Conquering Mount To-Be-Read: A New Year Challenge

It’s no doubt advice that you’ve heard time and time again, but it’s good advice – in order to be a better writer, you have to be a great reader. In the quest to read as widely and prolifically as possible, it’s inevitable that you’ll pick up lots of wonderful books. It’s even more inevitable that at least half of them will gather dust on shelves and in piles in bedrooms, living rooms, attics and garages. Alas, the curse of the bibliophile writer (is there any other kind?) is the to-be-read pile of shame.

Your TBR pile grows quicker than you realise – doubly so if you’re an ebook-a-holic like me. A new awards list comes out, so you pick up a few titles – they have to be good, right? A friend reminds you of a series that you’d been meaning to check out in a while, so that’s another set on the shelf. Amazon’s always got a sale on Kindle books, Humble are doing a new bundle of rare and unseen Neil Gaiman texts, and before you know it, you’re drowning in pages with more and more being added to the vast, wordy sea.

This Christmas, my bookcase reached its limit and became a health and safety nightmare, so I decided that something needed to be done. After scouring the web for a solution, I stumbled upon my potential salvation – the Mount TBR reading challenge, created by literary blog My Reader’s Block.

The aim of the game is to try and conquer that toppling to-be-read pile by choosing a target number of books to read throughout the year, with tiers named for mountains of differing heights. In my case, I’ve chosen Mount Blanc, partially because of the Shelley reference, and also because it equates to knocking a conservative 24 books off the list. It doesn’t seem like many, but that’s at least two books a month, and not an easy feat when you read whacking great sci-fi tomes like I do. However, with a bit of careful planning – a hastily scribbled list of all the physical books I have left to read, and a promise to take my Kindle on the bus to work instead of my 3DS – it’s a positively achievable goal.

There aren’t many rules in the Mount TBR challenge, except that the books must be ones you own (and surely that’s the point of doing the challenge), and, if you’re really not feeling a book, you have to give it a chance and get through a good portion of it before you can call it quits and knock it off the list. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can always scale your pledge up to conquer even more of the pile of shame. However, in the true spirit of competition, you can’t scale that number down. Come on, it’s meant to be a challenge after all!

As well as alleviating some of my reader’s guilt for leaving books on the shelf for so long, I’m excited by the fact that I’ll be reading loads of new stories. Already, I’ve knocked The Autobiography of James T. Kirk and Paul Cornell’s The Lost Child of Lychford off my list, but I’ve got some Annie Proulx on there that’s been languishing in the pile for several months. On my Kindle, there’s a T.C. Boyle novel that I bought during my MA that remains untouched, and there are even books that I bought in sales six years ago lurking on there. I’m hoping that at least a few of those will make the cut as I attempt to hit my target.

Although climbing the mountain and cutting down the list is its own reward, I’m hoping that the challenge will stretch me even further and encourage my writing output to grow this year. Getting off the computer and going analogue a bit more, diving into new and different worlds, should in theory encourage me to keep on creating my own. So with cup of coffee in hand and blanket in easy reach, I’ve started my ascent up the formidable Mount TBR. What are you waiting for?

About the author of this post

Robyn Hardman is a writer, blogger and a PR and marketing consultant based in the Cotswolds. When she’s not writing press releases about silly cars, she’s usually in the pit at your local punk show. She tweets as @twobeatsoff.