ngoomie tries Very Hard to reduce its TBR in 2026

As I say in my "About My Library" section on my profile, I have a horrendous habit of adding books to my TBR at a way faster pace than I can read them. There are nearly three thousand books in my TBR on my LibraryThing! And that's not even everything, I have a TBR on my StoryGraph (a site I only really use for getting recs) that contains a bunch of stuff I have yet to enter in my LT. There's no way I'll be taking huge chunks out of that this year, but any progress is good progress, yeah?

I plan to try and focus somewhat on books that I actually have in my possession already (whether they actually belong to me or someone else in my house like my mom/dad/brother), instead of books I take out from the library. But, well, I said that last year after I got ~50 books dirt-cheap at a charity book sale in summer, and then the rest of the year I barely touched those, so, heheh....

I also track videogames that slot into the sort of 'interactive fiction' category on my LibraryThing, and occasionally an article here or there, but those will be excluded from this challenge (they're not books, after all), so there might be a difference in how many books I say I've read here vs. what my stats page says.

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Progress so far as reported in other posts in the thread:
#1: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
#2: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
#3: All Tomorrows; The Myriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man by C.M. Kosemen/Nemo Ramjet
#4 Neuromancer by William Gibson
#5 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
#6 Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter
#7 War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
#8 The Haunted Vagina by Carlton Mellick, III
#9 If I Died Tomorrow I Would Eat Your Corpse by Wrath James White
#10 The Boys: Digital Omnibus, Vol. 1 by Garth Ennis
#11 (6 counted as one) The Boys: Herogasm, Vol. 1 / The Boys: Herogasm, Vol. 2 / The Boys: Herogasm, Vol. 3 / The Boys: Herogasm, Vol. 4 / The Boys: Herogasm, Vol. 5 / The Boys: Herogasm, Vol. 6 by Garth Ennis
#12 The Boys: Digital Omnibus, Vol. 2 by Garth Ennis
#13 Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Right now I'm trying to read Shadi Bartsch's translation of the Aeneid. I'm not really a huge poetry person, but the way latin poetry gets described in the intro to this book kind of sounds like it would be more my style than English poetry typically is... Had this happen a lot, where I hear about how poetry works in other languages, and it sounds more 'interesting' to me than what you can do in English. Really makes me want to put the pedal to the metal in actually getting fluent in literally anything else (I'm learning Japanese right now and neglecting it to hell).

Also a Discord server I'm in for city-local events is organizing a book club and the first book that was selected was Project Hail Mary, so I'll be starting that soon enough.

Funnily enough both of these already violate my loose rule to focus on books I own, because they're both library books :v

Oh yes, and, I almost forgot: I already finished A Christmas Carol earlier this month, so I've already got 1/75. But that was a book I started back in December. ...It's also a library book lol

Welcome! I'm also trying to work down the TBR, but am also having a hard time sticking to it.

Started and finished Project Hail Mary in a little over a week, making that my second book of 2026. It was an absolute banger and I'm very glad my book club picked it, getting me out of my weird rut where my brain just doesn't want to let me pick up any sort of popular works (whether this be books or literally any other medium). I hope the movie is as good because it seems like something my mom would really like! I also couldn't help but think all while reading it that my grampa woulda loved it.

Now hopefully I'll get back to chipping away at the Aeneid. I also just got All Tomorrows: The Myriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man from the library (which I'd had on hold since they added it to their catalogue as on-order sometime last year). Also, Wuthering Heights is now ready for me to pick up from the library, which doesn't seem like it'd really be my thing, but with the movie based on it coming out somewhat soon I'm kind of curious to give it a shot (and of course this violates my "books I own or TBRs when possible" rule again).

>3 drneutron: There's so many interesting books... Hard not to let my TBR list pile higher and higher :')

Y'know, I think I'm actually going to drop the Aeneid for now. I'm kind of having a hard time with it, my reading comprehension hits the shitter with poetry. I think I need to read more short-form poetry and work my way up to big, long epics. So that means All Tomorrows will be next, then.

Just finished All Tomorrows. Took me a bit because right in the middle I ended up getting distracted by a few things (some of which I know will eat way into my reading time the rest of the year lol) and because I'm bad at forcing myself to Do Things I think I would've left it a lot longer if only it hadn't just started to become overdue at the library!! I somehow didn't realize it was somewhat body horror-y before going into it, but I'm glad because that makes it even more of something that's super up my alley than it would be otherwise. Felt a little bit weird to read though just because it's a book that was recommended to me by my now-ex boyfriend and I've been feeling generally grumpy about that. There were mentions in the end section of some mild changes from the original digital version so I'm curious to maybe go back and read that one at some point (though certainly not right now!) and the details of where Kosemen got his inspiration from was really interesting. Also genuinely helpful seeing some information on his creative process, too.

Next up, ahh, I don't really know. I jumped into (actually, started) another book club which will be reading Neuromancer soon. And the other book club I'm in will be starting a new book soon as well (but I'm blanking on which right now). I never picked up Wuthering Heights from the library (I just couldn't get to it in time before the hold expired) and now the hold queue on it is, as you would totally expect, HUGE, so if I do end up reading it it'll have to be from an ebook I guess.

Just yesterday finished Neuromancer, my 4th book. I'm honestly eager to go read the next book in the series already... I'm torn between holding off for now since it might end up being chosen by the same book club later on, or just diving right in.

I'm not making great progress so far, but that's okay :p My reading always tends to ebb and flow throughout the year anyways. Past years on LT, you'll see sometimes I go months reading very little, and then have a sudden explosion of read books in the span of 1-2 months.

