Wednesday, December 12, 2012

2013 Challenge: Three TBR Challenges

COMPLETED!

I am signing up for three TBR challenges for 2013 that I am going to tackle with a personal twist.  I hope to chew through a batch of my TBR list by participating in the Mt. TBR, Off the Shelf, and TBR Pile Challenges.

 

I signed up for the Mt. TBR Challenge at the Mt. Vancouver level to read at least 36 books and the Off the Shelf Challenge at the Make a Dint level to read at least 30 books.  The TBR Pile Challenge involves a commitment to a specific 12 books (noted below), with two alternates.

The personal twist is that I plan to read the books from a particular shelf.  According to my LibraryThing tags, there are 1,421 books on my TBR shelves. Even though I read good number of books every year, I never seem to make visual progress through my TBR books.

So I have latched onto the idea that I want to read all the books on at least one shelf. I want to see a gap grow on the shelf as I finish book after book. I have a wall of TBR fiction books so I picked one shelf from it at random and plan on reading all the books from that shelf in 2013, with the one limitation that I am only going to read one book by each author on that shelf. From the shelf I picked, that means reading 21 books in 2013.


I also picked one of my non-fiction TBR shelves at random with the goal of reading 10 books off that shelf in 2013.

There are other books from my TBR shelves that I plan to read in 2013, either for other challenges or on whim, which will count for the other books in these TBR challenges.


It is going to be an interesting experiment because the reasons a books makes it to my TBR shelves are far broader than the reasons I would typically chose a book to read.  I am going to end up reading several books that would probably sit on my shelves for many more years given the natural course of things. 

BOOKS

I read a total of 53 books from my TBR shelves in 2013 -- 41 fiction and 12 non-fiction.  These are all books that have been on my TBR shelves since at least last year, some since the 1980s.

For the TBR Pile Challenge, I finished all the books I pre-selected.  My books are here, with links to reviews:
In addition, I read one of the two alternates and skipped the other:

In addition, I read another six books from my randomly selected shelf:
I rounded out the Mt. TBR and Off the Shelf Challenges with other fiction books from my TBR shelves:

And several non-fiction books from my TBR shelves:



NOTE

Updated on December 26, 2013.  I will finish The Dean's December by Saul Bellow before the end of the year, bringing my total TBR Challenge reading to 54.  

4 comments :

  1. I gave up on challenges, but I think that a TBR challenge could be very helpful...

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  2. Welcome to the 2013 Mt. TBR version! I hope you enjoy Small World by David Lodge. He's one of my favorites!

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  3. I'm belatedly catching up on posts. I am doing this challenge too and excited about finally (hopefully) reading some books I really, really want to read. Good luck with yours. I liked She's Come Undone.

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