The to-read pile has been diagnosed as a moral failing, a hoard, a lie we tell ourselves about who we are. I would like to submit a defence. The pile is not a backlog; it is a portrait. It records, better than any diary, the exact person you were on the day you chose each book — the ambitions, the seasons, the versions of yourself that bought cookbooks during a month you cooked nothing.
Unread books are not a failure of reading. They are the reserve tank of a life that believes, against the evidence, that there will be time. That belief is, in itself, a form of optimism worth keeping.
The to-read pile is the only honest autobiography you will ever keep.
So leave the pile alone. It is the last thing you own that is still full of possibility — and you can finish it any time you want, which is to say, never. That is the point.