What’s on Your TBR Pile?

Ah, books.

They’re lovely things, aren’t they? Lying provocatively on coffee tables, just inviting visitors to leaf through them...standing at attention spine-out on shelves, their colorful bindings drawing the eye...and of course, piled in tottering stacks next to bedside tables, patiently waiting their turns to be read. And we aren’t even going to discuss e-readers, which lose in the aesthetic appeal department but gain in the sheer number of volumes that can be hoarded stored on one device.

For extreme booklovers, TBR (To Be Read) piles can often assume alarming proportions. Friends of mine on the book cataloguing site LibraryThing (if you’re a member, come and friend me there!) refer not to their TBR piles but their TBR hills and mountains (my favorite nickname for a TBR pile there is “Mount Toober.”) ☺

With a TBR pile of such epic proportions, the problem is a complicated one: how do you choose what to read next? Some acquaintances close their eyes and try for a random pick (possibly dangerous if choosing a tome near the bottom of the pile.) I’m not made of such stern stuff; I have to be in the mood for a particular type, so pulling out a cozy mystery won’t do when I’m in a humorous fantasy or a historical non-fiction mood.* Which means I often get lost in my TBR pile, looking for exactly the right book to scratch the reading itch of the moment. It can take a while...

So tell me about your TBR piles, NineteenTeen readers. Are they actual piles lovingly accumulated, or neatly typed lists of your next library borrows? Do you have a system for choosing what next to read, or is it a spur of the moment thing? And after you’ve posted here, go check out the Twitter hashtag #TBRDive, where readers are posting about their latest forays into the wilds of their TBR piles.

Have fun!


*Contrary to what I wrote here, my current reading is actually in the mystery realm--the Calleshire novels by mystery writer Catherine Aird, a series of semi-cozy procedural mysteries set in a fictional English county in the 20th century. Though I may pause my sojourn in Calleshire for Kim Newman’s new release, The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School. Decisions, decisions!

The By Jove party continues: Book View Café

I’m still happily celebrating the re-release of my contemporary fantasy, By Jove, into the world...and thought you might be interested in learning a little about its new publisher, Book View Café...because, as BVC’s  motto reads, you can never have too many ebooks.

Book View Café is really a pretty cool concept: it’s a cooperative publisher, meaning that the author-members of BVC fill all the roles of a trade publisher—we edit, proofread, format, create book covers, do marketing, distribution, and publicity, maintain social media accounts, and even run an on-line store— www.bookviewcafe.com—to sell our books (though they’re also available at ebook retailers such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, and Kobo. Some books are also available in print editions. The only thing BVC does not do is accept submissions: all books published by the cooperative belong to members.

Because Book View Café was founded by a group of fantasy and science fiction writers as a way to republish books to which they’d gotten publication rights reverted, you’ll notice that most of the 300+ books available in BVC’s lists are genre fiction—in addition to science fiction and fantasy you can find romance, mysteries, thrillers, young adult, and a smattering of non-fiction and memoir as well as a number of short story compilations by BVC members...some of those members being science fiction luminary Ursula K. Leguin, Vonda N. McIntyre, Sarah Zettel, Sherwood Smith, Laura Anne Gilman, Patricia Rice, and more—lots more.

So the next time you’re looking for a good book, you really can’t do better than to stop by Book View Café.  But when you do, give yourself an hour or two to get lost in the books...

Thank you for celebrating with me!