The 2014 TBR Challenge

As I prepare for another great year of reading, I'm looking back at some of my reading goals for 2013 and noting that I particularly fell down in my goal of reading books I already own. I'm constantly distracted by the new shiny book on the shelves of the bookstores and libraries I haunt, and I'm collecting books at a rate far higher than I could ever hope to read.

So to focus my efforts a bit in 2014, I'm signing up for Roof Beam Reader's 5th annual TBR Challenge, with the goal of reading 12 books I already own in the 12 months of 2014. This should not be that hard, right?

On my list:

1) Stoner, by John Williams
2) The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
3) A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf
4) The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
5) Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong
6) Everything Beautiful Began After, by Simon Van Booy
7) When Women Were Birds, by Terry Tempest Williams
8) Dracula, by Bram Stoker
9) Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson
10) The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
11) Room, by Emma Donoghue
12) Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall

Alternates (because sometimes I'm indecisive, and also I can't currently recall which books are in storage and which are un-stored and therefore accessible to me right now, so just to be safe, I want some extras):

1) Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainier Maria Rilke
2) Birds of a Lesser Paradise, by Meghan Mayhew Bergman
3) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sachs
4) Cat's Eye, by Margaret Atwood
5) The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russel

Here's to a year of tackling the mountain of books I already own, getting to some oldies-but-goodies, and remembering why I bought all these books in the first place.