I’ve got a new phone, which means my downloaded Kindle books have gone away, wiping years of digital debris. It is shockingly freely. I do most of my reading on my phone (Jared, circa 2015 is clutching his pearls hard), and the problem is, the digital TBR follows you everywhere. The physical TBR? I can live with that. We live in an anti-library, that’s part of our home’s chaotic charm.

But opening up the Kindle and finding pages upon pages of downloaded-in-good-faith books and really-interesting-...