It’s time to check in for Bev’s Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2013.

This is a very simple challenge – to read books from your own shelves.  All the books I own are ones I want to read so why is it so difficult to reduce my TBR mountain of books?I think it’s because of the temptation to read newly acquired books, those recently published and also older books that I come across either on the internet, or in the library or bookshops.

I suppose the only way not to keep adding to the TBR mountain is to stop going to the library, bookshops or read the internet – and I really don’t want to do that and I could miss out on some good books. So, the TBR piles never get smaller, even though I’ve been reading quite a lot this year – 26 so far, which is one more than I read in the whole of last year.

This quarter I’ve read 13 of my TBR books (linked to my posts on the books):

1. Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier
2. Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh
3. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
4. The Case of the Howling Dog by Erle Stanley Gardner
5. The Red Coffin by Sam Eastland
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
7. Third Girl (Poirot) by Agatha Christie
8. Agatha Christie at Home by Hilary Macaskill
9. The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge
10. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
11. The Death Maze by Ariana Franklin
12. Relics of the Dead by Ariana Franklin
13. Not the End of the World by Christopher Brookmyre

There are a couple of outstanding books in the ones I’ve read this quarter – To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Birthday Boys. 

Here are my answers to some of Bev’s questions:

1. Tell us how many miles you’ve made it up your mountain (# of books read).  If you’re really ambitious, you can do some intricate math and figure out how the number of books you’ve read correlates to actual miles up Pike’s Peak, Mt. Ararat, etc. 

This means in terms of mountains climbed (according to the Challenge criteria) that I’ve scaled Mont Blanc (24 books) and am now in the foothills of Mt Vancouver (36 books) – quite a way to go until my target of Mt Ararat (48 books).

2. Which book (read so far) has been on your TBR mountain the longest? Was it worth the wait? Or is it possible you should have tackled it back when you first put it on the pile? Or tossed it off the edge without reading it all?

Of the books read this quarter I think Falling Angels has been on the list the longest and it was well worth the wait. I always wonder why I haven’t read such a book earlier when I’ve enjoyed reading it so much, but really it doesn’t matter when I read it, so long as I do sometime!