Discussion in GIFs ~ My Trouble With TBRs and the Painful Truth

I have been wanting to write this discussion post for a heck of a long time, for this one reason.

People must think I am one hell of a LiAr. 

I know what you're probably thinking.... "Sofia doesn't really like the Legend Trilogy and the Throne of Glass Series! What has this world come to?" No, it's nothing about lying when it comes to my opinions about books, I am 100% honest about those.

But let's get real here. You would think I am a liar when it comes to TBRs. 

Let's see.... How many read-a-thons have I participated in where I actually read even a fraction of the books I had intended to read?

I'm going to go with a grand total of 0 books. 

It's not that I don't want to read those books, I have EVERY intention to read, review, and love all of those books on my read-a-thon TBR. I am the kind of person that loves lists, as well as making goals and striving to achieve them to the best of my ability. So you would think TBRs were perfect. 

Yet.... I'm Sofia. The other day I tried to analyze how many different ways I receive books, both physical and electronic. 

Review Requests     ~     Netgalley     ~     Books I Own     ~     

Physical Library Books     ~     Books Borrowed from Friends     ~     Phyiscal ARCs I Receive from my local Indie Bookstore     ~     

Electronic Library Books     ~     Impulse Buys     ~     Books Bought for Signings     ~     Kindle Daily Deals     ~     Blog Tours

Needless to say.... a lot. A good person would divide up the books they read by source so all review and pleasure books are equal. Yet that doesn't seem to be the case most of the time. I can't tell you how many times there have been impromptu visits to the library of bookstore that rattle my TBR, and reconfigure all of my careful plans. 

At the beginning of the month, a faithful little book blogger would resist the urge to read all of those books they want to read, and just plow through the two or three review books so that they could have commitment-free reading for the rest of the month. Instead, I am the kind of person that waits until two days before my blog tour date and/or review deadline before I start READING the book. 

Also, have you ever had a stack of ARCs (whether they're physical or electronic) that are being published during different points in the year, and you feel the urge to read the ARC being published THREE MONTHS from now instead of the ARC that was published FOUR WEEKS ago?

This happens to me on a daily weekly basis, whether in the context of ARCs, Blog Tours, or Library Books. Until around a week ago when I finally admitted the painful truth.

I'm a Mood Reader.

There, I said it. I'm putting it out there. I'm a mood reader. It has taken me almost a years worth of blogging to figure out that I read books in accordance to how I feel. While constructing my lengthy (of course) TBR, I realized that I was ordering the books by what genre/what mood they would put me in. I knew to stick fluffy contemporaries between high fantasies and "depressing" contemporaries. And I've been SO much happier because of it.

So there you have it, why I don't stick to TBRs (even if I am the type of person that normally would), and my HUGE self-discovery that wouldn't have occurred without blogging.