An Elimination Diet for Overwhelmed Readers

 (1) The Idea: The Lean TBR Framework

I’ve been barking up the same tree for years, and here’s one more woof up the trunk:

Don’t focus on the quantity of your reading, focus on quality!

So, this year, I decided to push this practice to the extreme, and yes, you’ve read the title right: I’m only going to read 1 book a month this year. And this post, I’d like to propose a kind of elimination diet for frazzled readers drenched in a monsoon of new releases and half-finished TBRs. Let’s start with why elimination matters if you’re currently feeling overwhelmed.  

1: Most of our reading is unintentional

See, readers have this weird problem. Somewhere along their journeys, reading almost becomes this transcendental good and a moral duty. We forget what got us into reading and start chasing any BS that resembles reading.

This weird problem hit me hard in 2025 when I was sniffing around for anything that would soothe my post-graduation blues. I would pick up random books just so I was reading. I would stack up magazine subscriptions because at least I was reading. I started chugging down shorter books because at least I could brag about how much I was reading.

But it all felt stupid in retrospect. Did I become a smarter person? No, I can’t tell you the first thing about a dozen non-fiction books I’ve inhaled. Was it satisfying? No, I was constantly anxious about losing the reader badge. And the nail in the coffin: did I read what I wanted to read? No. I was distracted by all the BS that resembled reading at the expense of being intentional about what I allow into my mind. 

So, my first step was to embrace a bit of blasphemy in the commonwealth of letters. No, I won’t read another review of some hotshot Booker Prize winner, nor will I agonise over being up to date with new releases. Instead, I lined up 12 mammoths I’ve always wanted to read (averaging 1,000 pages per book) and divided them up across 12 months.

The Brothers Karamazov is not a book that I’ll read one day when I’m wearing a fishermen sweater, holding a mug I made in a senior pottery class. The Tale of Genji is not a book that I’ll throw myself into when I’m on a year-long hiatus, stroking my grey stubble in Kyoto. They’re here with me now, and I have more than enough time to attack them one at a time, given that I’m intentional about not letting new stuff distract me. And the beautiful thing is that I spend no more than two hours reading these huge books every day. My day is freed up from this guilt to be a chronic reader. This leads me to:

2: You need space to discover your natural reading tastes

See, if you’re intentional about your reading practices, you’ll realise that you don’t actually need that much time for quality reading. But this also means that you no longer have the excuse to use reading as a distraction from other parts of your life.