I no longer have a TBR pile; I have a TBR mountain range. Although my concept is quite simple: I expect to live long enough to still read them all. If that will turn me into a nonagenarian, so be it!
If you wonder what "TBR" stands for, you must feel the same way I did when recently I stood in front of an automated money-dispenser which had been covered with the sign "This ATM is out of service ATM (at the moment)". Who said bankers have no sense of humour? We used to crack lots of jokes when I was with the ANZ Bank more than sixty years ago. The one that sticks in my mind is "Once you withdraw you lose all your interest". I understood the word 'innuendo' before I understood that one.
But back to my TBR mountain range: hoarders are known to hang on to some seemingly insignificant detritus — an old cup, a yellowed old newspaper (I had a neighbour in Canberra who kept every copy of the CANBERRA TIMES under his house) - which they couldn’t possibly throw away. I am not that kind of hoarder. What I hold on to are books.
I got my get-out-of-jail-free card when I discovered the Japanese word "tsundoku". Instead of castigating myself over every new book I buy, I tell myself that I'm practicing tsundoku. "That’s not a pile of unread books; that's a tsundoku", I tell my wife, the magic word transforming the pile into something unshackled from negative associations, into what I see when I look at it, a tower of potential reading experiences.
I leave you with Carl Sagan's now almost famous "What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
If that will not turn you into a tsundoku master, I don't know what will.
