Why I Love Wednesdays: Book Challenges (!!)

Why I Love Wednesdays is a weekly meme hosted by Alexis at Reflections of a Bookaholic. Every Wednesday, she discusses a different literary topic. The topic this week is your favorite book challenge for 2012.

Why I Love . . . The Dusty Bookshelf Challenge

I was originally going to write about the seasonal challenges I participate in for one of my Goodreads' groups. We do that challenge twice a year, and there are 34 different tasks to complete, each worth a certain number of points. The tasks always add to my reading experience because they are so diverse and sometimes require you to really dig around and look into books/authors you have never heard of before in order to find a book that works for that task. Check out my Fall/Winter challenge task list on my Challenges page to get an idea of what the tasks are all about.

For this post, though, I want to focus on a challenge that I just discovered today at Alysia's blog. It is The Dusty Bookshelf Challenge hosted by Jessica @ Books: A True Story. The challenge is to read books that you've owned for a while or books that you've been wanting to read for a LONG time. 

I'm using this post as my announcement post for the challenge as well. I own 125(!) books, but instead of listing them all, I'm just going to list the ones that have been on my shelves for a year or longer (at some point I might add a TBR page to my blog that lists all the books I own and still need to read):


Adult Fiction
-One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-The Stand by Stephen King
-The Shining by Stephen King
-Widow for One Year by John Irving
-The Cider House Rules by John Irving 
-A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
-Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
-Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
-The Risk Pool by Richard Russo
-Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire
-Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire
-The Island by Victoria Hislop
-Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
-The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud
-Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
-The Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George
-Helen of Troy by Margaret George
-Atonement by Ian McEwan
-A Carnivore's Inquiry by Sabina Murray
-The Liars' Club by Mary Karr
-Poison by Kathryn Harrison
-Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls
-The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
-The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman
-The Red Tent by Anita Diamont
-Playing Botticelli by Liza Nelson
-The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
-We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
-Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
-Set in Motion by Valerie Martin
-The Girls by Lori Lansens
-31 Bond Street by Ellen Horan
-Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
-The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster
-The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennet
-The House at Riverton by Kate Morton
-Perfume by Patrick Suskind
-Cassie Draws the Universe by P.S. Baber
-No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook . . . (this one has a long title) by Edgardo Vega Yunque

Classics
-1984 by George Orwell
-The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
-Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
-The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
-Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
-Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
-The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
-Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
-Watership Down by Richard Adams
-Metamorphosis by Ovid
-Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
-The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas


Young Adult
-Eragon by Christopher Paolini
-Firelight by Sophie Jordan
-Wither by Lauren DeStefano
-Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson
-Ruined by Paula Morris


Non-Fiction
-Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
-Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
-An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks
-The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
-The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
-Personal History by Katharine Graham
-Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean
-When the Air Hits Your Brain by Frank T. Vertosick
-360 Degrees Longitude by John Higham

Whew! I know that from the look of this list I should aim for the highest level in this challenge, but since this list isn't including all of the newer books I bought that I really want to get to, I'm going to aim for Cobwebs (10-15 books).