Pick-a-Shelf discussion

Sooooo Luann and I have been chatting and doing some brain storming on what we can do to keep things fresh, interesting and fun :0) And we all know you like to have fun!!!

We have been playing with the idea of doing some new challenges. We all love the Shelf-a-Thon and it’s slowly coming to an end (july 31st) but we are wondering how people feel about maybe trying something new either along side the shelf-a-thon or staggering between shelf-a-thon and different challenges every few months to keep things interesting. So we are going to create a poll so that you can way in on the topic because we really want to know what you would prefer as your going to be the ones playing :0)

One challenge we where thinking of, is doing something very similar to the 12 days of Christmas Challenge that Karen had started, except this would be the 12 vacation days of summer, and we would give you the summer word closer to the challenge so everyone could pick their books at the same time.

We would also love to hear any other fun challenge ideas you would like to try or have come up with. We know lot’s of you out there are challenge junkies like ourselves who have lots of great ideas so please feel free to share them so we may draw from them in the future.

I will set up the poll so you can vote for continuing with the shelf-a-thon, 12 vacation days of summer, shelf-a-thon & 12 vacation days of summer, Other (please leave comment).

Please take the time to weigh in :0)

*The poll has been created and I have given it until July 17th for people to really brain storm ;op*
http://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/18...

I like the vacation challenge idea. Another one that I though of would be to do a chain. Each person would pick a book and then after reading it pick the next book by using the last letter of the book (just read) as the first letter in the title for the next book. There would need to be a limit or a time frame, but it could be fun to see what books people end up with in their chains.
ex. I am reading The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
So my next book could be
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

I hope I explained it without confusing all of you.

Tara that's a great idea! Part of the challenge could be to see how long the chains get and how many different letters someone can achieve.

OR

If you wanted to make it really hard instead of the last letter being the first of the next book you could use the last word, and it has to be in the next books title ;op
So your next book would have to have the word "banks"
in the title and so on.

Love your idea

Maybe just any word from the title. I think it may be too hard to find a book with banks in the title, but I could be wrong. I am glad you like the idea. I used to play a game like that with my friends in high school where we had to think of band names.

Yeah it may be a bit more difficult, I think when I originally searched I only came up with 2 other books, mind you I did not look very hard ;op
However the problem being it's not going to help me get through my Mount TBR *giggle* it would aid my book shopping addiction though!
I think your first sugestion would be more suited to my Mount TBR.....*Laughing* I swear it's growing!

You have the same problem I have it seems, the never-ending TBR pile. I still find a reason to get more books though.

Love the chain idea! Great challenge! Maybe I can tackle some of my pile that way too ;-)

I also love the chain idea, but agree with only using the last letter of the previous books title. As you said Mel - I AM a challenge junkie and love to mix things up. I also love the shelf-a-thon because it seems to fit the "reading outside your normal genre" theme of this group so well, so I would be for keeping it, at least on a rotating basis.

a variation on the shelf-a-thon that I thought of is:

After finishing reading a book, pick one of the shelves on its first page of shelves and read a book off that shelf, repeat for each book, but you can't repeat a shelf. See how long you can do that.
This is just off the top of my head, but it might be fun.

I was going to suggest one where you pick a word, like summer, and read a book whose title starts with each letter, but I get the impression that is what the summer vacation challenge is. Right?

And lastly, my TBR pile grows way faster than my read pile also.

Lyn- I love your idea for a variation of the shelf a thon. I am excited about all these ideas.

Interesting idea - I confess the only book with "banks" in the title I could think of offhand was On the Banks of Plum Creek!

Unless you also allowed author's surnames eg Iain Banks. I'm all for new challenges, personally I wouldn't do the shelf-a-thon again straight away.

I like the chain one as well, you could do it quite easily just using the last letter as Tara said or with the link as Sunflower has said if you used a word that could be linked to a title or Author. You could do it like a 6 degrees of separation type thing & try to use as many different links between the books as possible, publisher, a character having the same name as the Author of the next book or being set in the same time period? Of course it is more complicated but the winner could be not only the person that has the most amount of books with a connection but the person with the biggest variety of links. I do like the simple version as well though.

I think the chain idea is great. I have been looking at books in my TBR shelf and thinking "if I read that one what could I read after it". We could end up reading all sorts of random things which is what we are here for isn't it?