My "Unread Shelf" Project
I am probably technically “behind” on posting this review of my reading from 2022, but I’m not here to be doing this thing on everyone else’s schedule.
Ever since I discovered Goodreads in 2014, I have loved setting a yearly reading goal. In 2021, I modified my goal structure (and added a spreadsheet because data! And librarians be librarian-ing). My 2022 goal was to read each month from four categories: a book from my unread shelf (aka books I own but have never read), a diverse novel, a justice-focused non-fiction, and “what else?” aka a category for all the other categories. This post is all the books I read from my unread shelf. Thank you to Whitney from The Unread Shelf Project for the inspiration!
Rather than write about each of these books individually, because I have already done that for all of these books this year (I think), I’ll do a little update on how this went! First, a moment of honesty- I acquired (bought or was gifted) some of these books this year, which means they were not officially part of my unread shelf. Part of the whole point of Whitney’s Unread Shelf Project is reading the books we already have before buying more. However, most of these books have been sitting on our bookshelf for years, and I wanted to read them- that’s why I bought them! I often don’t get to books we own because I’m reading library books before they need to go back.
Some of the stats:
4: (I think) books I picked up, did not finish, and then gave away. I’m counting this a success as it still helped me move these books along, and they are not taking up space, waiting to be read.
3: books picked up at Little Free Libraries over the years
2: audiobooks I bought on audible in ~ 2016? So glad to get these read!!
1: old gift, one new gift
I will definitely include this category in my 2023 reading goal. This year The Unread Shelf’s prompts are more interesting to me than in the past too- they are focused on mood reads, which I love. I might be following that a little more closely this year!