The Unread Shelf Project is a community of readers who want to live their best reading life, by tackling their unread shelves, one book at a time.

To find out more about The Unread Shelf Project and where to get started with this challenge, check out Your First Assignment: Count Your Unread Books. After that, it's time to get onto to the challenges. 

The following twelve challenges are the core of the Unread Shelf Project. It’s a simple assignment: over the next year, we will choose one book per month from our unread shelves. We either finish it by the end of the month or get rid of it.

The purpose of that ultimatum is to gain momentum on your TBR (to be read) stacks. It’s so easy to let them languish, while we check out our next hold from the library or read that new book club pick. It’s human nature to respond more quickly to a given deadline than an open-ended possibility (does the phrase “sale ending soon” get anyone else’s heart beating fast?).

So for twelve books in 2020 - totally a doable number, right? - we are giving ourselves a deadline to either read it or give it away.

Each month, we will talk about the challenge on the website and on Instagram and share what book we’re reading for the month.

Also, new this year - you get a wild card! If any of the month’s challenges don’t feel like a great fit for you, you can pick any unread book off your shelf that you want, OR you can have someone else choose it for you - whether Bookstagram, your family, or random strangers off the street! (if you do the last one, please video tape it, because I want to experience that!)

And in case you’ve missed it, email subscribers get a free printable download of all 12 challenges. Just sign up on the website.