Sometimes I stare at my growing To-Be-Read stack and wonder how many books it would take to break a 3/4″ wooden shelf. I fear that I might wake up one night to the crashing sound of dust — that one speck that breaks the threshold of my shelf’s resistive strength and causes the entire mass of my TBR library to fold into itself, crushing my centuries-old collection of Robbie Burns poetry into a mound of ash.

Every so often, I try to mitigate this pending literary disaster by brushing off the du...