Am I going to keep doing TBRs?

If a TBR stack falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it ever exist?

I can’t remember the first time I heard the acronym TBR.

When I worked for a publishing company out of college, the marketing and publicity teams were only just beginning to explore the power of influencers to sell books—and that’s because influencers were hardly a thing at the time. Immersed as I was in books all day, every day throughout those years, I’m fairly confident that I never once heard TBR tossed around as a catchy stand-in for to-be-read.

For the uninitiated and the bookstagram-less, “TBR” has become the shorthand used across bookish social media (and now beyond) by creators (and now, again, beyond) to share any content related to what they’re hoping to read in the near or distant future.

To make sure we’re all on the same page (pun intended), I’ll demonstrate with a few examples of how the acronym exists in the wild:

Intermezzo is on my TBR means that Sally Rooney’s latest is on one’s radar as an upcoming read

Check out my February TBR is a very lame version of a caption that one might use to share a stack of books they’re hoping and/or planning to read in the month of February

My TBR is out of control is a phrase often used by yours truly, indicating that there are just too many books and too little time and that I really need to get realistic about what I’m putting on my shelf and on hold at the library

I’ve written about this before, but I never really intended to be a ~bookstagrammer~. In fact, I’m still not sure I would call what I’ve created on SSR’s feed a “real” bookstagram. When I launched my podcast in 2018, I figured I’d use all of the standard social media platforms to promote new episodes, certainly not expecting to find that the bookish side of Instagram was its own world that would draw me in so fast that there was no real option to dabble. My intention was to share exclusively podcast news and podcast-centric reading updates, but before long, I was having so much fun seeing what my new bookstagram friends were sharing that I wanted to do more.

Since making the decision to give up the podcast, I’ve been thinking a lot about how my relationship with social media is going to change when I no longer have a show to promote, and I’m planning to share more about that soon. For now, though, I find myself considering a very specific little slice of my life online—and that’s TBRs.

My reading habits and my reading life changed a lot when I launched the podcast and started engaging more proactively about books on social media.

Most of these developments have been positive—and even those that I now have mixed feelings about have served me well for a few years.

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Currently Reading: Tehrangeles by Porochista Khakpour

This is our current read in the SWR book club and I am having the most fun reading it. It’s deliciously satirical and incredibly smart. If you are someone who enjoys engaging with critical commentary about reality TV as much as you enjoy watching reality TV, you’ll be drawn in immediately.

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I didn’t start sharing monthly TBR stacks immediately after joining bookstagram.

It had never really been my style to plan my reading the way I was seeing other people do online. I’m what some people would call a ~mood reader,~ and even my Virgo-est Virgo tendencies hadn’t once given me the inkling that I should be quite so strategic about a part of life that has always been relaxing.

But looking at the TBR stacks that other people were posting was fun! It helped get me excited about new books each month! Plus, I figured that these photos would be one easy way to be consistent about posting regular content.

Over time, I did find it helpful to come up with TBRs. Since I was juggling “required” reading for the podcast along with what I was trying to enjoy for pleasure, it’s been nice to have a plan each month, and gathering my TBR stack has become a fun ritual.

Now that I’m winding things down with SSR and the social media accounts that go with it, I find myself wondering if I’m still going to be the kind of person who makes a TBR. Will I start posting photos of my monthly stacks on my personal Instagram? Social feeds aside, will I stick with these monthly plans for my own purposes? If a TBR stack falls in the forest and no one sees/likes/hears it… did it ever exist?

These are obviously trivial questions in the scheme of things. But reading is a huge part of my life—and if you’ve found me here, chances are that it’s a big deal for you, too. Running a bookish podcast has made reading more of a public endeavor for me, which is, admittedly, weird. In the process of saying goodbye to SSR, I find myself doing a bit of untangling in terms of my relationship with books. And while this experience is quite specific to me, I think it’s an interesting commentary on how we all exist online in 2025.