A book challenge

Yesterday I decided that I wasn't going to spend the entire day on the computer. So I organized my bookshelf instead :)

The last time I moved, I realized that I own a lot of books that I haven’t read yet. This is a big problem that I have. So often, I buy books without the intention of going directly home and reading them. The result: 55 books on my shelf that I have yet to read. Okay, so really there are only 48 that I haven’t read yet. There are seven books on my shelf that I have read before, just not the copies that are on my shelf. You see, I tend to see books at garage sales, or second hand stores that I know I have read before and loved. Mostly, I think I buy them with the intention of making someone else read them (mainly, my husband… but I think that’s a lost cause at this point!). But many of them I haven’t read since I was a child, or I read them for school so I was never really able to enjoy them for what they are.

So I'm challenging myself to read all of these books before I buy another one. I even sat down yesterday and made an actual chronological list. The break down is something like this:

31 fiction books
10 classic fiction books
14 nonfiction books

So I'm ordering them in this way:
Fiction
Nonfiction
Fiction
Classic

Until I run out of classics. Then I will just alternate fiction and nonfiction until I'm done. There will be about 6 fiction books to read in a row at the end of it all, which really doesn't bother me a bit!

So there are 55 books on my reading list as of right now. The best part? I no longer have to worry about school books permeating my list! I have a list of 55 books that I actually want to read. I don’t think I’ve been this excited about reading since middle school! Although, it is sort of a daunting task. If I read a book a week, this will take me a little more than a year. This challenge means resisting stacks of books at garage sales, not spending weekend afternoons at bookstores, and completely ignoring all of the wonderful Barnes and Noble coupons that I receive in the mail for an entire year. Ah jeez, I hope I can make it through.

But hopefully it won’t actually take me that long. Many of the books are less than 300 pages. Some of them are less than 200 which won’t take long at all. Unfortunately, Don Quixote is on the list, which is 1050 pages long.

Right now I’m almost finished with my first book: About a Boy by Nick Hornby. I’ll let you know what I think when I am done!