preserve my secret 😀
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Time to make use of that in-case-of-nuke-shelter. 😀
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I have ‘calibre’ as well but never really used it that much. Maybe it’s time to look into it some more! I’d like to have all of my books better organized..
Stranger of tempest.. its on my high priority list, which means I will probably read it first next month 🙂
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I never used Calibre that way until I learned that Leafmarks was shutting down and that there were no real good booksites out there to store my data on. Once burned, and all that.
Looking forward to your review. I’ve seen 2-3 and they vary wildly 🙂
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wow! I’m impressed by your method. If I were not so lazy I’d do it myself. I know that I might start with this method and eventually give up. My tbr is mostly in goodreads or in my head haha.
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And if your system works for you, then stick to it.
I used to do the “in the head thing” as well. But once I got busy with other stuff in life, I couldn’t remember all that 🙂
Booklikes would add any books in my TBR list to my overall number of books, so I didn’t want that. And once I made the move here to WordPress, there was NO tbr. So something had to happen and since I was working on putting all my reviews into calibre, I figured why not systemize my tbr list as well?
The hardest part at first was not adding books. I just don’t add books anymore that I’m not sure I’ll read. I have to know that I’m going to read it to add it. The plus side to that is that my average rating has gone up almost half a star 🙂
That and my tbr is no longer controlling me or completely out of control. I’m in charge 😀
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I like your approach! When I see people with 1000book TBR’s I’m like…really? It’s excessive and unrealistic. It must be hard not adding books but it gives you a more realistic list of the books you’re actually going to get to read I bet. I like the idea of putting reviews in Calibre. Maybe you should make a back up of all that. I’ve had bad experiences with losing things on my hard drive.
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The whole reason I began using calibre for reviews was because Leafmarks shutdown and Booklikes didn’t allow exporting of data. So I needed something of my own.
And I have my book review library on a thumb drive, on an old laptop harddrive converted into a portable drive and once it gets completed [I still have about 400 entries left to edit] somewhere online with either google or microsoft.
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Oh gosh I laughed so hard at your recommendation answer. *wipes tears*
Yay for Buddy read!
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Well, I’m glad you found it so humorous 🙂
Overzealous fans of books are like JW’s who come knocking on your day.
I’ll try to email you again about the buddy-read to nail down another detail or two.
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Cool. I’ll be on the look out.
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It took the collective brain of David and myself to ‘get’ the JW’s comment. LOL. Too true, too true.
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😀
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*wow* I am super impressed with your system for your tbr- it’s as orderly as mine is chaotic- and mine is very chaotic 😉 😂hehehee I like that your tbr is like a grindstone 😂 Again, I’m very much a mood reader, so I rarely have much of a plan for my reading (it’s basically read what I want, when I want, but library books go to the top of the pile, cos I have never had a fine in my life and I plan to keep it that way!)
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I used to be a mood reader too. Until I couldn’t decide between several series or found myself ignoring books.
But this system is only about a year old, so it’s not like I can claim I’ve always been so organized 🙂
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Ah that’s good to know- maybe one day I’ll get super organised too- that’d be really good for me 😉
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Well, as long as you start before the next 15 years, you’ll have started sooner than me 😀
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hehehehe thanks!! 😀 Now I’m gonna treat this as a race… that I’ve got 14 years before I even have to start… 😉 (guess I’ll put my feet up, slow and steady wins the race 😉 )
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I’m a Calibre fiend and use it religiously to sort and organize my books. I think I’m at 700-800 on it though, I need better self control :S
This reminds me, I also need to clean up my goodreads and delete those books I’ve added that I have no intention of reading anymore. I’m not one of those people who keep books I’m not really interested in on my tbr either, but my lists definitely need some updating.
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Yep, keeping those things pruned is almost a chore in and of itself…
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I like the idea of that system. Certainly more organised than my system…. which is more of a scroll until I find something that tickles my current fancy.
