Murder by Death

A lot of my BookLikes friends plan their reading in advance, something I've never even tried because I'm so purely a mood reader; I can bet that no matter what I choose to read for the month, it won't be what interests me when it comes time to read it.

But my physical TBR is getting unruly.  I know most of you have far larger TBR piles than I do, but I refuse to shelve books I haven't read, and since I can rarely use an e-reader, all my books are here and they're stacked up everywhere and it's getting to me.

So this week, I decided to try an experiment:  I took all my TBR books and sorted them into subject/genre piles.  I ended up with 11 piles.  Since I can usually get through 11 books a month without a problem, I grabbed one book from each pile and created a March reading stack (and an April and May stack too).

But won't I just run into the problem I outlined at the top of this post?  Well, probably.  But I decided to do this with the understanding that if I didn't want to read a book in my March stack, I could swap it out with another one from the same subject/genre.  I'm also free to read whatever else I want to read from my TBR (since I usually read more than 11 books a month).

Honestly, I think it's only a 50/50 chance of succeeding, but I need to try something because I'm starting to forget about books I've bought and that's never happened before and I don't like it.

So here's what I ended up with for my March reading (not including what's already on my Currently Reading shelf):

Manners & Mutiny - Gail Carriger 

Thirteen Guests - J. Jefferson Farjeon 

The Counterfeit Heiress - Tasha Alexander 

The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language - Mark Forsyth 

Raising Demons - Shirley Jackson 

The Quiet Gentleman - Georgette Heyer 

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris - Graham Robb 

Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper - Harriet Scott Chessman 

A Whisker of Trouble - Sofie Ryan 

Off I go!