Year of the Book Purge (AKA I Got Rid Of A Bunch Of Books On My TBR And It Feels Good!)

At the beginning of the year I started culling my tbr shelf on Goodreads with a fun feature called Down the TBR Hole, wherein each week you pick 5-10 books on your shelf and then decide whether you want to keep them or not. It was a really handy feature because it forced me to sit down, go through my tbr list, and really think about the books I want to read the most, and just get rid of the ones I knew I was never going to get to. Today I want to share the results of my culling with you... it's kind of insane.
First, I should mention that I started this process in January and finished at the beginning of the summer, but I had my Down the TBR Hole posts scheduled all the way up to last week. So, below, I took my first screenshot before I started getting rid of books, the second one after I was done, and the third one I took maybe a week ago.



So thanks to the Down the TBR Hole feature, I got rid of 221 books on my tbr shelf... that's more than half of the books I had on that shelf! 😲

In the third screenshot you will see that the number went up to 307 from the 190 I went down to, but that's because after I was done with the Down the TBR Hole thing, I went back to my shelves and got rid of my must-read shelf (and I got rid of my to-pick-up-later shelf at some point too). For these two shelves I deleted, I basically went through the same process as my tbr shelf. For my must-read shelf I deleted the ones I knew I wasn't going to ever get to, and then the ones I decided I did want to read I moved to my main tbr shelf. And for my to-pick-up-later shelf, I moved the ones I wasn't actually going to pick up again to my dnf shelf, and the ones I did want to pick up again back to my main tbr shelf.

So, if we look at the number under my "All" shelf, I went from 1859 books down to 1543 which means I got rid of a total of 316 books I was never going to get around to reading.



That's... that's a lot of books 😅 I still have a ton of books on my tbr shelf (833 books combined from my want to read shelf and own-to-read shelf), but it's more manageable than before AND I know that all the books on there are books I really, truly want to read at some point.

Let me know if you've ever done anything like this before and how it went for you. And if you haven't, I highly recommend you do because it is so satisfying!