My TBR pile is not a pile. It is a distributed system. There are books on the nightstand, books in a stack beside the desk, books on a shelf labeled 'soon,' books in a Kindle library, books on hold at the library, and books I have promised myself I'll get back to stored in a Notion database. The total count is somewhere between 200 and 400 depending on how generously I define 'TBR.'

I have made my peace with this. The pile is not a to-do list — it's a record of enthusiasms and intentions, and there's value in keeping it even knowing that most of those books will never be read. The act of acquiring them was an act of attention. The pile remembers what I was interested in.

The books I'm most likely to read are not the ones I've owned longest. They're the ones I was most recently excited about. This means the pile inevitably grows. I've decided that's fine.