Now What?

So it's Dec 31st (Happy New Year's Eve, by the way!) and you got a big honkin' stack of books for the holidays. Or maybe some of you were lucky enough to receive the "Just the Right Book" gift package (see Dec 5th's post). Whatever the case may be, you're facing a huge stack of books, added to the pre-existing collection of tomes on your shelf.

What to do? What to do? How about try a blogger's challenge? Here are some I thought worth checking out:

The Read Your Own Books Challenge - this one is really simple. Pick a number of books you want to read in a year. Pick said number of books off your shelf. Go. Really! The only rule is that you have to read books you already own.

The TwentyTen Challange - Requires one to read twenty books, two in each of ten categories. Only one of these categories is the "new" book category, meaning it has to be acquired in 2010 (but you can count gifts or giveaways). The rest can be found on your shelf, which I think could also prove an interesting way to explore what you have on your shelf that you may have forgotten about.

The New Authors' Challenge - Read books by new authors - that is, authors that are new to you. Therein lies the charm in this one: I guarantee there are authors on your shelf that you've never read before. Maybe it was a gift, maybe you always wanted to read something by Graham Greene, or Edgar Allen Poe, or Nora Roberts... now's the time. The only added challenge to this is seeing if you have 15-50 (those are the margins) books by new-to-you authors on your shelf. If not, it might be time to expand your reading horizons (hint, hint) and this could be a good challenge for you anyway.

Library Challenge - If you're looking to participate in any of the above challenges, or just have a laundry-list of titles to read (like me) and are trying to limit the number of books you're adding to your collection (also like me) this one might be for you. It won't help you explore the books you already own, but it will hopefully limit the number coming in. Simply read a set number of books from your local library. You never know what you might find in there - try asking a librarian for recommendations (a dangerous suggestion, I know).

Ok, that's all for now. If I see any more, I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, I'm off to dig through my own stack of books...