by Tracy Briseño

My TBR (To Be Read) pile is out of control. Somehow, I always have more books that I want to read than time to read them. So, I’m looking for a plan for 2024.

I have already joined the 12 to Try Reading Challenge and am enjoying broadening my reading from “Ooh, this looks interesting.” And “I love everything else this author wrote.” to seeking out new perspectives and challenging myself to explore more broadly. I am particularly pleased that the 12 to Try challenge is so flexible and I can try things in any order. If you decide to join the challenge, you might try “Never to Old to Save the World” – which is both a book written in the last 12 months and is fiction with a main character over 40 years old! I also recommend “Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body” by Rebekah Taussig for the memoir category.

While I know that 12 to Try may in fact increase my TBR pile, I am hopeful that other measures may reduce its size. I am somewhat notorious for going overboard when checking out books on a given subject. For instance, right now I’m learning a lot about my family history so I’ve been drawn to books that give context to the times and places that I am learning about. Many of my relatives lived or traveled along the Mississippi so I picked up some books about the history of the Mississippi river. A great grandfather left home at a young age in the 1930s so I picked up “Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move in the Great Depression.” I’ve also picked up a number of stories about life in Iowa and Illinois in the late 1800s and early 1900s. As you may have guessed, this has led to me having a pile of books about history but not enough time to read all of them. My plan is to focus my reading, picking one topic, or time frame, and zero in.

Fortunately, the library is always ready for me. I can check out an unreasonable number of books, sort through them to find the ones that are really relevant to me, then return the others to be read another day. I can reach out to the librarians for suggestions when I get stuck and nothing sparks my interest.

I wish you all the joy of finding just the right books to fill your TBR pile in the new year.