TBR jar and what does that mean

When I first saw the letter combination of TBR, I had no idea what that meant. TBR what? What does that mean? Then I found out the letters stand for To Be Read, and felt a bit stupid. But I was new to the booktube community on YouTube, and forgave myself this little bit of stupidity. Later I saw a bunch of videos titled something like 'my TBR jar', and, interested, watched those. And now, some time later, I have my own TBR jar.

The idea of this jar is simple; write the names of the books you have owned for ages and haven't gotten around to reading on pieces of paper, put the papers in a jar, pick one every month to read. Simple. Some people have an additional rule, which is that if they don't feel like reading the book they pick that month, they have to get rid of it. Because if the book has been on their shelf for four years, and they don't feel like reading it now, they probably never will. I think this is a very smart rule if you own a lot of books, but since I don't have hundreds of books, I won't be doing this. I just have a lot of books that are not necessarily something I'd pick up from a bookstore that I want to read. (I won a giveaway some years back in a book fair and got like ten books, mostly from Finnish authors.)

I felt like I needed a TBR jar, because I tend to read only books that I know I will enjoy, or that are at least in a genre I usually enjoy reading. And I don't really read a lot of Finnish authors, which I should, so I'm trying to fix that too. I will be keeping the books even if I don't read them when I should, or if I don't like them, but maybe some day when I have a larger collection I will get rid of those I didn't enjoy. I do want to read more from genres I haven't tried yet, and to be honest I want to give everything a try.

So starting in September, I will be picking a book from my jar to read that month, my goal being a shelf full of books I have actually read.