Leta’s How To: How To Choose Your Monthly TBR

Hello, dear readers!

Continuing with my trend of giving bookish advice, I wanted to start off this year with some more “how to” posts! Today’s post is all about choosing a weekly or monthly TBR.

Everyone’s TBR is going to be different based on their reading load. I’m going to talk about how I pick my monthly TBR here to give an example, but it wouldn’t be too hard to take my tips and pick your own based on the number and types of books you read every month.

1.     Think about how many books you want to read in a week or month. For me, I think about how many books I read on average, which is between 7 and 9 a month. Then I make a list of 9 or 10 books to read for the forthcoming month. For January, I chose 9 books. Those were:

–        Mexican Gothic

–        Sorcery of Thorns

–        King of Scars

–        Renegades

–        A Court of Silver Flames

–        From Blood and Ash

–        Beartown

–        Us Against You

–        Serendipity

I chose these books because I’m going to write reviews on them in the next few months. I chose A Court of Silver Flames because I’ve been wanting to reread it so badly and decided I didn’t want to wait anymore. On other months, I would choose ARCs from Netgalley because of their deadlines or the novels from The Ormsby Review because I have deadlines to read those as well.

I try to balance out the month so that I get everything done within deadlines while allowing myself to read at least one book for myself.

2.     So, my next tip is to think about what you need to read. Whether it’s for writing reviews, school assignments, or sites like Netgalley. When I was still in university and reading a large number of books every semester, I would rank all of those necessary reads. School books were first, then those with deadlines outside of my own control, and then the reviews I write myself.

3.     Pick different genres of books. For example, I put together a mock TBR for February as the Instagram photo for this post. That TBR was:

–        Archenemies

–        Supernova

–        Throne of Glass

–        All the Stars and Teeth

–        All the Tides of Fate

–        An Ember in the Ashes

–        Empire of the Vampire

Archenemies and Supernova are science fiction novels, whereas Throne of Glass, All the Stars and Teeth, All the Tides of Fate, and An Ember in the Ashes are all young adult and fantasy. Finally, Empire of the Vampire is an adult fiction novel all about – you guessed it – vampires. Having a variety of genres helps to keep me interested in reading. It allows me to read how I feel in the moment while still keeping on track with deadlines.

Those are my top three tips on how to choose your monthly TBR! I know these methods have helped me to keep up on reading for deadlines as well as raise the number of books I read per month. I hope they help you too!