Reading in Public No. 53: A TBR-saving tool for readers who love a plan

Booker of the Month creator Deedi Brown on how she uses Airtable to organize her reading

Hey, readers! Some housekeeping before we get into today’s guest post. I am currently accepting pitches for Reading in Public essays! Do you have a reading habit or practice you’d love to share? Is there a trick you use when selecting books to read? Do you have a particular mindset that helps you get more out of your books? Are you currently working through a reading struggle? Send me a pitch at fictionmattersbooks@gmail.com. I’d love to talk to you more!

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Deedi Brown is the reader and creator behind the Instagram account @DeediReads and the Substack newsletter of the same name. In both of those spaces, she is known as a proud and vocal advocate for independent bookstores and as the fearless leader of the Booker of the Month Club—a Discord server and monthly Zoom hang dedicated to reading through the Booker Prize longlist in one year. Deedi’s reading life and my own intersect and overlap in interest ways and are vastly different in others. We both love reading from prize lists, participating in buddy reads and book clubs, and keeping up with the buzzy new releases. Deedi reads much more genre fiction than I do though, and always has smart takes on what’s happening in the worlds of fantasy and science fiction.

But the way our reading lives diverge the most is that Deedi is a planner. Unlike me, Deedi is capable of actually reading the books she says she’s going to read each month. A truly mind boggling achievement in my book! Because she organizes her reading so differently than me, I asked Deedi if she would mind sharing a little more about how she manages her epic to-be-read pile and how her system has improved her reading life.

So my darling planners, my anti-mood readers…this one is for you.

-Sara

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“So many books, so little time.” The fact that it’s quippy doesn’t make it less true. As avid readers, we’re constantly battling bookish FOMO.

I have a lot of respect for mood readers who finish one book, consult their shelves, and then pick their next one based on whatever’s calling to them in the moment. Or for readers who keep a little tiny list of constantly rotating possibilities like Sara does.

Alas, my brain craves something so much more intense than that.

For better or worse (and it does indeed go both ways), I’m the kind of person who doesn’t do anything without setting a goal for myself, even if it’s totally made up and inconsequential. I’ve never met a list I didn’t love. Or a plan I didn’t throw my weight behind. Or a spreadsheet I didn’t geek out over.

So it’s no surprise that when I was introduced to Airtable via my job in tech, I fell head over heels. In no time, I was using it to not only catalog my home library, but also to plan by TBR every single month.

I won’t go too deep into the mechanics of Airtable as a platform or the ins and outs of how I use it here (although you can read that in this post), but these are the basics: Airtable is essentially a super-powerful, user-friendly, tricked-out spreadsheet platform. You can view and organize your information any way imaginable, including grouping similar items together, displaying items on a calendar, and so on. I use it to assign books from my TBR to the month in which I want to read them, track publication dates and library due dates and book club meetings, mark down whether or not I own a physical copy of a book, and more. It’s also free to use as long as your table has fewer than 1,000 rows, or–in this case–books.

In short, Airtable is perfect for TBR planning and library inventory. For years now, it’s helped me not only get organized, but also manage that bookish FOMO and protect my mental health. Let me tell you how.

As you might expect, there are many practical benefits to using this platform to catalog my home library. I own more than 1,000 books, and I don't even know how many times I’ve been in a bookstore and found myself unsure whether I already owned a title. Having a searchable inventory that I can access from my phone has saved me from many a duplicate book purchase. I also recently reorganized my books by author’s last name, and being able to sort an existing list made that process at least 10 times faster. To be honest, I don’t know how I could ever go back to a world without my inventory.

Side note: Depending on how many books you own, I know that creating an inventory like this might feel like a daunting task. I made mine from scratch back when I owned far fewer books, and now I maintain it by simply waiting to physically put a new book on my shelves until I’ve added it to the AirTable list. But technology to the rescue — nowadays you can use The StoryGraph to scan the barcodes of all of your owned books, export the resulting list as a CSV, and then import it into Airtable. Bless you, StoryGraph.

Inventory aside, the more surprising benefits of using Airtable are the ones that come from being able to plan out my TBR to the level of detail that makes my reading life thrive.

I have so many reading aspirations: staying on top of buzzy new releases so I can discuss them with friends, getting through prize lists, joining book clubs and buddy reads, digging out of my mountain of backlist books — you know how it goes. Having a way to prioritize all those aspirations helps me feel much less anxious and much more satisfied about how I spend my reading time.

