The Long TBR

Recently, without planning to, I’ve found myself doing something unexpectedly delightful: reading books I’ve been meaning to read for 20 years or more. For me, that means books I’ve been meaning to read since middle or high school. I have found this to be incredibly wonderful, and I highly recommend it. It all started when I picked up a battered, used copy of Song for the Basilisk by Patricia McKillip that I had on my shelf but had never read. This was back in October, and I have since (with a few exceptions) been on a pretty serious Patricia-McKillip-Books-I-Have-Not-Yet-Read kick, which is quite a few books, all of which I have been meaning to “get to” since I was about 14.

After Song for the Basilisk (which was wonderful) I cracked open my one-volume edition of The Riddle-Master trilogy. My best friend had mentioned it way back in middle school, and she has excellent taste in books, so there is precisely no excuse for why it’s taken me so many years to pick it up. I’ve just finished it, and I am already trying to decide if I want to pick up The Book of Atrix Wolf or In The Forests of Serre next. Or maybe I’ll reread Winter Rose, which I haven’t read since I was a teenager.

While deciding between these options, I started a new book I picked up at my local bookstore on a whim. And while I am enjoying it quite a bit, I find that I miss Patricia McKillip. Why? Of course, part of it is just that her writing is so beautiful. I would take vacations in her imagination if I could, which I suppose is what I’m doing when I read her books. But there’s also, I don’t know, a secretive feeling? Something mildly deviant even. Like I’ve declined an invitation to a loud and busy house party (BookTok)—a party I’m definitely supposed to be at for some reason (Goodreads)—because I’d rather sneak off into the woods in search of a clearing where I can be alone. Or more accurately, alone with a book, which is not quite the same thing.

These “alone in the woods” books, books like Patricia McKillip’s—while swiftly becoming classics in my opinion—just aren’t part of the looping, incessant, self-referential, cultural conversation that is constantly unspooling across the engagement-driven ether. No one’s really talking about them, which means they can be read in a sort of isolation. Honestly, it feels a lot like reading before the internet was powerful enough to transmute all experience into content. Back when you’d pick up a book while loitering at a bookstore, often not knowing what anyone else thought of it, not even knowing anything about the author beyond what was printed in the book itself. And if you bought the book, it was simply because you liked it. Something about it called to you. And never would you ever have considered taking a picture of it on your camera, getting the film developed at K-Mart, making hundreds of copies, and mailing them by hand to everyone you had ever met along with some strangers just for good measure. That would have been exceedingly strange.

But back to this book you’ve picked up. Maybe it was the cover (I will read anything with a Kinuko Y. Craft cover) maybe it was the title. I’ve even bought books because I loved their color palette. It’s my experience that the books you need aren’t particularly picky about how they snag you; books are such humble creatures that way. But the point is this: back in the before times, you got to experience your own honest reactions to a book first, without thinking about what clever things you could say publicly about it, what (vaguely performative) statement you could make by giving it 1 star, or about how you might use it as a strategic lever to boost your own social clout. In other words, you got to experience the book as intended. As a missive from one soul to another.

You see, these books at the bottom of the long TBR, they have become a bit wild. They are feral and overgrown with briars, shrouded in moonlight and mist. But if you open them, you might just find a clearing in the woods. They don’t follow the beat structures that have come to dominate speculative fiction, and yet they work wonderfully as stories. They are not didactic, and yet they have strong moral cores. They poke holes in the status-quo of their times, but without using subversion as a sort of metonym for thematic depth, hoping you won’t notice when actual thematic depth fails to materialize. Even as their resonances and harmonics reverberate around us, they are not of the moment. Rather, they remind us that this moment is but one among many, and there is much to be learned by both lifting your gaze and turning it inwards.

This is not to criticize all, or even most, new books. Every year I read wonderful new releases that enter my own personal canon. But more and more, for the time being at least, I anticipate I will foray into the deep netherworld of the Long TBR, seeking that old feeling of being alone with a book. And yes, I freely admit that there’s a good dose of nostalgia at work here. I don’t care. I’m allowed to be nostalgic, and so are you. My other best friend has taken to painting LOTR/van Gogh mashups for precisely this reason. We’re all allowed.

And if you don’t have a long TBR to draw from, I suggest time travel. Go to a used book store and browse the shelves. Leave your phone in your pocket or your purse. Wait for a book to snag you. Maybe even one you had no idea existed, written by an author you’ve never heard of. When you’ve got a book in hand, don’t google it. Not the title, not the author, nothing. Just look at the book. Give it your attention. If you buy it (use cash if you’re really going for the full black box experience) read it without telling anyone. No posts, no nothing. And read it knowing that you will never review it or say anything about it on a public forum. This book is just for you. Let it be your clearing in the woods. What do you find there? Contemplate it within yourself, keep it just for you. This doesn’t mean you have to like the book. Maybe you didn’t. But that too you can keep for yourself. Try it. There is a lot of pleasure in being a black box every once in a while, and you’ll likely get to know yourself better too.

So, what books lie at the bottom of my long TBR? Here’s a selection: Everything by Patricia McKillip I haven’t read yet, Deerskin by Robin McKinley, Wild Seed by Octavia Butler,The Wood Wife by Terri Windling, Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner, something by George MacDonald, Lilith is even on my shelf already. What books have you been meaning to “get to” for far too long? Maybe their time has come. Maybe they are already waiting for you, patient as only books can be, just beneath those brambles there, waiting to take you to your clearing in the woods.

The art accompanying this post is “Reading Girl” by the German artist Maria Heyck-Jensen, 1870-1940. Sourced from Artvee.