Down the TBR Hole #9

Down the TBR Hole was originally created over at Lost in a Story.

Most of you probably know this feeling, you’re Goodreads TBR pile keeps growing and growing and it seems like there is no light at the end of the tunnel. You keep adding, but you add more than you actually read. And then when you’re scrolling through your list, you realize that you have no idea what half the books are about and why you added them. Well that’s going to change!

It works like this:

  • Go to your goodreads to-read shelf.
  • Order on ascending date added.
  • Take the first 5 (or 10, if you’re feeling adventurous) books
  • Read the synopses of the books
  • Decide: keep it or should it go?
  • Keep track of where you left off so you can pick up there next week!

My to-read shelf: 1050 titles

Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life by Stephanie Staal

Published: January 31, 2011
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012

The reviews on this one are pretty rough. Probably best to skip the memoir and just read those books instead.

Stay or Go? Go

Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz

Published: May 18, 2005
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012

My wife and I were married in a church ceremony in 2005; the state of California joined the party three years later. (And then left the party, and then came back, thanks to a US Supreme Court ruling – that was an interesting little roller coaster.) This still looks like good reading.

Stay or Go? Stay

All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert L. Dreyfus

Published: January 4, 2010
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012

The gaps in my reading are large and strange. Name a classic, and it’s entirely possible I haven’t read it. (Unless it’s Shakespeare, which I took more than one college course on.) Not out of any conscious aversion; I seem to have had an unusual high school required reading list. And while I took a comparative literature survey course on “Masterpieces of Western Culture”, we read selections from anthologies, not whole works. So, I have a back-burner project of actually reading The Classics, and this book looked like it might be helpful. The reviews on it are definitely love-it-or-hate-it, though, and it looks like it’s not quite what I want.

Every time I look at that cover, I think of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Poor whale.

Stay or Go? Go

On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits by Wray Herbert

Published: January 1, 2010
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012

A little pop-neuroscience.

Stay or Go? Stay

Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession by Craig Childs

Published: January 1, 2010
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012

The subject is interesting, but I don’t think this is one for me.

Stay or Go? Go

Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality by Patricia S. Churchland

Published: January 1, 2011
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012
More neuroscience. Yep.

Stay or Go? Stay

 

Frozen Secrets: Antarctica Revealed by Sally M. Walker

Published: October, 2010
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012

Antarctica. For kids.

Stay or Go? Stay

 

Peace Is Every Breath: A Practice for Our Busy Lives by Thích Nhất Hạnh

Published: January 1, 2011
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012

Stay or Go? Stay

 

Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen: Ambition and Tragedy in the Antarctic by David Thomson

Published: 1977
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012

An older book on the Heroic Age of Exploration. I actually don’t think I need to read this particular one.

Stay or Go? Go

 

Nomansland by Lesley Hauge

Published: June 15, 2010
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012

I keep thinking this book is older than it is. Possibly, I have it confused with another book.

Stay or Go? Go

 

5 out, 5 stay in. New to-read shelf: 1045 titles.