What Do You Consider Your “Official TBR”?

Hey there, friends! It’s me, Lila, back again and this time with a discussion post!

I’ve been wondering about TBRs a lot lately. In particular, I’ve been wondering about which books people include on their so-called “official TBR.”





The question floated into my mind a few weeks back when I stumbled upon the following video from Ariel Bissett in my YouTube subscriptions section:

When asking booktubers how many unread books they owned, Ariel received a wide spread of answered from three to seventy-five to two and three hundred unread books! The smallest answers were three, forty, and seventy-five and when Ariel remarked to the girl who had answered “three” that the girl had the smallest owned TBR, the girl abashedly told Ariel that she regularly utilized her library. This made me wonder…Outside of books that readers actually own, what do most readers consider their “official TBR”?

Now, my book collection is largely in the form of digital audiobooks which I own and thus have downloaded. So the number of unread (audio)books that I own is difficult to pin down exactly, but I’d estimate it’s around seventy, seventy-five-ish audiobooks. But I don’t just consider the unread books I own the only books I can put on my “official TBR.” And that’s where it gets tricky, friends.

See, I belong to four county/city libraries, all of which have digital audiobook collections. Those collections pool the digital collections of all of the libraries county-wide. In other words, they’re massive collections. And I have access to four of them. Having belonged to these libraries for years now, I’ve searched through the majority of their digital audio collections and bookmarked most all of the books I want to read—both backlog books and new releases. And I consider those books to be on my “official TBR.”

You may be wondering why. Well, here’s the thing: in these county’s physical libraries, you can take out a book at one town’s library and return it at another town’s library, so long as those libraries are in the same county. And these counties have a lot of libraries (for instance, the county I live in has at least six libraries, if not more). So each library has a kind of rotating collection and you can never be sure how long the books that are currently there will, ya know, actually be there. That being said, you can also request a book at one library that that library doesn’t own but another library owns and that other library will ship it over to the library you’re at (when it’s your turn in the wait list line), but that can take some time. The digital collections, however, are fixed, because they’re an online pool of digital resources and thus the resources there are available county-wide. So you only have to wait in the wait list line and not worry about the library not having your book and/or needing to have it shipped over.

Because of this system, I consider library books to be on my “official TBR,” because I know for sure that I will (eventually) get a chance to read any digital audiobooks the county library system owns.

But that makes me wonder—do most people consider library books to be on their “official TBR”? Or not? Also, on a tangentially related note, do people only consider owned books to be on their “official TBR”? Or do non-owned books that people want to read and are on their wishlist make it on their “official TBR” too?? Friends, now I’m dying to know—what books do you consider to be on your “official TBR”????

T E L L   M E   A L L   A B O U T   I T

• Do you include library books on your “official TBR”?
• How about wishlist books—do they go on your “official TBR” too?
• Or do you only put owned books on your “official TBR”?
• Basically, what books do you put on your “official TBR”???