Any suggestions on how to animate this in Houdini? Is cloth solver up to task?

I would think so, but you might also want to look at a particle system and the spring sop.

Generally it works ok. Though I would like the papers to dissipate more. Also self collision testing isn't 100% yet. If anyone has any suggestions, I would love to hear them.

What I'm trying to achieve is to have a tossed stack of papers fly away as realistically as possible.

The best (well, one of) way to do it would be with cloth- just make a grid object, instance it around the place with a copy sop and make that whole /obj a cloth object via the shelf.

Then just put a fan force or wind in and off you go! Drag would be nice too, and of course gravity. Turn on self collisions too once you have the physics right. If you want to toss them at something, animate them and then set the pintoanimation attribute from 1 to 0 when you want to release them to the cloth sim.