Books I’m Not Sure If I Should Add to My TBR #1

Hello readers!

I would like your help! As explained on my Anti-TBR post, I am quite critical of the books that make it to my TBR. A lot of times they don’t make it, and a lot of times they do. Most of the time, however, the books simply remain on a sort of limbo, where I am not sure if to read them or not. So I convince myself I will add them if I keep hearing about them and if I still want them after a few weeks, but sometimes it isn’t that simple!

Some of the books below I have simply been unable to decide for years. Because I normally don’t take note of the “limbo” books, I had to force my memory a bit here. I’m sure there are many more that I will remember, which is why I wrote this post as a series.

If you’ve read any of the books below, please let me know in the comments what you thought!

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The Princess Saves Herself in this One, by Amanda Lovelace 

I don’t like poetry a lot and I hardly ever read them. So I am very hesitant to add one to my TBR, but this one sounds so interesting! I’ve read very few reviews, and they either say “I hate this, it’s not even poetry”, or “I love it so much, it resonates with me a lot”. It tells a story through four point of views: the princess, the damsel, the queen, you. It sounds like a wonderful feminist piece, but it also sounds like it could be underwhelming.

Why I read classics + Why you don’t need to

Hello readers!

Most of us have books in our to-read lists that we feel we should have read by now. Some books that everyone knows a bit of the story already and a lot of people pretend they’ve read because it’s almost embarrassing not to. That kind of book we call classic. Or, as Mark Twain puts it:

‘Classic’ is a book that people praise and don’t read. – Mark Twain

The other day I was going through my to-read list with the spirit of Let’s Get This Organized and realized that most of the books I deleted from it were classics. It got me wondering why it was that I seemed to have put so many classics on my list that I clearly didn’t want to read, and why I didn’t seem to be so attracted to classics in general.

I came to the following conclusions:

1. The blatant racism, misogyny and ableism which are very common in such books bother me a lot. Putting the stories in the context in which they were written only works so far for me – I lack patience and excel at being critical. Which means I have to put myself in a very particularly lenient mood to read a classic.
2. Most of those stories I know by now, including how they end. There are movies, discussions, articles everywhere, and it feels a bit useless to read I book whose story I already know.
3. I find many classics’ writing style boring. Too many rely on far too much description and introspection, meaning not all that much happens. Which is ok for most of them, I just need to be in the mood for that.
4. Some of those I felt like I “needed to read” to complement my literary education. Nowadays I don’t think I need to read anything in particular, especially if I don’t want to.

Discussion: What do you put in your bookish spreadsheet?

Hello readers!

This post is categorized under “Discussion”, but probably should have its own category of “Help me please”. I am going to start putting the books I review under a spreadsheet, as I would like to collect more information than I can do with WordPress and Goodreads alone. The things is: I am not sure of all the categories I’d like to put! I got some inspiration from this Book Riot post and this Lose Time Reading post.

The idea is to make future lists, statistics and organization easier, both for blogging and personal life. So here are the categories I’ve come up with! Please let me know if you have ideas of what else I should add!

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General Info:

• Title
• Author
• Publisher
• Date published
• Pages
• Standalone? Y/N
• Name of series
• Number in series

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Blogging Data:

• Review posted? Y/N
• Date review was published
• Rating
• ARC? Y/N
• Genres
• Recommended? Y/N

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Info for Statistics

• Author gender
• Author nationality
• Author POC? Y/N
• Book setting
• Date started
• Date finished
• How I got the book (bought/received by Netgalley, etc)

Goodreads Challenge: Do you do it?

Hello book lovers!

When it comes to the Goodreads reading challenge, I’ve seen quite some opinions around, and I thought it would be interesting to see what you guys think about it. Personally I use the feature, since then I can keep track of what I am reading and how much I read that year. It keeps a digital record that allows me to go back to it and analyze it as I will – often in the beginning of the year I check what I read the year before and notice some sort of pattern that I want to explore more or avoid, for example if I read too many thrillers, I will try to vary to other genres, if I read books from too few different countries, I will put an effort and plan to diversify, etc…