Booking Through Thursday: TBR

This week's Booking Through Thursday question is a follow-up to last week's topic about unread books:

Do you keep all your unread books together, like books in a waiting room? Or are they scattered throughout your shelves, mingling like party-goers waiting for the host to come along?

Well, I've got loads of unread books on my shelves that aren't necessarily on my TBR list. So I'll just talk about the books I tell myself I am going to read someday. And those books are pretty much scattered out all over our apartment – on shelves, on tables, in boxes and bags, on the floor. Not so much like party-goers, though. More like unruly kittens, always tumbling about, and getting underfoot, and disappearing into hard-to-reach places, and never coming when you call them.

For a while, I played around with various ideas about what to do with the books on my "read soon" list. You know – those books I'm planning to read in the near future. Challenge books and ARCs. That sort of thing. Tried separating them out and keeping them on special shelves, or in a box all by themselves. But I ended up spending more time moving books around than I spent reading them. So now, I mostly just keep the TBR books shelved with the other books – those I've read and those I have no intention of reading but don't want to ditch. I do try to keep the recent ARCs in a pile all by themselves, but they frequently get mixed in with the other books – another example of best laid schemes going "aft agley."

As you can see, I've still got a few shelves in the bedroom with TBR books on them. (You can also probably tell that I'm not going to be featured on HGTV anytime soon.) This bookcase has some "read soon" books mixed in with books about to be stored, or just coming out of storage (hence the plastic covers on some). Of course, "read soon" is an extremely erratic concept around here.
The second photo is a close-up of a couple of the shelves – and I'm realizing that some of those are actually books I've started, but put aside for one reason or another. I really need to get back to those. Gee, maybe I should take photos of my unruly books more often.