Bookshelves Upon Bookshelves

I have a lot of books. Between the books I teach, the ones on the free reading shelves in my classroom, the ones crammed into the three bookcases in my tiny office, and the ones I have at home, I must have thousands of books. Sometimes, I feel like all I'm doing is shuffling books back and forth between school and home. I have a bit of a hard time getting rid of books for once and for all, but I have been getting better about this lately. (I've had to--I'm running out of space!)

So, for part one of the Clean Away the Clutter Reading Challenge, I'm going to post a series of pictures of my bookcases. I did not take pictures of all of my shelves because I literally could not get enough of an angle to snap a picture of the ones in my office. It's super teeny-tiny, but I love it! I did manage to snap a couple of pics, but not of the entire setup. Maybe I'll work on this.

Here we go. Let's start at home. Here are my two downstairs bookcases.

These shelves are located in my little reading nook. About half of these are unread and a little more than half have been read. Most of the unread books are young adult titles. I never put a book on my free reading shelf that I have not read, so I can get a little backed up from time to time. (Now is one of those times-Hopefully this challenge will help me out!)

These books have made it to my upstairs beside bookshelf. This is where I keep all of the books that I am working on. I like to have a lot of books going at once, as you can see. I have a hard time reading just one book!


These are the free reading and assigned reading shelves in my classroom. I've read all of these books and love matching excited teen readers with books I know they'll love. It's a pretty exciting time to be an English teacher with so much great YA lit to offer students!

Part two of this challenge asks me to make a plan to read and review ten books during this challenge. Lucky for me, I have quite a few books that I'm partially or mostly finished reading. I read like crazy this past weekend, but did not finish many books (I actually only finished one, which is weird for me.) Plus, I have quite a few shorter reads on my list. I should be able to knock a few of the shorter titles on my list soon!

Part three of this challenge asks that I implement this plan, which I have started by selecting out some of the shorter titles I need to read to lessen the amount of books on my TBR shelves. (Currently about 110 books. But, many of these are a result of a book grant that was funded to provide more books for the free reading shelves in my classroom. I'd be great to get some in the hands of my teen readers!)