It’s that time of year again, your birthday, and like every bibliophile, you probably received countless books or maybe a subscription to a bookish box, or maybe you decided to #treatyoself at BookOutlet or a local bookstore. We’ve all done it, there is no judgement. Now comes the hard part: how do we prioritize these new books among our ever growing To-Be-Read (TBR) shelf or bookcase. Recently, I took a look at my TBR and was shocked that I had more books on that list than on my read list. My thirst for new books has clearly outgrown my reading capabilities and I should probably take a look at it. So let’s talk about a strategy for organizing birthday books!


As part of my own initiative on my personal blog, I have been methodically going through my TBR, and I have found there are a lot of books on there that I really have no interest any more. I found this system from a book blogger (Lost In A Story), where every so often she takes the oldest 5-10 books from her TBR list and decides, do I want to keep this book or do I want to remove it? It’s simple and it can make room for new interests and gifts without making your list feel overwhelming. So once a month, I am taking the oldest 10 books from my list and making some decisions

However, there are quite a few books that I really do want to read and purging my list got me excited to read them again. Many of the books that were shortlisted were gifts, some from others and some from myself, that I received. So to focus on the positive aspect of cleaning my TBR shelf, I am going to list the Top 10 books that I received that I am most excited about and where the gift came from, including the birthday books. I hope that I can get these books onto the shortlist and hopefully read in the coming year.

The Countdown

All of these books were picked for me by friends or were selected by fellow bibliophiles for amazing book subscription boxes. I think these kinds of books are some of the best to read because they were picked with thought and love.

The Giveaway

In honor of Geek Girl Pen Pals’ 5th birthday and my subscription box problem, I would like to giveaway one OwlCrate subscription box to a fellow iggle!

Entry instructions

a Rafflecopter giveaway