The 2013 TBR Pile Challenge!

Adam over at Roofbeam Reader is hosting the annual TBR Pile Challenge, in which we choose 12 books from our TBR Piles and read them over the course of the year. But before we talk about all the books I want to read (and will genuinely try to finish but let's be honest,

I'mma tell you a story.

Soooooo last year around this time, I tore through my library and put little pink Post-it Flags on the spines of all the books I have not yet read. There were over 100 of them.

And in June I packed everything into boxes and into storage with the secret hope that the flags would all magically disappear, which would have been awesome and a little creepy. But alas, when I unpacked the library in my new place, they were still there.

But then as I was putting the books on the shelves, I realized that the next best thing had happened: some of the flags had fallen off or gotten stuck on books I had, in fact read, making the WHOLE SYSTEM ineffective. And there's nothing I loathe more than an ineffective system (Reason #45198 that I decided not to become a teacher and/or a parent).

SO, I took all the flags off and felt vaguely guilty about it, since I really should read the books I buy.

And then, along came Adam's challenge!

I'm joining to alleviate my post-Post-it flag guilt, is basically what I'm saying. Behold my tentative list (complete with commentary, por supuesto):

1. Moby-Dick by Hermann Melville (This title still makes me giggle like a 13-year-old. Dick. Haha.)
2. Wings of the Dove by Henry James (I heart you even though you talk shit about other authors, HENRY.)
3. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (I am a HUGE Hardy fan, maybe because I've never read this?)
4. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (Oh, EVELYN. Be my melancholy gay friend! /sigh)
5. Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (I... have never read any Eliot. I KNOW.)
6. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (ditto)
7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (I bet Anna closed her mouth occasionally, but to see KK play her YOU'D NEVER KNOW.)
8. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseni (handsome local author! I have an unread signed 1st edition. Go me.)
9. The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton (Eeedith! Let's hang with Evelyn and be fabulous together.)
10. Inside the Victorian Home by Judith Flanders (is that non-fiction you see? I must be growing as a human being...)
11. How Fiction Works by James Wood (yep, clearly I'm growing.)
12. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (Because I haven't grown THAT much. Dick. Haha.)

Alternates:
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace