A Reading Plan to Reduce My TBR Stack of Books

I never used to have anything I’d call a TBR (To Be Read) pile of books. Even in grad school  by using a reading plan I managed to keep up with reading for school, work, and still keep the circulation department of multiple libraries busy.

But now, now I have a colossus of a TBR stack, though most of it is digital these days. That said, I still have somewhere around 15 printed codex books, mostly in my field to read. I’ve had a loose schedule of sorts for years, mostly based on what I’m currently researching, but this year, in part because there are So Many Books, I decided to organize a list and create a reading plan, much like those I made in grad school in order to keep up with long lists of required reading.

As I compiled my list, which required me to sort through books printed and digital, I was reminded of other reading plans. There were the Great Books sorts of institutionalized plans wherein reading Great Books was thought to be a sure pathway to being a Great Person yourself; these sometimes took the form of actual books produced and accompanied by a reading plan, sometimes by subscription, as in the Harvard Classics l or in the form of a build your own list like The Modern Library. Just search “reading list” and you’ll be overwhelmed with all the lists of books you should read.

In a similar vein, given the current emphasis on intentionality and reading for personal improvement, just searching the Web for “personal reading plan” will provide you any number of how to guides for creating your plan.[ref]Not to mention countless schedules for reading the entire Bible over the course of the year; this practice dates back at least to the medieval monastic tradition for Christians, and far longer for Jews.[/ref]  I even found a nifty 2020 schedule for reading all of Shakespeare during the course of the year.

I’m in the early stages of my plan as yet, with not much more than a very large multi-page checklist organized by topic/project. Just listing and categorizing the books was exceedingly helpful in creating a plan. I already use Library Thing and Goodreads for book tracking and inspiration. They were useful in this instance in tracking books I have but have not yet read, and what I need to reserve at a library. I use Calibre to sort and categorize and tag ebooks, making it easy to locate all the books I’ve tagged TBR or to put on hold at the library.

Once I had my checklist of categorized books, the next step was scheduling and finding specific times to read. I generally read fiction at night and for a few hours each weekend. During my week-day working hours, I concentrate on non-fiction and books in my field and related to current writing projects. Even more importantly, I’m blocking out specific times to read specific books. It’s not enough to just put Read Cunliffe’s Ancient Celts second Ed on a to-do list. I need to block out when I’m going to read it (Friday afternoons 12-2). The blocking-out-of-time is one of the most useful techniques I know in terms of actually getting things read or done. I schedule specific items to read an hour or two at a time during the week as part of my regular bullet journal scheduling. I also make sure I always have something queued up on my iPhone for those odd quarter-hours waiting for someone else to do something.