Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share ten books on our TBR lists/piles we’re avoiding reading and why:

I finished Early Riser last week, six months after starting it, so that is NOT a book I’m avoiding. However, there are plenty more:

1. There There by Tommy Orange: I started it. It’s about mass shootings. It was too much. Yes, I feel guilty, so I haven’t returned it yet. But I will.
2. Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell and Faith Erin Hicks: It’s about fall and I want to wait until the season kicks in.
3. Hope Rides Again by Andrew Shaffer: Biden is running for president now and his real-life presence in my life disallows my feeling nostalgia for him. That got in the way of my caring enough to keep reading so I could determine if the author was trying too hard and had turned a fun romp into a pulp potboiler. I did return this one to the library.
4. The Body Papers by Grace Talusan: Written by the sister of someone I went to college with, I felt like I should read this memoir, but it’s about incest and again, I just didn’t feel up to it. I feel horrible about it and will likely give it another go.
5. My Twenty-Five Years in Provence by Peter Mayle: He’s dead and there will be no more books by my favorite Provençal transplant.
6. Daughter of the Siren Queen by Tricia Levenseller: I just finished another book about the daughter of a pirate king and it felt too soon to read another.
7. The Summer before the War by Helen Simonson: There’s a war coming at the end of the book.
8. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Karen read it and suggested the recent adaptation is too close to the text to read it so soon after watching the series.
9. Me Before You by Jojo Moyes: I know how it ends.
10. Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling: I love everything of hers I’ve read, but I’ve heard this books is a downer. I don’t want to not love it.

How about you? Are there books you want to read, but just not right now?