I'm in the middle of making my way through Wuthering Heights now, though kind of slowly because the language is throwing me a bit. The library queue cleared out way quicker than I was expecting, I'd imagine a bunch of people got it, were also thrown by the language, and then dipped. I wouldn't blame them! Not much different than how I had to drop the Aeneid because I didn't feel quite ready for it yet.

I'm also chipping away at Aspects in Astrology by Sue Tompkins in bits and pieces. I don't believe in astrology but it's fun to learn about anyways. When looking at my own birth chart, it gives interesting topics of contemplation, even if what it says by most interpretations is comedically off (how I differ and why is still worth considering). I've also been using it for character writing, and 'reverse-engineering' a chart for a character that fits what I've already laid out for them is a bit like a fun puzzle, and then the chart gives me potential direction on how to flesh out parts of a character I haven't touched on yet. I'll probably end up dipping into a lot more astrology books this year specifically because of the character writing thing, because I've been thinking about that a lot.

In a similar vein, I was reading The Negative Trait Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman & Becca Pugilisi but I've not really touched it for a while now :x

I also want to get back on cracking away at The C Programming Language (2nd ed). I got stuck with kind of a silly mistake and then got sidetracked by something else and haven't really returned since. Programming is just generally something I've been wanting to improve upon this year.

I've found that announcing what I'm going to read here before I read it just makes me nervous and less likely to actually read them...! So I ended up reading two books without doing that. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (book no. 5) which was a bit earlier in the month, and Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter (book no. 6) which I just finished last night.
Since I've been genuinely having a hard time reading, I think because I've essentially been sick for a good chunk of the year, I decided to opt for books that are either short or 'easy' (while still being enjoyable) or both. The Time Machine was short enough that I read it in one or two days, and Pollyanna is a kids' book (one I've always wanted to read) so it wasn't the most challenging thing in the world. Hopefully I can ease myself back into my more normal reading habits eventually and make better inroads to hitting 75 books!

Read three more books:

- The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
- The Haunted Vagina by Carlton Mellick, III (this was certainly something, lmfao, maybe up there as one of the weirdest books I've ever read)
- If You Died Tomorrow I Would Eat Your Corpse by Wrath James White

All 3 were books that were on my TBR either here or on StoryGraph, so yay, finally sticking to that intended loose theme. War of the Worlds I had been cracking away at since the start of the month. The other two I started and finished on the same day, intentionally picking kinda short books. I'm gonna maybe try and stick to shorter books for the time being since I'm still for whatever reason having a hard time sitting down and reading as much as I have previous years

Today I've started The Boys, Vol.1: Digital Omnibus but I don't suspect I'll finish that today also (maybe tomorrow?) — this is also something I've been interested in maybe reading for a while, but I don't think it was on any of my actual TBRs on any site. I intentionally went for the biggest possible omnibus of The Boys so I wouldn't somewhat artificially inflate my progress by reading lots of comic books...

More books:

1. Finished The Boys, Vol. 1: Digital Omnibus


2. I read through The Boys: Herogasm, Vol. 1, The Boys: Herogasm, Vol. 2, The Boys: Herogasm, Vol. 3, The Boys: Herogasm, Vol. 4, The Boys: Herogasm, Vol. 5, and The Boys: Herogasm, Vol. 6, which I'm going to count as one book, since these are essentially like one chapter each of this side story. I couldn't get a collected version of the whole side story in one volume like I would have liked.


3. Finished The Boys, Vol. 2: Digital Omnibus. Herogasm takes place in the middle of this so I'd started this before starting that.


4. Finished Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Read this one for a book club, and I'm really glad they picked this one. Though it was in my TBR, I think it likely would've taken me a lot longer to get around to this book than I did just because I had other books I found to be higher priority. I really liked this one, it's like House of Leaves but if the house was blesséd and holy instead of fucked up and evil.... And speaking of which, Piranesi seems to, alongside House of Leaves, fall under two sort of "microgenres" I've noticed I really like:
   1. fiction containing architecture that looks like it should be human-made, but exists without human intervention or supernaturally
   2. fiction with locations that are so full of "spirit" (literal or figurative) that they almost feel like characters unto themselves
   Piranesi and House of Leaves are both, The Shining falls into the second though feels superficially similar to the first (The Overlook is in its entirety a manmade building, just one that has a lot of literal spirit), and I would argue that Kane Pixels' Backrooms (the YouTube series, I haven't seen the movie yet, but would very much like to) does not fall under the second but does fall under the first. Even though Kane Pixels' Backrooms has the occasional creature in it, all in all I would say the location as a whole feels dead, soulless, and empty. It doesn't even feel like there's something malicious about the location itself as with the house in House of Leaves, the Backrooms just Are and they do not have an agency. They're utterly hostile in how dead and inhuman they are. In this way, it's like the polar opposite of the House in Piranesi, a location that, while still not "manmade", comes indirectly from the dreams and knowledge of mankind, and feels (in a way) warm and vibrant, as well as loving, and actively so.

Outside of this, I've also read The Boys: Highland Laddie, Vol. 1, but as with Herogasm I'm going to count every volume of that as one book, so I won't be putting it in my OP for now... And just like my earlier distraction of playing Fallout: New Vegas, I've started playing Fallout 4, and that's definitely going to be another thing that sucks my time away from reading :'D

Hadn’t thought of Piranesi and House of Leaves as two sides of a coin, if you will. But yeah, that makes sense. I really like those microgenres too!