Welcome back to Book Break! In this video I'm gonna tackle a problem that a lot of you
probably have. It's a problem shared by book lovers all over the world: what to do when that
TBR pile gets out of control. Just in case you haven't been on BookTube that long, your TBR pile
means your to be read pile, all those books you have stacking up in your house that you haven't
managed to get to yet. And this is a problem that a lot of BookTubers have and talk about,
and so I have been doing my research, I have scoured the internet, and in this video I'm
bringing together a bunch of tips that BookTubers use to get their TBR piles down. And every
BookTuber that I mentioned will be linked below, so go and look in the description box to go check
out their amazing channels. But let's get to it! So the first tip that loads of BookTubers use to
get their TBR piles down is to turn it into a game - and BookTube is an amazing resource for this.
There are readathons specially designed to help you work through your TBR pile, so for example
there's Tome Topple created by Thoughts on Tomes. This is a recurring readathon designed to help you
work through those big books you've got waiting on your shelves. There is Cramathon which has loads
of hosts so I will link all of them below. Again it's a recurring readathon, it's a week-long and
encourages you to speed through those books that you haven't yet finished this year. There's also
Finish-a-thon which is hosted by Tea Books and Tazmyn, and that is for people who read multiple
books at once and struggle to actually finish any of them, there is a readathon designed to help you
finish all of those books that are still waiting by your bed in the technically currently reading
pile. And then there are BookTubers who have made up their own creative games which you can copy for
yourself. So Kayla from BooksandLala used to do a series called Closet Unhaul, her closet being
where she kept her massive TBR pile, so what she would do is re-watch her own book haul videos from
a few years before and everything that she still owned and hadn't read from that book haul, she had
to read within the next month otherwise she had to unhaul it and give it away. And that was a really
fun series to follow along with and definitely something you could try yourself. If you have a
bullet journal or if you keep track in any way of when you hauled books, you can see how long
they've been on your TBR and maybe set yourself that challenge. There are also games like StackIt
which Lianne from literary diversions does, where she selects a stack of books that she owns and
then over the next month she has to read through them in that order. And she has a few fun little
exceptions that allow her to flip the pile over again. I will link to her video below so you can
go check out all the rules but it's a really fun way of keeping yourself focused. I've even made up
a couple of TBR games myself. I do Balancing the Books every month where I count all of the books
that I've hauled and all the books that I've read or unhauled and make sure those numbers balance
so that my TBR isn't growing. And I also created a game called Trash my TBR where I post a video with
a bunch of books from my TBR and invite people to comment on which ones they think I shouldn't
bother reading, so that also really helps me get those numbers down. And there are so many more.
Really any kind of TBR game is a great way of getting you to focus on your own unread books
rather than getting distracted and wanting to buy new ones. So people play games where they write
down all of the books that they own unread and put those names into a jar, and then they just pick
them out in order and that's the book they have to read. Or Sylwia from Wish Fulfillment used to play
a game where she wrapped up all of the books on her TBR and then it would be a surprise unwrapping
which one she was going to read. And quite a few different BookTubers do that now so they're really
fun to watch. Megwithbooks does it, Eri’s book wonderland does it, and Pardon my Imagination does
it. There are also loads of variations out there on TBR Bingo, I recently got really into Kaylani's
version of this, so she has a proper little bingo wheel with balls that come out with different
numbers that match up to different prompts, and she then using those prompts has to read something
from her shelf. But she is also corresponding those numbers to a big bingo board that she has,
so you check in every month and see how she's progressing, so you get really invested in it.
And one of the prompts that I saw in one of her videos was to use a random color generator website
to pick a book that has the same color cover, and I thought that was really fun on its own. I might
try that with my own books. One of the coolest ideas I saw in a video from Wanderness - she
matched up every piece on a chessboard to a book from her TBR, she then played a game of chess,
and depending on which pieces got taken during the game, those were the books that she had to read.
People just get more and more creative every day. So you get the gist. Making it into a game is a
really good way to tackle your TBR. But there are loads more suggestions out there. So I Should Read
That made a video all about how she was going to tackle her TBR which has over 450 books,
if that makes you feel a bit better about yours, and one of her tips was mixing up the formats that
she was reading in - so switching between physical books and ebooks and audiobooks. Boston actually
managed to get their TBR down to zero which is very very impressive, and one of the ways they
did it was putting themselves on a book buying ban, but to satisfy that urge that they get to
buy new books - we all experience that - they only let themselves buy physical copies of books
that they had already read and loved. So maybe a book they had borrowed from the library or from
a friend and they'd really loved it, they were then allowed to go and buy maybe a secondhand
copy of that book. So it really satisfied that urge to buy something new and beautiful without
adding to their TBR. Books by Leynes made a really good video about this about four years ago,
so she was ahead of the TBR panic that everyone's experiencing now. And in that video she talked
about how you need to really figure out your motivation for why you want to get your TBR pile
down. Don't just be pressured because everyone else is talking about it because at the end of
the day there are so many good things about having a big TBR as well. So if you really enjoy having
stacks of books around the place just waiting to be read, then embrace that! Enjoy that feeling,
it doesn't have to be something that you feel guilty about. All of these are hopefully just
useful tips if you feel like your TBR is too big for your space or your personal comfort level,
but that's not to say that you have to get that TBR down at all. So I will link all of the videos
I just talked about in a playlist here, and I would also love to know your own tips and tricks
for how you manage your TBR pile, so do leave us a comment below and let us know. See you next time!