I was browsing YouTube the other day, as I so often do, when I came across a tag used by booktubers (YouTubers with book-focused accounts) that caught my eye. Originally created by the channel Nicole & Her Books, the anti-TBR challenge is a twist on the usual TBR (to be read) lists. Rather than focusing on books that you intend to read, the anti-TBR features books which you are probably never going to get through.
Like a lot of people who love reading, I struggle with the fact that I can never possibly read all the books in the world, not even all the ones I want to read. The anti-TBR's charm lies in embracing this fact, allowing book-lovers to approach their reading with the aim of curating their choices, rather than feeling as though you have to read everything. This seems quite a liberating idea to me, and I especially like it since a lot of the books deemed part of the classic Western canon (and thus often considered must-reads) are those written by and focusing on white, cishet, English-speaking men. Embracing the idea of an anti-TBR opens up the possibility of exploring authors beyond the supposed "greats" of literature and allowing us to appreciate authors who have received less attention than they deserve.
While this is a tag that originated on YouTube, I have seen examples of people doing it in blog post form as well, so I wanted to give it a go myself. The challenge includes eight questions/categories, for which you choose one book, author, or series each. I have listed the questions below in bold, with my answers underneath. Please feel free to read through them and let me know how you feel about my choices - I have no doubt some will be controversial!
1. A popular book EVERYONE loves that you have no interest in reading?
Normal People by Sally Rooney.
If I had taken a shot for every time I've heard someone praise Normal People, I'd have died of alcohol poisoning back in 2019. Even a lot of reviewers and critics whom I respect and share similar tastes with have praised the book, but I still can't manage to muster even a little bit of enthusiasm for reading it myself. Part of this is probably because books focusing on heterosexual, male-female relationships usually seem incredibly boring to me, and Normal People doesn't add enough punch to its plot summary to get me to read it (or even watch the tv series adaptation, for that matter) in spite of that.
2. A classic book (or author) you don’t have an interest in reading?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
Answering this question posed something of a challenge for me, since (like the rest of society) I struggle to define exactly what counts as a "classic" in the realm of literature. I eventually decided to restrict my options for this category to well-known books that were published more than a hundred years ago; hence my exclusion of my first choice, Kingsley Amis.
I am choosing Huckleberry Finn rather than Mark Twain here, because I have technically already read some of Twain's work (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as well as a few short stories). Twain's other work didn't impress me sufficiently to motivate me to read more of his writing, nor do I feel compelled to read this book based on its place in the American canon. There is also the fact that this book is sometimes criticised as racist - while I couldn't testify as to whether or not that's the case, I can't help but feel that if we want to read books which do address racism (as this one apparently does), it might be better to read books that are actually by people of colour rather than white men with no stake in the matter.
Also, Twain famously hated Jane Austen and declared that "Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig [Austen] up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone." As a fan of Austen, I take some offence to this.
3. An author whose books you have no interest in reading?
Ernest Cline.
I have not heard a single positive thing about Cline, author of Ready Player One and its sequel, that could possibly compel me to read his books. Ready Player One sounds incredibly unappealing, like it was created to pander to nostalgic retro gamers while also being a self-insert male fantasy novel. Reading his awful poem Nerd Porn Auteur, which I initially thought was a misogynist parody of incel geek logic, was the last straw for me. I have the exact opposite of interest in reading any more of his work after that.
3.2 A problematic author whose books you have no interest in reading?
Roald Dahl.
This is a sort of conscious rejection, one which I have hesitated to make for a long time. Dahl is something of a saint of British children's literature in the UK, whose books are brought out year after year in attempts to get children into reading. He was also a virulent anti-Semite whose books have also been called out for undertones of racism and misogyny, so not the sort of author I would like to support, even in spite of his having died before I was born.
To be honest, I never read Dahl's books as a child (much too scary for my young self) and I never felt any great enthusiasm for them as an adult, but it's always hard to reject an author seen as so important to your country's literature - especially given that Roald Dahl was from Cardiff, thus possibly one of the most famous Welsh authors of all. Still, what little of his work I have read has felt lacking in empathy at best and outright cruel at worst - just reading about his short story collection Switch Bitch was enough to turn my stomach. Combining that feeling with my knowledge of his bigoted beliefs, and I find myself unable to read his books anymore.
