Surveying the Almighty TBR List
Coming to the end of one year and looking ahead to another: it’s a good opportunity to take stock of my virtual and physical to-read piles once more. Thanks to fellow book bloggers Naomi at The Writes of Woman and Eleanor at Elle Thinks for giving me this meme idea and tagging me in it, respectively.
How do you keep track of your TBR pile?
I have a ridiculously large to-read shelf on Goodreads, but that’s more like a vague lifelong wish list – some of them I own, some I’ve only heard of and want to investigate further, some I’m desperate to get hold of, and so on. I recently culled my online TBR and cut it by about 10%, but it’s still overwhelming. In real life, I take occasional inventories of the unread books in our flat (192 at last count). However, this doesn’t account for the fact that at least half of my book collection is still in my parents’ house in the States. While I’m back there for some time over the holidays, I enjoy gazing at my books and choosing a select few to bring back in my suitcase. On this trip I’ll be boxing them all up to go into storage. When shall I ever be reunited with them?!
Is your TBR mostly print or e-book?
If I only consider the books I already have access to, there are more unread print ones on my shelves than there are e-book approvals through NetGalley and Edelweiss. There’s not all that much in it, though; I might estimate the print TBR at 400–500, while I have about 300 books at my disposal through those online sources and new titles come up for request all the time.
How do you determine which books from your TBR to read next?
This generally depends on review deadlines, library due dates, and e-book expirations. In some sense, then, my reading list is completely imposed on me from outside. However, I always make sure I let whimsy guide some of my choices. Next year I hope to be even better about just picking up a book off my shelves and starting it for no reason other than instantaneous interest.
A book that has been on my TBR the longest
On the virtual TBR: probably Fast Food Nation and some of Margaret Atwood’s back catalogue. On the vague list in my head: all the more obscure Dickens and Hardy titles.
A book I recently added to my TBR
Rochester Knockings: A Novel of the Fox Sisters by Hubert Haddad.
A book on my TBR strictly because of its beautiful cover
I love the beard-house on the cover of Know Your Beholder by Adam Rapp.
A book on my TBR that I never plan on reading
Will I really pick up Martin Amis’s novels, or Ian McEwan’s early work? How about those obscure Thomas Hardy novels like A Laodicean and A Pair of Blue Eyes?
An unpublished book on my TBR that I’m excited for
I recently started Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld (to be published on April 19, 2016). Her novel American Wife is one of my absolute favorites, so I was excited about her Pride and Prejudice retelling and lucky enough to be sent an advanced copy. I’m not that into it yet – the third-person omniscient voice is taking a while to get used to because first-person female narrators are Sittenfeld’s forte – but I hope it will pick up soon.
A book on my TBR that everyone recommends
I’ve encountered almost universal praise for Elena Ferrante’s four autobiographical novels, the first of which is My Brilliant Friend. They’re on my priority list for 2016.
A book on my TBR that everyone has read but me
1984 by George Orwell.
A book on my TBR that I’m dying to read
Some of my priority books to get hold of are Nell Zink’s novels, the final two books in Jane Smiley’s The Last Hundred Years trilogy, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast, and Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig. I’ve also been meaning to read The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert for ages, and I’m intrigued to try The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide.
How many books are on your TBR shelf?
5,664 on the Goodreads shelf; maybe 500 in the print queue.
People I’m tagging:
Shannon at River City Reading
Lucy at Literary Relish
What Makes a Review Popular?
I’ve only been reviewing on Goodreads for a couple years, but in that time I’ve noticed some contradictory trends. The most-liked reviews can be thousands of words long or two sentences; disjointed ramblings or concise analysis; gif after gif (screen captures of moving or still images from TV or film) or pure text; strewn with typos or perfectly honed; personal or detached; gimmicky or straightforward; gushing praise or forthright dismissal. In other words, I’m somewhat puzzled as to what makes a review popular.
To some extent it’s down to the popularity of a reviewer: the more friends and followers they have, the more likely people are to ‘like’ their review (if you’re not familiar with Goodreads, it has a ‘like’ button just like on Facebook, and reviews of a certain book then arrange themselves in order with the ones with the highest likes on the top). But this isn’t a sure thing. Although top reviewers probably account for a good percentage of the most popular reviews, there are always those sneaky book reviews that come out of nowhere and go viral.
Here are my thoughts on what is likely to make a review popular, thinking not just of Goodreads but of other sites I’ve worked with:
The book has buzz already, and/or has won a major prize.
By far, my most popular review ever is of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries [458 likes]. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2013.
My second most popular review ever is of Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry [264 likes]. It was a New York Times bestseller and especially successful with the bookish types on Goodreads.
To my knowledge, our most popular article ever published on Bookkaholic was a book debate we did about Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. I rated it 3 stars, while my opponent, an Australian blogger, gave it 5.
There’s thousands of 5-star ratings for Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, the 2015 Pulitzer winner, so while mine is not one of the top reviews by any means, it’s still my fifth most popular one at 62 likes.
You get in there early.
Mine was one of the first reviews of The Luminaries to hit Goodreads, thanks to an advanced reader’s copy sent to me by We Love This Book. I also managed to review A.J. Fikry a few weeks before the publication date thanks to an Edelweiss download. With an early review, you can sometimes set the trend.
Helen Macdonald’s superb memoir, H is for Hawk, was released in the UK about a year before it finally arrived in the States, so that allowed my review time to gain some momentum (though not as much as a review that contained lots of photographs, something I still haven’t figured out how to do in html). It’s my sixth most popular review at 48 likes.
You epitomize the positive (or dissenting) response.
My third most popular review is of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being [138 likes], one of my favorite books from 2013 or any year. That was an unreserved 5-star rating. My 5-star review of Jo Baker’s Longbourn, my fourth most popular at 64 likes, went up the week of publication and started off strong before being overtaken by some other positive reviews.
By contrast, my reviews of The Luminaries and A.J. Fikry are lukewarm and critical, respectively. For the latter, I seem to represent the negative response: people who were disappointed by how clichéd and sappy a promising bibliophile’s novel turned out to be.
[Note: The above numbers were correct as of October 12, 2015; I will now stop updating them as it was taking up too much of my time and memory! My Goodreads teaser for A Little Life has now overtaken H is for Hawk as my sixth most popular review.]
Do you have any theories as to what makes a review popular? If you’re a blogger and/or reviewer, what have been some of your most popular pieces?
All comments welcome!
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 