Any reader will relate to the struggle that is the TBR (to be read). Saige had a great idea for me to discuss how I go about my reading and the process that’s worked the best for me.

First, it may help to get a general idea of how big my TBR actually is. Keep in mind, this only includes physical books. For selecting my next audiobook, I tend to just pick something off my list that’s available and sounds good at the time. There’s no guilt there. There is guilt when you’ve got 200 books sitting on your shelf, staring at you.

So here is my physical book collection.

It may not be as pretty as a bookstagrammer’s, but these shelves and their contents are my most prized possessions. For those wondering, the books I have turned outward are some of my all time favorites (with the exception of the first two shelves, my Sandershelf and Rothfuss/Brown/Paolini shelf. Those two are shelves of great honor).

I have read perhaps ¼ to 1/3 of these books. And this isn’t even counting my Stephen King shelf. Here’s that for fun.

So, you can imagine that such a vast storage to choose from when I need to select my next read could be overwhelming. Earlier on, I used to select by what I felt like reading in that moment, but I quickly desired a new method, as I was letting books sit unread for long periods, and I felt bad for them.

So, I put it up to chance.

I use the Spin the Wheel app. It’s free and the ads aren’t super obnoxious.

So, originally I just put all of my TBR books on one wheel and spun each time I needed my next book. But that wheel was getting too big, and I found that I was often spinning the same genre multiple times in a row, since everything was lumped together. I also have way more horror books that any other genre, but I wasn’t spinning enough horror to keep me satisfied.

So I created the genre wheel.

This wheel has a higher occurrence of “horror”, since about 2/3 of my TBR is horror. This way I’m not getting stuck in the same genre for multiple spins or spending too long away from my favorite genre. Once I spin a genre, I open that genre’s wheel.

But this still left me with one problem, balanced though this system was. I also like to re-read.

So the next wheel I created selects the “type” of my next book, the overwhelmingly occurring slice being a new book. But this wheel allows for the occasional re-read, either a King one specifically (I get a King itch often, but I’ve read most of his books by this point), or a re-read of my choice, such as something I really enjoyed but haven’t read in a year or more.

I know some people think re-reading is a waste of time, and I may go into the whole idea of it in a later post, but I love a re-read, especially if it’s a 1000 page fantasy brick or something that really resonated with me the first time. It’s just like rewatching a movie- you always catch something new that you missed before. I still find myself surprised by things in The Inheritance Cycle, which I have re-read about every year or two since I was 13. So I had to allow for some re-reading in my spins!

The final problem that arose from this increasingly-complicated system was that King Re-read slice. There are so many Kings that I want to read again, and that choice was overwhelming to me as well. So then we’ve got my final wheel: the King Re-reads.

Then we have “seasonal” wheels, such as the one I’m currently using to get through my Dragonsteel Nexus 2025 reading goals, and the wheel I created for Pride Month this year, picked out of my regular wheels for featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes.

One thing to note is that I will go outside of my wheel spins for certain situations. One is our book club. That’s selected by each of us for every round, so I will often have one of these open at the same time as my “pleasure” read, which I select using my wheel system.

I will also often have a “follow-along” read open, mostly for keeping up with the Flanagan’s Wake podcast, for which I’ve re-read The Haunting of Hill House, Gerald’s Game, and will shortly be reading some Henry James to prepare for their watch of Bly Manor (I’m still not recovered from my first watch. That shit hurt). So, I will often have one of these open at the same time as my pleasure read and my book club read.

I know, some of you are dying at this. I know a lot of readers who can only handle one book at a time. I actually used to be that type of reader. I’ve only been like this for the last few years.

How do you tackle your TBR? Do you freewill it? Pick a strip of paper out of a jar? Let someone else pick for you? Maybe you use a random selector app?

Personally, the wheel is fun for me because A. Fun bright colors and B. The anticipation while it spins is exciting. Hey, you’ve got to get serotonin anywhere you can these days, right?

Maybe my method will work for you! If you don’t have one and are searching for something while your unread books stare you down, consider a wheel spinner!

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