Meredy's Exlibristic Ambition

When I first saw the "books off the shelf" challenges here shortly after joining in November, I thought it meant literally moving books out, and not necessarily reading them. So that's how I'm interpreting this: if I can just get them off the shelf and not put them back, read or not, that will count for me.

Given how much resistance I have to overcome in order to eliminate even one, this is a major undertaking. But I really can't keep adding--there's no more room. Something has to go away.

My goal is 49 books in 2012: 49 books that are in some bookcase in my house on January 1 and are not to be there on December 31.

That's four per month plus one, but not quite as many as one per week.

If I manage to read or reread any before I remove them, that will be a plus.

I've made my own tracking counter.



{Edited to track progress}

Books Off the Shelves 2012

1. Started Early, Took My Dog, by Kate Atkinson
2. Cultural Intelligence, by David C. Thomas and Kerr Inkson

January

1. Dictionary of Scots Words and Phrases in Current Use (Stevenson)
2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)
3. The Transparent Society (Brin)
4. Critical Approaches to Six Major English Works: Beowulf Through Paradise Lost (Lumiansky)

February

5. The Pale Blue Eye (Bayard)
6. Shadows over Baker Street (Reaves & Pelan)
7. Go Ask Alice (Anonymous)
8. The Fifty-Minute Hour (Lindner)

March

9. Ship Fever (Barrett)
10. Refiner's Fire (Helprin)
11. Weaveworld (Barker)
12. True Detectives (Kellerman)
13. Year of Fog (Richmond)
14. Ghostwalk (Stott)

April

15. Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais)
16. Dracula (Stoker)
17. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
18. Orlando Furioso (Ariosto)
19. Dubliners (Joyce)
20. The Linguistics Wars (Harris)
21. Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi)

May

22. Three Wogs (Theroux)
23. The Whisper of the Axe (Condon)
24. The Black Tower (Bayard)

August

25. World Without End (Follett)

lol. I think you could probably move four books a month.

Hi, Meredy,

I hope you enjoy this group as much as I enjoyed the BOYS challenge of 2011, which was my first experience with it. I look forward to your progress reports. And I just love your ticker!

Florence

>2 fundevogel: fundevogel, move, yes. Now, REmove (and not just move again): that's something else. I removed about eight in 2011 that were simply discarded and not going to Amazon Marketplace sales. And that was really hard. So we'll see.

>3 Fjumonvi:, Florence, thanks. Is it customary to post titles? I suppose that is another good motivator.

Added one. But they're not actually gone, just read. I may have to refine my definitions a bit.

Ok, I did this wrong. I have defined "books off the shelf" as just being books I managed to remove from the bookshelf and put out of my life, and that's the definition I want to stick to. That means
(a) that they had to be on the bookshelf to start with (or in a pile that amounts to a vertical bookshelf) somewhere in the house; and
(b) that I took them off and put them out.
This has (for me) nothing to do with reading them--only with divesting myself of them. Reading is easy; parting is hard.

So this record is not a reading log. It's a ditching log. For us clinging and hoarding types, that's a major challenge.

My definition of this challenge has no implications for anyone else's.

I have to revise my list at the top. I mustn't list books as I read them, only as I remove them from the shelf and eliminate them from my life by some means.

There is no wrong (typed with my Yoda fingers)

It's whatever you want!

(I did it wrong according to what I said I was going to do!)

Two are going out to the "free books" table at the writers' club tonight, both of them very good: Ship Fever and Refiner's Fire. I'm holding back Reading Lolita in Tehran while I look over the notes I wrote in it.

I've just pulled two more that aren't worth anything for resale on Amazon Marketplace. I may as well donate them to the writers. One of them was signed for me by an author who spoke at the club, so in a sense it's going back to the source.

This now puts me ahead of schedule for March.

Here go six more off the shelves (listed at the top).

I am actually reading Gargantua and Pantagruel, although I've found on reaching the 1/3 mark that I really have to take a breather. So I'm digressing at present with Dracula, another that won't be returning to the shelves.

The other four are leaving either unread or abandoned. I bought my copy of War and Peace in 1971 and apparently read to page 486, which is where my list of character names leaves off at number 115. I don't think I'm ever going to go back to it.

It's good to know your limits.