Here’s how it usually goes: As I approach the turn of a new month, I open up my TBR and see what past-Deedi has scheduled for future-Deedi to read that month. I make sure I’ve made space for anything with a hard due date — book clubs, buddy reads, library loans, that kind of thing. After that, it’s just the books I most want to read next. But sometimes I find that I’ve got too much there, or I’m not as immediately excited about a certain book anymore. In that case, I either push it back to the following month or move it over to the “shortlist” section of my Airtable — a holding ground where I put the books that juuuust don’t make the cut. I pull from that shortlist if I end up with any extra space later.

That’s not to say that I never change my own plan! I actually change it all the time — especially when I realize I’ve bitten off more than I could chew, which happens often (perhaps you can relate). For example, in October I originally wanted to read the last three Booker Prize shortlisted novels that were left on my TBR, but as I approached the end of the month, I knew I was running out of time. I looked at my Airtable and was reminded that the true “due date” is November 11 (because the award ceremony is November 12). Plus, I only had eight books scheduled for November so far, so I knew it would be no big deal to push one of those three back into the next month’s TBR. No stress.

But this way, I can make sure I’m carving out time for long-term reading projects that feel important to me or excite me rather than keeping them in my back pocket for “someday” or starting and then fizzling out early. One year I read a different Toni Morrison novel every month. In 2020, I read all the previous winners of the Women’s Prize so I could vote for my favorite in the contest they ran in celebration of its 25th year. And I run a book club that reads one Booker Prize nominee every month to get through the whole longlist in a year’s time.

Plus, slotting books into future months’ TBRs is often enough to satisfy me when I’m feeling the FOMO especially hard. You know how sometimes you feel the shopping bug, so you put something in your cart but wait to check out? And then a few days later, you find that your urgency to buy that thing has dissipated a bit? It’s like that.

For example, I marathoned the whole National Book Award for Fiction longlist in the last two weeks of September. During that time, I occasionally found myself bitten by the fantasy bug, but I really did want to finish the longlist before the shortlist was announced on October 1. The result is that right now, I’ve got my Black Sun trilogy reread scheduled for October through December, The Bone Season #1–4 scheduled for November through February (in time for book 5 in March), and more. There’s a chance I’ll shift those things around later, but in the moment, knowing I’d put those books on my schedule and would have plenty of time to read them soon helped me return my focus to the NBA longlist.

Photo courtesy of Deedi Brown.

I also receive a lot of advanced copies from publishers, which is a pinch-me privilege I try not to take for granted. But it’s not possible to read them all. So when I get a new ARC in the mail, I either schedule it for the future (usually the month before it will be published), or I put it on my shortlist with the pub date noted in my Airtable’s “due date” field. This makes it easier to resist the urge to read all those ARCs immediately — which wouldn’t leave time for much else.

And finally, it might sound ironic, but being overly detailed with my TBR actually helps me keep my reading ambitions from tipping into unhealthy territory — and it forces me to choose better books. We all know the feeling that if we could just squeeze in one or two more books a month, we could finally catch up and feel less behind on everything. But as Oliver Burkeman taught us, that’s flat-out untrue. There’s no such thing as the bottom of a TBR list; the more we read, the more we’ll add to our list, and the pressure will continue to snowball.

In order to resist the temptation to let reading overtake other things that are important to me (like sleep and exercise and spending time with my husband and daughter), I now purposefully limit my monthly TBR to 10 books. It’s so freeing! And, by forcing myself to really choose instead of adding “just one more” over and over again, I end up prioritizing the books I actually, truly, really want to read, and I let go of the books I’d be reading just because everyone else is.

I know my approach might feel over the top for some (maybe even most) people, but it works really, really well for me. If I tried to become a mood reader, I know I’d constantly worry that I wasn’t making the “best” use of my time, and I think I’d also feel a lot more regret about everything I didn’t pick up to read. This way, I can rest assured that I’m spending my time intentionally and thoughtfully, making my way through the books that matter to me each week, month, and year in reading. 

You can follow along with Deedi’s (meticulously planned) reading journey on Instagram and Substack.

Deedi’s home library. Photo courtesy of Deedi Brown.

For questions, comments, or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out by emailing fictionmattersbooks@gmail.com or responding directly to this newsletter. I love hearing from you!

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-Sara