How to Fall in Love with Your Bookshelf Again and Find Joy in Your Unread Books

My favourite piece of built-in decor that I’ve put into my house has got to be my bookshelf. It spans the entire wall of my living room and surrounds the archway that leads into my dining room. It gives cozy, warm vibes, and it always inspires me to read.

Of course, inspiration does not equal action, and I fear I have read less than half of my books.

For a while, I liked to say I was a book collector, which is a separate hobby from reading. While collecting is fun, I only really said this to excuse my constant abandonment of the books I wanted to read. I liked having books, but life always got in the way and eventually I had a mountain of stories that hadn’t even had the pleasure of having their spines cracked.

I’ve gotten better over the past year and I've cut back quite a bit on book buying, which is a step in the right direction. That doesn’t mean I’ve made any progress on closing the read-unread gap that exists on my home shelves, though. I confront it daily. I’m ashamed.

So, this year I’ve set a goal to read books I already own. I want this plan to last, so I've developed some ideas to keep it fun and exciting so I don't get distracted and buy a new book. This plan has 3 phases:

• Find a book tracker
• Select your books
• Read your books

I can help you to kickstart phase 1 & 2, but phase 3 is in your hands.

If you’re like me and you have a gigantic TBR pile looming over you, I hope these ideas help you.

Phase 1: Tracking your Reads

A good book tracker at minimum will allow you to keep tabs on your progress and reference your TBR. If it has a rating system or notes functionality, all the better. I love being able to go back after I finish a book and read all the hot takes I had before I hit the end.

Besides how cool it is to have a log of your personal library, using a tracker has a lot of benefits. The act of tracking any type of progress improves motivation, reliability, and creativity. When you're more motivated, you're more likely to succeed.

I use an app called Handy Library. It logs and organizes your books by pulling data after you scan the ISBN. The app stores the cover art, book title, synopsis, price, publisher, release date, genre, page count, and even pulls in the Goodreads rating. It also includes the option to track pages read and leave notes.

I love using this, but if you aren't into apps, a spreadsheet or a journal would work fine.

Note: Handy Library is free up to 100 books. After that there’s a one time fee to continue to use it. I'm currently on the free version, and not sure if I'll upgrade yet. There are tons of apps that do similar things out there, so ‌definitely browse and use what feels right to you.

Phase 2: Deciding What to Read

Picking a book is the hardest part. Every time I look at my shelf of unread books, I become immediately overwhelmed and abandon ship because there are so many books. I have no idea where to start. If this is your issue as well, give one of the below ideas a try.

Roll for Reading

I love the trend of people assigning numbers to things and rolling for whatever. Roll for Sandwich was the first instance of this to go viral (I could be wrong), but it works everywhere. In Roll for Sandwich, the creator rolls dice to select each element of his sandwich. Regardless of the outcome, he makes the sandwich and eats it. I'd love to apply this idea to my bookshelf. Except the eating it part, of course.

When you need to pick a book, the dice can decide on the genre, tropes, cover design, or anything to narrow down your selection. All you need is a catered list and a set of dice. I made my list with the intention of using a D20, but you can make it work if you only have a classic 6-sided die available. I had a great time making my lists, but feel free to make your own. If you want to try mine you can download them here for free.

Rolling a dice likely won't be specific enough to pick out a single book for you, but it can help to narrow it down. The more you roll, the smaller your pile of potential reads will be, especially if each roll uses a new key. For example, I've set myself up with two keys. My first role decides the genre, then the second roll narrows it down further based on other story elements.

I had a lot of fun setting this up, and I'd love to expand on it to create lists of tropes and cliches for different genres. It could even be a fun writing prompt generator.

If you don't like dice, you can try a randomizer. If you have a spreadsheet of your books, this will be easy. If you’re using an app to log your books, most of them have the option to export a .csv file so you can make one. This tutorial is great for randomizing a list in Google Sheets.

Blind Date with a Book

I’m sure we’re all well-versed on the concept of blind date with a book. In case you’re not, it’s when a book shop has a collection of books all wrapped in plain paper so you can’t see what they are. Usually there's a vague synopsis or a genre label written on them so you aren't going in completely blind. This way you know you're buying a book that fits within the realm of your interests.

I absolutely love these. I’m a total sucker for mystery items, and I usually can’t help myself when I see a setup of mystery books on a table somewhere. I love the mystery of it! It's so fun to buy something you don't have to pick out yourself. So why shouldn’t I bring that thrill into my own house?

If your TBR is a mountain, it’s not realistic to wrap them all. I would never suggest that. If I give this a go, I'll likely pick 5-10 books with the goal of reading them before the end of the year. I'm a little concerned that any clues I write will be a dead giveaway since I already own them, so I might skip that part. I'll see what the moment calls for. Leaving them blank could be fun though, it'll make every read a total mystery.

If you have friends who also like to read, making an event of picking & wrapping books from each other’s piles would be a great way to take this on. This way, you won't know what books are being wrapped. The clues will be from someone else's perspective too, so the books might be more difficult to guess.

Open these at whatever intervals make sense for you. If it's once a month, once every 3 months, or whenever you feel like starting a new book.

There's only one rule I'll attach to this plan: If you unwrap a book, you must read it.

The Tiny Bookshelf

If you’re crafty like me, you might think these tiny bookshelves people are making are pretty cool. You make a tiny book for everything you read and place them on a tiny bookshelf. It acts as a kind of trophy to show off the books you've read. This is great as a reward for finishing a book, but what about your unread books?

What if you pre-made tiny books for your entire TBR? What if you dumped your tiny TBR in a little bag and drew one out when you needed something to read? Then, once you’ve read it, reward yourself by putting it in your official tiny bookshelf.

This would be a lot of work up front, but would be so fun and so worth it. Plus, who knows? Forcing yourself to craft tiny versions of all your books might spark a new curiosity for them. It might get you excited to read books you've forgotten about.

These tiny books are super versatile as well. The most popular use is the tiny bookshelf, but I've seen others put tiny books in all kinds of things. Christmas ornaments, wall hangings, shadow boxes, and even jewelry.

If you want to give this a go but you don't want to format every book cover for every book on your TBR, don't fret. A quick Google shows that there's lots of templates online. If a template is still too much to work with, you can find downloadable files all over Etsy.

As for making them, I found this tutorial really helpful.

Make 2025 the year you read from your TBR

If you lack the time or motivation for the work required of my ideas so far, I have one last option for you:

Walk up to your bookshelf, TBR pile, whatever it is, and close your eyes. Wave your arm back and forth and the first book to touch your hand is the one you read.

I know life gets busy, and it’s easy for reading to take the back burner with everything else going on. If you love to read but can’t imagine finding the time for it, my advice to you is this: make your reading goal for the year low. Just because there are a ton of people online saying they read 50+ books in 2024, doesn’t mean you have to. Just because your TBR contains 100 books, doesn’t mean you have to read them all in one go.

Last year I only read 2 books, and I ended up really enjoying both of them. Sure, my reading goal for the year was a lot higher, but 2 is better than 0, and I'm grateful for the experiences they gave me. Hopefully this year will come out higher, but hey, who knows?

The methods I’ve outlined here aim to integrate the love of reading back into your life. If you’re like me and you’ve felt it fizzle out in recent years, I hope a creative activity can help ignite it for you again. Whether it’s mystery books, dice rolling, or picking a tiny book out of a hat, let’s smash those TBRs this year.

Happy reading!