TBR or NOTBR?

January 2026

January 2025

Recently I posted a photo of my current TBR stack, which lives perilously close to my bed in earthquake country, on Instagram, and realized it looked very much like my TBR stack from the previous year. Some of the top piles had changed, but those books on the bottom are just waiting and waiting and waiting for me give them some attention.

I feel a little guilty about that. I feel bad that I constantly bring in new work instead of committing to what I've purchased before. I wonder about the stability of the stack. I wonder if this is all performative, if having a neverending stack of what I'm intending to read someday just makes me feel smart or cultured or better than.

But that's not why my TBR gets bigger over time -- my TBR gets bigger over time because I think having a big collection of physical books you intend to read, to hold in your hand and really grapple with, makes me a better writer. (And yes I think e-books and audio books count too, don't come at me!)

Here's why:

Once upon a time I was a first year MFA student at Columbia. I had some great teachers -- Binnie Kirshenbaum and Sigrid Nunez, yes that Sigrid Nunez, among them. I met Philip Roth there. Seriously. I sat in a small seminar around a table with Philip Roth. I was serious about writing fiction and I was so excited to be surrounded by other people who wanted to write fiction -- until I realized, very quickly, that the majority of my classmates wanted to write, but they didn't read widely. They didn't really seem to read at all. They had no interest in talking about new books, older books, classics -- it was all about their work, never about what they found inspiring or instructive or simply thrilling in the millions of books that had come before.

I left that program a year in and moved to LA for a lot of reasons, but what pushed me out of Columbia was my feeling that I was depending on critique and support from a group of other writers who didn't feel a part of a larger community of artists, who weren't engaged in the ether of the artform -- and that felt really empty to me. I wanted peers who had grappled in the language and the stories of huge numbers of writers, who could offer me not just their gut checks but their understanding of how what I was doing was related -- or breaking from -- what had come before.

I still believe that the best writers read widely. The best of us have giant stacks of books by our bed or our favorite chairs. We carry books in our bags, we read while we eat, we listen to audiobooks in the car or on the treadmill.

And we are aspirational about how much we can actually read -- hence the neverending TBR piles -- in the same way that we are aspirational about what we want to write. We are inspired by other writers every day. We stand on the giant stacks of their works we call our TBRs.