A new year, and a renewed challenge to continue reading the books that are already waiting for me on my shelves! I am not going to go too deeply into the Unread Shelf Project since I wrote about it last year, but wanted to kick things off for 2021.

I felt like I did pretty well with reading this past year, making a point to read many of the books that had been on my shelf for quite some time. Unfortunately, I was not so good about controlling the number of books that I added to my shelf. All in all, I entered 2021 with a total of 271 books on my unread shelf. This is up 1 from my starting point for 2020, and marks a new high point. At one point in the year, I was down to 253.

While this is certainly not a “win” in my quest to conquer my unread books, it is more progress than I have made in the recent past. Over the past 10 years, my to read list has been increasing fairly steadily. My efforts to vanquish the stack have helped to slow the growth over the past 2 years, and an increase of 1 is certainly the smallest increase I have seen. Maybe this means I have reached a turning point. I suppose only time will tell.

Luckily for me, there are a few new twists added in to the Unread Shelf Project for 2021 that should help me along my way. In addition to some new monthly challenges, there is also a set of bonus challenges—making a total of 24 challenges for the year. My new goal is to complete these all with books that were already on my unread self at the start of the year (with the exception of the “most recently acquired” challenge, which will depend on when I am able to work it in). So, as January comes to an end, I raise a toast to us all: let’s live our best reading lives in 2021. My first challenge post of the year will be up next week.

For more information on the Unread Shelf Project, visit The Unread Shelf blog or Instagram.

2021 Prompts

• January: A book with high expectations
• February: A book you got for free
• March: A book you bought on a trip
• April: A book bought from a used bookstore
• May: A book you bought as a new release
• June: A book bought in a spending spree
• July: A book bought for the cover
• August: A book from an independent bookstore
• September: A book you want to learn from
• October: A book you’re secretly afraid of
• November: A book published before 2000
• December: A book that reminds you of childhood

Bonus Challenges

• A book with more than 500 pages
• An impulse buy
• A book on your unread shelf longer than one year
• A book by an author you’ve never read before
• A book you bought because of a recommendation
• A book given to you that you didn’t ask for
• A book you got for a special occasion
• A book from your favorite genre
• A book bought because of the hype
• A book from a Little Free Library
• The unread book most recently acquired
• A backlist title by an author with a newer release available