4. An author you have read a couple of books from & have decided their books are not for you?
Jeffrey Archer.
I have read far more Jeffrey Archer books than I should have, specifically books 1-4 in the Clifton Chronicles series. For all Archer seems to have a reputation as a "master storyteller", I found his writing boring and predictable. His characters are either one-dimensional villains or utterly-faultless heroes, with no in-between. It doesn't help that Archer himself is a tax-dodging Tory, either. In any case, I won't be purchasing or reading any more of his books.
5. A genre you have no interest in OR a genre you tried to get into & couldn’t?
Travel writing.
I used to think that the main thing which appealed to me about reading was being able to mentally travel to places I'd never been in real life, so I thought that travel writing was exactly the kind of genre I'd love. Actually, it turns out that what I enjoy about reading is experiencing different perspectives from different worlds, not the perspective of one person as they travel to different countries and experience them from an outsider's perspective. The general air of privilege and fetishism in much travel writing also doesn't endear it to me. I've tried to get into the genre before, but I'm not sure I'll ever manage to find an example I like enough to counter my dislike of the category as a whole.
6. A book you have bought but will never read? (this can be a book you have unhauled/returned to the library unread)
The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski.
Back when I was studying World Literature in high school, I was tasked with finding a book from each continent to read and write about for the module. The Shadow of the Sun is one of the books I bought for the Africa section of the course. I didn't use it in the end, discarding it in favour of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's excellent novel Half of a Yellow Sun, and I have never picked it up since. I used to tell myself that someday I'd come back to it, but now I have no intention of doing so. I have gone off travel writing in general, and as someone who specifically seeks out books written by authors from the areas they are set in, reading a book set in Africa by a Polish journalist doesn't really appeal to me. Kapuscinski has also been accused of racism and gross generalisation in his writing about Africa, most prominently by Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, making me even less inclined to read his work. I would much rather read work by authors who are actually from Africa, such as Wainaina or Adichie, than spend my time on Kapuscinski's.
7. A series you have no interest in reading OR a series you started & have dnf’d (didn't finish)?
Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.
Unlike a lot of the other authors I've chosen for this post, who I either strongly dislike or avoid due to problematic beliefs, J. R. R. Tolkien is an author I feel thoroughly apathetic about. I have no problem with the Lord of the Rings books; I just have no interest in reading them. I did previously read Tolkien's earlier book The Hobbit, thinking it might finally reveal to me the Tolkien appeal which had always eluded me, but I ended up finding it incredibly boring - hardly the best quality in an adventure book, of all things. The reputation of the Lord of the Rings books might be enough to convince me to read them in spite of all this, if it weren't for the fact that they seem so interminably long. As things stand, I have no intention of attempting to slog through them anytime soon.
8. A new release you have no interest in reading?
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
I'm not entirely sure this counts as a new release since it won't actually come out until April this year, but I think it's close enough that it works for this answer. Once upon a time, I would have eagerly anticipated a non-fiction John Green book. I used to adore his writing and his whole persona in general, reading as many of his novels as I could get my hands on and keenly following his and his brother Hank's exploits on their shared Vlogbrothers channel. Around six years ago, after being thoroughly disappointed by Green's fourth book Paper Towns, I became disillusioned with his writing as a whole. It started to seem pretentious and maudlin, and I quickly lost all enthusiasm for his work.
All that is to say that John Green's new release, an essay collection based on his podcast of the same name, now holds little to no appeal for me. I don't enjoy Green's writing, nor do I care to read another unqualified white man's perspective on climate change (see also: Bill Gates' new book). In short, I have no interest in this one.
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So that's it! Those are 8 books/series/authors which I have no plans to read anytime soon. If you read this far, let me know: do you agree or disagree with my choices and reasoning? What do you think of the idea of an anti-TBR in general? I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this.
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