What is #StartOnYourShelfathon?

#StartOnYourShelfathon is a 2020 star-themed readathon hosted and run by CW from The Quiet Pond. The aim of #StartOnYourShelfathon is to read as many unread books on your bookshelf as you can between December 13th 2019 and December 31st 2020. I first heard of this one from Avery at RedRocketPanda and thought it looked like the perfect challenge as it matches up with my own goals for 2020, thanks for sharing!

#StartOnYourShelfathon isn’t an ordinary readathon! The mascot of #StartOnYourShelfathon is Castor the Star Collector who is also a sloth friend of The Quiet Pond, who has lost all the stars he has collected over the years and needs your help to find them again.

For every book that you read as part of #StartOnYourShelfathon, you collect a star that you can add the star to your ‘star map’. Read books, collect stars, give yourself an amateur star-collector name, and create constellations! You can read Castor’s story and find information about and resources for the readathon here.

Information about Joining #StartOnYourShelfathon

1. Join the StartOnYourShelfathon anytime between Dec 13th 2019 to Dec 31st 2020!
2. To join #StartOnYourShelfathon, create a blog post, bookstagram post, booktube video, Twitter thread, or whatever medium you wish, with ‘#StartOnYourShelfathon’ in the title or your tweet.
3. In your post/video/thread, announce that you will be participating in the readathon. List your readathon goals and the books you plan to read! (Post templates and readathon banners can be found in the readathon resources below!)
4. Link back to this post so that others can find this readathon and join in.

Share your updates on your blog/bookstagram/booktube and social media. You are more than welcome to tag @thequietpond on Twitter in all your updates! We would love to see your progress and your star maps – in-progress and completed!

My #StartOnYourShelfathon Goals

Since this challenge lines up really well with my own personal reading goal this year of ‘read books I own’ this is going to be fantastic! As for hard goals, well, I’ll list them below to give myself something to shoot toward. Really my main goal is just to work on getting my massive TBR pile down a little bit because it’s totally out of control.

1. Read 40 books that are in my current physical TBR pile
2. Read 20 books that are in my current digital (audio and ebook) TBR pile

 

My #StartOnYourShelfathon TBR

I have SO MANY unread books around my house and on my digital devices (over 800—WTF!!!!!) so making a TBR for this will be tricky because I have so many books to choose from! So, what I’m going to list below are just a few of the books from my massive TBR pile that I’d like to get to at some point this year. I may come up with some more TBR lists for this throughout the year, we’ll see. 🙂

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

I’ve had this book in my audio TBR since August of 2018! There are very few books that I let linger in my audio queue for so long (maybe 20?), usually I listen to them within a month or so of picking them up. This is a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin and I really love fairy tale retellings, especially when authors make it their own thing. I’m working on trying to clear out some of my audio backlist and I think it’s high time I get to this one.

The Tower at Stony Wood by Patricia McKillip

I absolutely love everything I’ve read by Patricia McKillip but I still have a lot of her backlist to get to. I’ve been picking up her books whenever I happen across them, usually at 2nd hand stores, but also at the regular bookstores too. Her prose is some of the best in Fantasy and her stories are magical. I’m not sure when I added this one to my TBR, but it was probably three to five years ago. This one seems like a good place to start as any!

Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley

Robin McKinley is one of my favorite authors. She writes a lot of fairy tale retellings and such so that’s one appeal, but I just love the way she puts together a story. I’ve read a lot of her books but I still have many to get to. Like McKillip, I’ve been slowly collecting her back list when I see them. This one was recommended to me by a friend years ago and I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

The Many-Colored Land by Julian May

This is another book that has been in my TBR for a few years (probably 4 or 5?) and I just need to get to it! This is also another one that was a recommendation from a fellow reader. The entire concept of this one seems completely bonkers and I’m all about it.

The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford

I have been wanting to read more of John M. Ford’s work ever since I fell in love with a story he wrote for the Liavek shared universe called ‘Green is the Color’ (great fantasy story, you don’t really need to know anything about Liavek to enjoy it, highly recommend it if you can hunt it down). His books have been hard to find because most of them are out of print (I believe that they are finally going to be re-released soon!) but I did managed to find a couple and add them to my TBR sometime in the last few years. Now I just need to buckle down and read them!

Join #StartOnYourShelfathon!

If you want to join #StartOnYourShelfathon, you can read more information in the readathon information post at The Quiet Pond.

Thanks so much to CW at The Quiet Pond for this reading challenge! It seems like so much fun and it’s a cute way to encourage people to get through their already owned TBR piles–something I am in dire need of doing! I know I’m joining this a bit late, but I can’t wait to download my star map and start working on this.