Down The TBR Hole is a meme from Lost in a Story that revolves around cleansing your TBR of all those books you’re never going to read and sort through it all to know what’s actually on there.

How it works:
– Go to your Goodreads to be read shelf
– Order on ascending date added
– Take the first 5 (or 10 if you’re feeling adventurous) books
– Read the synopses of the books
– Decide: keep it or should it go

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

They are an unlikely pair: George is “small and quick and dark of face”; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a “family,” clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation.

Laborers in California’s dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie’s unswerving obedience to the things George taught him.

✔️ Keep – It’s a classic and I’m pretty sure I have a copy of this book somewhere in my house. Add to this the “should have read this, but never did” pile.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Obsessed with creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley’s chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley near Byron’s villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world’s most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.

✔️ Keep – One of these days I will get to this novel. This might be one of the novels that’s been on my TBR the longest.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens’s great historical novel, set against the violent upheaval of the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author’s novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores many of his enduring themes—imprisonment, injustice, social anarchy, resurrection, and the renunciation that fosters renewal.

✔️ Keep – I’m unsure if I’ll like this book, but I feel like as an English major I should attempt to read some Dickens.

Emma by Jane Austen

Emma Woodhouse is one of Austen’s most captivating and vivid characters. Beautiful, spoilt, vain and irrepressibly witty, Emma organizes the lives of the inhabitants of her sleepy little village and plays matchmaker with devastating effect.

✔️ Keep – I think I’ll read this Austen novel before I read any of the other ones. I think I’ll enjoy this one as I love witty characters.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas’ epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.

✔️ Keep – I have a feeling out of all the books from this pile of my TBR, this one will be my favourite.

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Oh dear, I’ve kept all five. Will I ever get rid of any of these books off my To-Read shelf? See you in the next post!