How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Ever-Expanding To-Read List

Ah, I understand! I finally get why so many Goodreads members have mind-bogglingly large To-Read lists. It’s taken about six months for it to finally sink in for me, but it has now.

I’m not usually such a slow learner. But it was hard to wrap my head around it at first. (Pardon me a moment while I banish the mental image of a head being flattened and wrapped.) How could anyone have 70 or 300 or 1700 books queued up for reading? Did they have any intentions of actually reading all of them? Or were they just trying to impress people?

I suppose I was visualizing the To Read list as a stack of books on the bedside table. I understand how half a dozen books or so could pile up. But many more than that and you would naturally stop browsing and selecting new ones until caught up, right? You’d demure politely and say that you couldn’t possibly if a friend thrust another, “You have to read this!” at you.

But come to think of it, it took me decades to be able to tell myself, “No, I don’t have to read that right now if there are others that I’d rather read first”. I’d spent a lifetime reading the recommendations of others and was generally glad that I did. I learned a lot and it was nice to share the experience of a good book with someone. But I have come across books on my own that I preferred to spend some time on and I feel far freer to read them whenever I wish, instead of making them wait until after I read the newly thrust-upon book(s). In the physical world of close-proximity people and bound books, I now say “Ok, but hold onto your book for now. I have six on my nightstand at the moment and I’m afraid I’d misplace yours if I take it before I’m ready”. Appealing to their concern for the book’s welfare works for all but the most persistent book advocate.

This doesn’t work in the online world with virtual book recommendations. There was no worry of a borrower spilling anything on a book or losing it under the bed or behind the sofa cushions. As my queue began growing faster than my rate of reading could keep up with, I began to panic. I’m a compulsive list-maker with a strong need to see progress as I check off items accomplished. I began to back out of groups with reading challenges and monthly reads – no matter how much they interested me – because it came to be almost a chore, an obligation, rather than something I wanted to do in my leisure to unwind and feel free.

One of the things I’ve loved to do since first joining Goodreads is to browse through reading lists of new friends and discovering writers and books that I wouldn’t likely come across at a nearby bookstore or library. Most of the books I’ve read have come from doing that. I see a listing of books that someone has and click on the links to read the descriptions. That’s often led me to click on those who liked a book to look at their book lists and then on to those who liked them and their lists too. I have no precise idea how I found some of the books in my reading queue. The one I’m reading now, Checkered Scissors, is an example of a book that I’m loving, but have no idea how I first discovered it. It might have come from a leap-about GR browse session just described or a Smashwords tag-leaping browse. In any case, I’m having a delightful time reading it.

The only problem with leap-about browsing is the danger of forgetting something newly discovered without some way of keeping track of what/where it is when you're ready for it. That’s when the revelation of the ever-growing To Read hit me. A GR friend asked recently why I kept my reading queue under an arbitrary number: first ten, then thirty, then fifty, and now one hundred. My answer was that I wanted to make sure that I could read them all.

But a passing comment that a GR author made to me recently in a message about bookshelves in his house gave me another way of thinking about this. There are bookcases in nearly every room of my house, populated with the combined collections of all family members. I haven’t read every book yet, and don’t expect to until I reach the point near the end of my life when reading is no longer possible. But I feel comforted rather than pressured by all those books. I like knowing that I could browse them and pull one out whenever I feel inclined, and I like that they have a safe home here with us and haven’t been tossed out somewhere with no one to care about them.

I decided to see my To Read list like the bookcases in my house and not as a task list that needs accomplishing. It’s my dynamic map tracking places to find books on virtual shelves that will be there when I’m ready for them. It’s ok that it grows faster than I can read because it’s a shelf of possibilities and safekeeping. And in keeping the books in my list, it keeps them sheltered in a shared virtual house for others to browse, to discover, and to keep. (Thanks, Edward M. Wolfe, for sharing your book Kendra with me, as well as your offhand comment from your daughter about books on your shelf that inspired this posting.)