2026 Plans and Challenges

Finally it’s time to stop looking at 2025 (as fun as I hope that is’s been) and to start focusing on 2026.

Last year was a disaster for my plans and goals…both those stated and unstated. That only bothers me a little–I had too much fun with what I did accomplish, and was so tired because of everything else in life that perspective is easy. This is a hobby–I didn’t hobby the way I wanted to. But, still, hobbying was done.

This year

I do have things I want to accomplish here over the next 12 months for a variety of reasons—and listing them like this helped last year (although, you’ll see a lot of echoes here from that post. But most of those echoes are of a “continue doing this” nature). So, here’s what I’m going to shoot for around here in the next 12 months.
Cut down on my Goodreads Want-to-Read list and the unread books that I own (a perennial project, but 2024 was not good for the size of that stack)—I’m going to talk about that more in a minute.
Any book that I buy this year, I want to read this year (unless I buy it for a 2027 project). I will fail at this. But I’m going to try.
I’m going to continue to be picky in the Book Tours I participate in. I still like Tours, they expose me to things I wouldn’t normally read—and I’m going to keep doing them. But if I’m picky, it helps me focus on other things.
I’m cutting back on the Reading Challenges I’m going for.
Try to interview more authors (maybe others, too?), and get better at that, too. The Literary Locals series is helping with that. Hopefully that also means more of the HC Chats, too.
I want to continue the Literary Locals.
I plan on pressing forward with Grandpappy’s Corner, and hopefully do posts for it more frequently. One of my challenges (below) will help.

2026 Book Challenges

Goodreads Challenge

Last year, I lowered this goal, and am sticking with it. This is mostly an attempt to shift my attention away from the numbers–I honestly don’t care about them, I talk about them just as an indicator of how I spend my time (for myself), although it often comes across as something else. I’m also planning on tackling some more thought-provoking and slower reads this year, so this might help me not care about that. We’ll see how that works.

My TBR Range Challenge

I’ve been joking about Mt. TBR for a couple of years now, and then I saw some meme recently talking about some having TBR Piles and others having a mountain range. Of course, I liked that image. Around that time, I started thinking about how my pile has grown a lot over the last couple of years specifically. And I decided to look at the list by year (well, I took a few by aggregate because the numbers were so small). I found the results disturbing–but a little heartwarming for 2021-23, to give myself a little credit. I’m going to attack things here.

(thankfully, it’s hard to tell that there are slivers of yellow for Audiobooks, but it’s there)

Reading with Wrigs
The Tradition continues. I finished this one with room to spare last year–far better than the year before when I missed it for the first time. Gotta make it a streak.

The 2026 Booktempter’s TBR Challenge

I really appreciate the way this one is put together, and it’s pretty easy—just 1 book a month and my TBR should go down by at least 12, more if I can squeeze in some of the stretch goals. This has been pretty helpful the last few years, and I expect the same this year.

25 Greatest Picture Books of the Past 25 Years
When I saw Slate’s 25 Greatest Picture Books of the Past 25 Years list last Fall, I decided it needed to be a personal challenge for this year. And, hey, I read one of them a couple of years ago. This has gotta be in the bag.

2026 Speccy Fiction Challenge
I was going to call it enough with the above (and probably the below), but then shelleyrae @ Book’d Out invited me to participate in the 2026 Speccy Fiction Challenge, and I can’t resist. Also… it looks fun.

20 Books of Summer
Assuming that this is done again–hopefully last year’s hosts are up for it–I’ll be there. It’s a fun tradition.

That’s everything I have planned, I can’t wait to see what unplanned things happen around here. Hope you’re around to join in the fun!

The image for the Picture book list is taken from the article. The Book stack image by yeliao521 from Pixabay