How Long Will It Take To Read Your TBR Pile?

Every book lover has one: a "To Be Read" pile or "TBR" pile — but how long will it take to work through the whole thing? Well a new To Be Read Calculator from Read It Forward will let you figure out how long it will take you to get through all those gorgeous books waiting for you on your shelf. At least, assuming you don't buy any more. Which, if you're anything like me, might be a big assumption.

For most book-lovers, it's hard to resist the allure of a good book, and fortunately, good books are everywhere. Not so fortunately, there is only so much time in which to read them. And the rate at which you get book recommendations or read a review for something that sounds awesome or see a perfect-sounding book in the book store far outpaces the rate at which you can read those books. And then of course, there's that point when the Man Booker longlist comes out. And before you know it, what starts out as a couple of spare titles on your nightstand turns into a precariously tall stack.

And because it will take you forever to read that many books, you're pretty much bound to buy more before you finish with it. And just like that you have a positive feedback loop that ends in dozens of unread books. There are just so many types of books to read — classics, young adult, memoirs, not to mention books to reread.

So how long will it take you to finish all those beautiful books? And even more importantly, how long before you can let yourself go back to the bookstore and risk bringing home more titles?

Well the TBR Calculator from Read It Forward will help you figure it out. You input the number of books in your TBR pile, the number of books you read last year, and your age, and it will tell you when to expect that you'll be done with it.

For instance, here's mine:

My TBR pile is smaller than usual right now, and the books-per-year number is an estimate, but still, you get the idea. So when will I be done with all these lovelies?

Not too shabby. Though technically, I will no longer be 24 at that point in the year, but still. I think I can work with that. Only two months until I can buy books again. Of course, since that was so much better than I was expecting, maybe I could go buy some books now...

Obviously this is just an estimate — if you have War and Peace in your pile, for instance, or if all your books are shorter than your usual fare, then this number probably won't be quite accurate. But it can give you an idea.

So how long will it take you to read all your books? You can find the calculator here to find out.

Image: Lindsay Attaway/flickr