30-day Challenge! - Day 21 - first!: How do you manage your TBR pile?

[Nocturnalux]

My TR list is well over 10 thousand titles (!). I compulsively add to it even though, at this point, it has snowballed out of control.

In order to keep a semblance of control, I catalogue it into smaller sub-shelves. "To-Read Women", "To-Read Women", and so forth, so that I can actually find titles I want to read according to themes/countries.

[Lynn, New School Classics]

I see something that looks good and willy-nilly I click to-read. Once a year or so I notice that the list is inordinately long. I then spend an afternoon deleted books that I no longer am interested in. Usually, I those are books I just clicked to-read to be polite because I had just read a great review.

[Lynn, New School Classics]

Bob wrote: "Before last December my Goodreads TBR was very small. I just didn’t list my books. I kept them in a separate part of my home bookshelf, known as my unread pile. When I needed a new read I went to t..."

This is a fantastic post Bob!

[Lynn, New School Classics]

Kim wrote: "I recently decided to use the shelves option here on Goodreads and I have also made an excel document to sort of "plan" all the books I still want to read this year. I like making lists and plannin..."

I am with Kim. I started keeping a reading journal in a composition book about ten years ago. Recently it morphed into a Google Spreadsheet. My yearly challenge plans are all on the spreadsheet, along with a list of what I read each month with the date published, the date I read it, and my rating. This makes reporting on the challenges so much easier.

Since I knew I would be focusing on short stories in my challenges, I actually spent a day on January typing in an inventory of short stories that I owned and their pub. dates. I made sure to list which anthology the story was in. This really helped save time on my century and and decade challenges.

I then would look up the story I was interested in to make sure it was actually a listed Goodreads book, and put it on my TBR. It took a couple of hours to do all this, but it was fun and saved me so much time later.

[Luke]

Lynn wrote: "I am with Kim. I started keeping a reading journal in a composition book about ten years ago. Recently it morphed into a Google Spreadsheet. My yearly challenge plans are all on the spreadsheet, along with a list of what I read each month with the date published, the date I read it, and m..."

Long live the spreadsheets! My 2021 one is keeping my reading balanced, while my 2022 one is giving me a bird's eye view of my challenge planning possibilities. Both grew a tad after the librar sale I went to last weekend, but not so much as to become unwieldy.

[Terry]

Manage? Schmanage! Only occasional weeding takes place.

[Wreade1872]

I have my to-read shelf which i keep very low like about a dozen books or so.
Everything else is thrown on a maybe-shelf or a to-read-eventually shelf. I've lost track of what was supposed to be the difference between those two though :P.
I use an Achievement system each year so i also mark any books on those three shelfs which fit particular categories for my achievement goals.