NOTE: I’m temporarily retiring the Shameful Book Club for 2019 in favor of my “free reading” plan where I encourage myself to step away from scheduled reading, book clubs, and book challenges in order to promote more spontaneous reading. The Shameful Book Club is not gone forever, and I do have a few back-posts that still need to be published, so you may still see some shameful reading throughout 2019 <3

I have this habit of trying to sound cooler than I am by telling people I’ve read books I actually have never even opened. I like to seem well-read and wise beyond my years, and for a while this cycle of lies worked just fine. And then I became a librarian. When you’re a librarian, people tend to ask you for book recommendations and opinions. This is hard to do when you’ve lied about a lot of the books you’ve “read”. Seeing that my scam was unsustainable, I decided to fess up to my crimes and do the time…which is however long it takes me to read each book I’ve said I lied about in the past. This book club is more of a personal reading challenge, but you are all welcome to join me!

How does it work? Well I’ve assigned each month of the year a general genre, and each month I pick a book that I have very loudly lied about in the past within that genre. Or maybe I’ll pick a book that people might be shocked that I haven’t read, based on my interests and activities as a human. This way, by the end of the year I will have read 12 books all in different genres and will be that much closer to a clear conscience.

Here is the genre schedule as it currently stands. This is subject to change.

• January: Comedy and Humor
• February: Romance
• March: Science Fiction
• April: Fantasy
• May: Non-Fiction
• June: A librarian friend’s recommendation
• July: Historical Fiction
• August: Adventure
• September: The “Classics”
• October: Horror/Gothic
• November: Young Adult
• December: Mystery/Thriller

Take a look at the books I’ve already confessed to lying about here!