Down the TBR Hole is a tag that involves bloggers whittling down their TBR lists – or in my case, my to-buy list. I first did this tag in March 2018 & in 10 months I only actually completed it 7 times; however, I did manage to clear a lot of books off of my to-buy shelf during that time & that’s great – but I won’t be doing it any longer.

I used to have a rule that I wouldn’t let my to-buy list exceed 200 books, & every time it went over that number (usually around 250) I’d sit down with my laptop & try to shave off as many books as I could, to get it back under my limit. I then came across the tag #DownTheTBRHole & thought that it would be a great idea to do posts on something I was already doing every now & again.

Down the TBR Hole has always been on my blog planning calendar, & every time I didn’t end up writing a post I’d push it back until the next week, & then I’d do it again, & again, & again… until eventually we get to where I am now – I haven’t done a Down the TBR Hole post in weeks, nay months, & a big part of me has been kicking myself for it.

However, earlier on I decided that enough was enough – why am I forcing myself to delete books from my to-buy list, that I do actually want to read, just because the number 200 seems to stop me panicking? Every reader knows that they’re never going to read every book they want to & with me owning 466 unread books the chances are I’ll never even catch up on all my already-purchased books, let alone the ones I want to buy! My wish list (the new name for my to-buy list) is at 455 books & lets be honest – I’ll never buy all of them (unless I win the lottery, in which case I’ll purchase every single one in one go, Amazon will deliver them all in a huge lorry to my new house that has a HUGE library & then 921 unread books will stare at me from my shelves for the rest of eternity) but why does that mean I can’t keep them on a list, in the hopes that one day the Doctor will take me away so I can read for days on end without any real time passing? Basically, it doesn’t.

So, from now on I’m not going to force myself to cut down my wish-list – a wish-list is exactly that, a list of wishes, & I wish to own & read every book on that damn list; as I’ve said, it’ll probably never happen but fuck it – I no longer care.

I wanted to write this post to encourage other readers like me to shout FUCK IT about limiting their TBR, wish-lists, etc. & to just embrace the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of books out there that you’ll never read, but would absolutely fucking love to.