Tackling the pile of shame : my physical TBR

I’ve got a pile of unread books in my home, and I’m pretty ashamed of it. Physical books are expensive, and I have a very limited budget – especially in times of covid – so I tend to not buy a lot of them, but I do sometimes get them as a gift from other people, or use money meant to buy myself a gift for it. As a result, my collection of physical books is quite small – and yet, there’s still a good portion of these books that I haven’t read. Why is that, you may ask?

Since I’ve gotten into reading in public transport, or pretty much anywhere when I have the time, and borrowing books from my local library, I’ve been reading more and more e-books instead of physical books. Their instant availability means that whenever I finish one of them, I can just open the next one immediately – without having to go back to my apartment and getting another novel from my bookshelves. The availability of e-books has led me to ignore my personal collection, which is why I want to set myself a challenge for 2021 : read every single book on my physical TBR.

Can I do it? Probably. Will I do it? We’ll see that next December! For now, here’s the contents of that TBR :

From the series The Expanse : Caliban’s war, Abbadon’s gate, Cibola burn.

I got the first two as a Christmas gift, and bought the fourth one this summer, but haven’t gotten around to reading them yet. They’re excellent and I love them, but having watched the TV show kinda slows me down in reading. I’m hoping I can get through these soon, though, as the next season arrives on amazon prime at the end of the year!

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

I got this book at a local secondhand bookstore a few street away from my apartment, and I’ve read it once before, when I was a young child, but the edition I have now is absolutely stunning – it’s the 60th anniversary edition, which has an introduction written by Neil Gaiman, and I thought it would be a very nice addition to my bookshelves when I found it!

I have little to no memory of the actual story, so it would definitely be good for me if I could re-read it.

Unravel the dusk, by Elizabeth Lim

I loved the first one, so I’m pretty sure I’ll love this one too, which is why I’m quite ashamed of putting it on this list!

I had a preorder of this book, and then Covid happened and I… kinda put reading on hold for a while during the summer, as I was working full time as an essential worker in a grocery store, then in a restaurant for as many hours as I could get, and studying part-time. With the new restrictions in September, I stopped working but went back to university full time, and I just didn’t find a moment to pick this up.

This is how you lose the time war, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This was one of my birthday gifts! I’m super interested in the synopsis, and it’s the books and tea book-club read-along for November/December, so I’m hoping to get this one done before the end of 2020!

The city we became, by N.K. Jemisin

I loved N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, and I’ve had my eye on this one since it was announced a long time ago – I finally got it at the bookstore last week!

The midnight library, by Matt Haig

Good reviews made me pick up this book while it was on sale at my local bookstore on the same visit when I got The city we became, and I love the cover art!

Hopefully I can read this one in the first half of 2021… maybe even during my winter break? Who knows…

I’m really excited to be reading all of these, and I’ve got some preorders for 2021 that will get added to the collection once they arrive – I’ll post an update halfway through the year, to see where this got me!

Do you have a lot of unread physical books? What are the ones you want to read the most, out of your collection? Let me know in the comments so I can add them to my TBR!