TTT: Spring Cleaning my TBR list

Top Ten Tuesday: Time to make decisions about the longest books on my TBR list and do a little spring cleaning.

I just checked. I have 231 books on my TBR list. These ten books (below) have been on the list the longest. Time to decide about what to do with them--- to read or not to read. 

Let's see. 

The Orphan Master's Son (2013); A Visit From the Goon Squad (2011); and Interpreters of Maladies (2000) are the first three books on my list and all are Pulitzer Prize winners (winning date in parenthesis.) I have a personal challenge to read past Pulitzer Prize winners, so these three books stay on the list.

The fourth book, Without You There Is No Us, is a book I purchased after meeting the author. I am still curious about the topic and since I own a copy of the book, it will stay on the list.

The fifth book is a toss up. Love and Other Demons is by the master of Magical Realism, Gabriel Marquez Garcia. His book One Hundred Years of Solitude was one of the most difficult but most satisfying books I've ever read. The reviews on this one are generally very good and the premise sounds different and so captivating. I need to conduct some more research before I remove or keep it on the list. 

The Atomic Weight of Love. Hmm. I can't even remember why I placed this one on my TBR pile. One reviewer on Goodreads said that the audiobook recording of this was so good it held her hostage while she listened. If my library has the audiobook version for check-out I will keep it on the list, if not, off it goes. 

The Notorious RBG. I saw a wonderful documentary film about Ruth Bader Ginsburg before she died last year. I am wondering if this is when I placed this book on my list. I still love her and want to read about her. It stays.

The fourth and eighth book on my list are about the same topic: North Korea. I remember why I put A Thousand Miles to Freedom on the list---my hubby and daughter listened to it as they drove east toward New York and my daughter's grad school. They both liked it a lot and told me all about it. Since I don't need to read both but I am committed to reading the one I own, this one will be removed from the list.

I'm guessing I placed the ninth book, Ways of Going Home, on the list because it is set in South America and I read so few books set on that continent. That is not a good enough reason to keep a book on the list. Off it goes. 

A Slip of the Keyboard is nonfiction by a favorite fiction author, Terry Pratchett. He died in 2015 and I'm positive I was still in mourning when I placed it on my list in 2016. Reviews on Goodreads are all positive but I'm wondering if I'd do better just consuming more of his fiction? I need to do more research including finding out if a copy is available from the public library.

So let's see if this was a valuable exercise. Out of ten books I decided to remove or clean up two or 20% of them. That seems like time well spent. If I were to have the same success rate at culling down my whole TBR, I'd end up removing 42 titles. Now that would be an accomplishment. Imagine removing more books from your TBR in one year than the number you add?

-Anne