Reading Off The Shelf – January Results

I’m doing the Off The Shelf Challenge in which readers pledge to read a certain amount of books that they already owned before the beginning of the year. All in an attempt to reduce the number of unread books on their shelves.

I had a total of 31 unread books on my shelves before January 1st 2011. I pledged to read them all by the end of this year.

But I also pledged to only read from those 31 books during January to make a good start on this challenge.

Now, did I succeed and what were the books like?

You’d think, those books that you constantly reject when choosing a book to read, those wall flowers, they can’t be any good. I must have had a month full of awful books.

Not so. Admittedly, they weren’t all brilliant, but it wasn’t bad. Let’s look at it in terms of how many stars I gave them:

5 stars (Very Good):

Oops, none!

4 or 4.5 stars (Good):

East is East by T. C. Boyle
Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding
Kindred by Octivia E. Butler
Harvest by Tess Gerritsen
Life Support by Tess Gerritsen
Solace by Nicci French
De tranen der Acacia’s by W. F. Hermans (Dutch)

3 or 3.5 stars (It’s OK):

Sweetie by Kathryn Magendie (ebook)
Ballet Russes by Rosita Steenbeek (Dutch)

2.5 stars or fewer (Not Good):

31 Hours by Masha Hamilton
Life Sentence by David Ellis (DNF)

And reading now:

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Tikkop by Adriaan van Dis (Dutch, ebook)

To summarize:

There weren’t any brilliant books, but most of the books I read were “good”. There were 2 books very disappointing and that is a higher number than in an average month. But actually, both these books were given to me. I would not have chosen them myself.

That’s 11 books off the shelf and 2 on the go. In addition I read one new ARC and I’m reading another one.

Didn’t I do well keeping to my challenge!

So, is the shelf getting a lot emptier then?

Erm, I did acquire a few new books during the month. They were ARCS, books I won, and books I borrowed from a friend. The total number of new books on my shelves is 12, one, an ARC, I read this month. So, that’s 31 old books, read 11, is 20 books. Plus 12 new books, read 1, is 31.

Isn’t that what I started with this month?!! Well, at least I don’t have any more books! In March, I will again read only from my shelves. Can I reduce the number? Will it ever happen?

How about you? Do you struggle to keep the number of unread books down? What’s your strategy?