How To

Resources to Make Your TBR List Explode

Katie McLain

Contributing Editor

Katie's parents never told her "no" when she asked for a book, which was the start of most of her problems. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Lake Forest College and is working towards a master's degree in library science at U of I. She works full time at a public library reference desk in northern IL, specializing in readers’ advisory and general book enthusiasm, and she has a deep-rooted love of all things disturbing, twisted, and terrifying. (She takes enormous pleasure in creeping out her coworkers.) When she's not spending every waking hour at the library, she's at home watching Cubs baseball with her cats and her cardigan collection, and when she's not at home, she's spending too much money on concert tickets. Her hobbies include debating the finer points of Harry Potter canon, hitting people upside the head who haven’t read The Martian, and convincing her boyfriend that she can, in fact, fit more books onto her shelves. Twitter: @kt_librarylady

The last thing I need is to add more books to my reading list, but I have to admit…I LOVE me a massive, professionally curated reading list. So many books to add! So many rabbit holes to explore! And because I am nothing if not an enabler for my fellow book lovers, I’m going to share some of my favorite resources. Your TBR list can’t even handle the insanity I’m about to throw at you.

Library Reads

Library Reads began in September of 2013 as a way for librarians to share their favorite books being published that month. Librarians would receive advance copies of books, vote on their favorites and submit annotations, and each month, the top 10 vote getters would be tallied into a user-friendly PDF for librarians to hand out to their patrons. Now, before I go any farther, I will say that I have a few bones to pick with this resource, namely the lack of diverse authors, a decreasingly diverse aray of genres, and the tendency for big name authors like Lee Child, Harlan Coben, and Nora Roberts to show up on the lists with some regularity.  That being said, this list still provides you with hundreds of annotated reading suggestions and I can almost guarantee you’ll find more than a few books to pique your interest.

Indie Next

The Indie Next list, courtesy of Indiebound.org, functions in a similar way to Library Reads – it’s an annotated collection of favorite titles released each month, as voted on by independent booksellers. And not surprisingly you’ll probably see a fair amount of overlap with the Library Reads lists as well. But Indie Next also tends to feature more diverse, lesser-known authors, more books in translation, and a greater variety of titles than you’ll find on Library Reads. Plus the archive is MASSIVE. You can spend hours flipping through each month’s selected books and adding stuff to your reading list.

Ultimate Reading List – Teenreads.com

“Our goal each month is to inspire you to read – and keep reading! With that in mind, we created the Ultimate Reading List – a list of more than 450 titles that we think make perfect pleasure reading for teens.” Yeah, you read that right. More than 450 titles. Some are YA titles, others are written for adults, making this one of the most well-rounded lists for YA readers I’ve ever seen. The website even offers handy downloadable PDFs: one for the list, one for the list with ISBNs & book descriptions, and a Banned Books version!

NPR Book Concierge

Starting in 2014, NPR did away with the traditional “Best Books of the Year” lists and created their Book Concierge, an interactive mosaic of books that lets you filter titles by genre, subject, theme, tone, etc. You can combine filters as well, so if you’re looking for “Book Club Picks” that are also “From the Dark Side” (dark or somber in tone), you can pull up a list automatically. The Concierge only goes back to 2014, but you can still see a list of NPR’s favorite books going back to 2008.

Publisher’s Weekly Best Books of the Year

Every year, Publisher’s Weekly compiles a list of approximately 150 of the best books published that year, from fiction to romance to YA to poetry to children’s to graphic novels to self-help to cookbooks, and more. The Best Of lists (or at least the ones made available online) go all the way back to 2009, and that’s not even counting the Best Books of the Summer feature they started running in 2012.

Award Archives & Short Lists

Ooooh, I love literary award lists! (They even get their own special subsection for this post!) Besides being able to go back and look at previous winners, I can usually find the archived short (and possibly long) lists for these awards as well! There are, of course, dozens of awards to choose from based on your own personal reading interests, but I really enjoy long, multi-genre lists that give me lots of options to choose from.  Here are a few of my favorites, but in general, I love the awards & reading lists generated by RUSA (Reference and User Services Association; a division of the American Library Association) and YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association).

So by this point, your TBR list is at about 5,000 books now and you’re probably hating me for enabling you like this. But this is okay! One of the best things about being a bibliophile is the thrill of discovery, and there is plenty to discover here!

Did your TBR lists get ridiculously long after reading this post? Hit me up and let me know!