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the thing is, my system works really well, for me. I have no idea if it would work at all for someone else.
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I love this post. You have such discipline in your reading habits. I imagine it’s really gratifying to make progress and watch the books click off the list. It’s so methodical! I especially like the high priority folder that gets attention as a reward of sorts even 7 books or so.
I’m currently focused on completing series I’ve started, so I put all the high priority titles on a Goodreads list and sorted them by date added so I focus on the ones that have been on there the longest. Since most of my books are physical copies, I could totally implement a version of your system by lining them up strategically on my tbr shelf. This is good stuff. Thanks haha.
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Well, this whole process is less than a year old. But so far, it is working wonders for me. It has taken the “oh no, I’m swamped with too many books to read, which one do I read next?” feeling completely away.
I like the High Priority thing too. Certain books you just want to read sooner and not wait for 6 months, so that is the best I could come up with.
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It looks really stress-free, for sure. I need something similar for high priority. It seems like I don’t get around to more than one a month. I should be reading those first lol.
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Am I interpreting correctly that you kind of rotate through series systematically? Or do you read everything from that author’s folder before continuing on?
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I rotate. Keeps things fresh for me so I don’t OD on one style or get burned out by some author’s idiosycrasies 😀
And that way I don’t show favoritism to any series that I might like more than another. Helps stretch out the good and break up the mediocre to ok [the bad gets DNF’d and tossed]
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That’s smart – and your folders make it easy to see how many you have left in a given series. I have to break it up too, else I don’t enjoy series as much as I would have with time between.
Really enjoyed this post! 🙂
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Glad you enjoyed it. It is always rewarding when I write something I like and others like it as well 🙂
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Thanks again for the link to this. I’ve downloaded Calibre and am currently experimenting with it. I like the look and feel of it so far. I’m curious how you choose your next book each time you finish one from the tbr pile. Do you go in order taking one book at a time from your collections on your kindle? Or is it more random?
Putting the books into collections is a great idea for mixing what you read, so thanks for the inspiration. My problem has been focus. I’ve started too many books over the last few months instead of being stubborn and doing one at a time. I used to be able to do that. I wonder what happened?.. So I have a “currently reading” list made up of five short story collections, four graphic novels, a science book, and two novels. All of them are between 50-70% read. Ok, enough waffling.
By the way, it might just be me but since WordPress was renovated I can no longer “like” a post on the actual blogger’s site. I have to do it on the WordPress Reader page. Tried it on my pc and on my android and it won’t let me. Weird.
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So I send about 20 collections to my kindle at a time (20 series, or books by author, etc). I sort them on my kindle by date. Once I read the first book in Series A, that moves up to the front of the line, because opening it modifies it. So I go to the back of the line and read the first book from Series B. That gets modified and moves to the front of the line. I repeat that process.
Once I’m done a series on my kindle, I delete it and move the next series in Calibre to my kindle (I sort my series in calibre by date modified).
I hope that helps.
Thanks for the heads up about the “like” button. I’ve experienced that on one other blogger’s site, so I’m wondering if it is a “theme” thing. I’ll have to look into that. Now, is that for everyones site you can’t like, or just some?
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Good morning from Japan 👺 6 a.m. here:) Thanks for your reply. 20 collections at a time is impressive. I think I get how that works and it sounds like a great idea for variety and keeping things fresh 😊
Regarding the “like” button problem, it has happened on 4 different blogs so far. I’m still signed in and my profile is showing. I hit the button and a small window briefly flashes open then disappears. The “like” doesn’t register. I haven’t tried it for commenting yet. Will see what happens.
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Yeah, 20 collections is about a 2 month cycle and I have found that 2 months between a series works best for me. Took me quite a long time to figure that out, but once I did, wham, I was good.
Ahhhh, I had that same problem. Are you using Chrome perchance? If so, I found that signing out of WP and of google, then doing a complete cache wipe (everything!) solved the problem.
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Yes I am. I’ll try that. Thanks for the tip!
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