Outgrowing your TBR

21 Feb, 2026

Some time ago I got my hands on a Boox Palma, and diligently got to organizing my reading apps (and reading lists) on it. I downloaded all the basics for me: BookFusion, Kindle, Audible, Storytel. I was feeling ecstatic with this new toy and its possibilities!

As with any bookworm, I have a ton of books on my library that I haven’t read yet. Not only physical books but also digital ones. You know how it goes: you think to yourself, "I’ll just download/purchase this one bc it’s cheap/interesting/my friend wrote/recommended it and I’ll get to it later." Maybe the book got hyped up by the reading community. Maybe it was about to be adapted to a movie or series and I wanted to read it before/during/after it. Maybe someone I love dearly gifted it to me.

The point is: it’s ten years later and I haven’t even glanced at it twice.

For the past however many years I've been buying books (I wanna say, twenty-five?), I keep adding to the endless "to be read" pile. The pile eventually turned into a shelf, and the shelf, into a whole ass bookshelf which, in turn, became an even longer list on LibraryThing, no longer bound to the books that I owned.

So when I got to downloading the actual TBR books, it stopped being fun. Suddenly I wasn't so ecstatic anymore with the Palma. I started with Kindle, where I got a bunch of books written by Brazilian friends and acquaintances who are indie authors published on KDP¹, and also books I really wanted to read in the past. And then it got worse: I faced my Calibre Library archive. Where I have a few hundred gigabytes worth of nonfiction of the most colorful interests -- interests that I had at some point in time as well.

This burden of the unfulfilled promises I made to all those books and people started crushing me again, and it kind of made me upset for real. It had been a looong time since I'd felt that. I'm very good at avoiding things, especially if there's no one breathing down my neck about it. And as I got older, overworked, burned-out and became a survivor of a global pandemic, I turned into a very slow reader, with very few select books that actually piked my interest, and above all else, a mood reader².

So as I thumbed through a few of these shelved titles, I think I had my very first true epiphany: the person who chose to shelf these books isn't me anymore. Years, decades later, I'm somebody else. I'm a completely different person now. No wonder I don't pick up those titles -- they're no longer relevant or interesting to me now. Their time came and went, and they no longer fit into who I am. I can be sad about not having read them in time, but I don't need to keep dragging them with me throughout the rest of my life.

I can be free.

I can make an entirely new TBR, and be at peace with the ones that were left behind with the other versions of myself. I remember when my parents divorced and the way I existed and interacted with other people changed: it was a shock to me, and I remember saying "that's not how I normally behave" out loud once. Guess what? I didn't go back to how I was before. And after my dad died, I felt the same effect: it was like I became a different person. And with mom, another shift happened within me as well.

Why would I want to read books picked by a person that's so different from who I am now? It makes no sense.

So I'm doing away with the old TBRs, reviewing them through an honest lens of interest, and picking up just what truly stood the test of time in my life.

Alas, setting up the Boox Palma became fun again.

#blog #eng #reading