The end of the year has come and with that, so has the time to reflect on last year’s goals and lay out my reading goals for the next year.
Overall, I would say that I had success with most of my goals although some of them did not quite turn out the way I envisioned, as is typical of most yearly goals.
In no particular order, here’s how I did on last year’s goals:
- Increase the percentage of books read to a minimum of 5%.
I smashed this goal! I ended up with 14.6% nonfiction this year! Also, more of my 5 star reads this year came from my nonfiction reads than from fantasy, interestingly enough. - Catch up on all book box subscriptions and reevaluate.
Rather than reevaluate at the end of the year like I considered, I ended up drastically cutting the number of book box subscriptions I maintained throughout the year, especially as I started the process of purchasing a house and started paying a mortgage. I did not read every single one of my book box books but I cut through a huge backlog. I now subscribe to just four. (One of those, my Comix subscription, I maintain primarily to keep my classroom library supplied with new, really good graphic novels so I do not count that as a personal subscription.) The others that I still have are Inkstone (quarterly), Goldsboro (my first, although with the increase in duties cost I may cancel that one), and Broken Binding. - Catch up on NetGalley eARCs.
I did make really good progress on this TBR this year even though I did not actually catch up. I managed to get my feedback percentage up to 80% (multiple times because I went on a couple requesting sprees). I also significantly narrowed the backlog. At the moment the oldest ARC on the list is from July, six months ago. Like with my 2023 owned TBR (discussed in #8), I have several of these books on my HRCYED TBR with plans to make this a focus area so I can finally use this NetGalley TBR as intended and read the ARCs prior to the book’s publication. - Complete all year long TBRs.
I love a challenge so look for this goal to return in my 2026 goals.
As far as the year long challenges go, I did meet this goal with one exception, my 25 in 25 list. I do not know what I was thinking putting The Muller Report on the list. With the way the year has gone with the absolutely horrific things that the current administration has perpetuated, there’s no way I could read about their misdeeds from the first go around and maintain my sanity. I gave myself grace and chose to put that book back on the shelf. Maybe I’ll read it in 5 or 10 years. - Maintain consistent posting and reviews.
So…I did maintain consistent posting.
As far as the reviews go? There were many times that I let them pile up, especially during months where I participated in a readathon or personal challenge with increased the number of books completed or simply because I just did not feel like writing the reviews on a particular day.
I still want to improve in this area but that means making changes to how I write the reviews – aka being okay with shorter, less in-depth reviews because I read way too much. - Complete my SCASL project
I most definitely did this even though it ended up changing as I got the opportunity to participate on the committee choosing the books for next year!
Since participating on the committee is a two year commitment, I will once again have around 100 more books to read for the next list although I will not state that a book is on the consideration list or not. I read a lot of middle grade anyway. - Complete or catch up on 10% of current series.
I most definitely completed this goal! I will say, however, that I ended up tweaking the goal in my series post to achieving a net negative. I accomplished that too! Overall I achieved the following stats:- Started – 76 series
- Continued – 16 series (meaning the books I read were somewhere in the middle)
- Caught up with – 49 series
- Finished – 40 series
- DNF’d – 27 series (some of these I did not read a book from the series this year, I simply weeded them off the spreadsheet as I updated)
- Net: -40 series!
- Read or unhaul all books on owned TBR from 2023 or prior.
I made remarkable progress in this area this year! I read or unhauled a total of 48 books from this list which makes up 68%.
I did not automatically unhaul the remaining books on the list for two reasons.
One, I placed several of these books on my HRCYED TBR. Since HRCYED lasts until July 6th of 2026, I still have time to read those books and complete that TBR.
Two, I still had interest in the remaining books on the TBR so I decided to put the books that remained, 13, onto my 26 in 26 list. One way or another, this category of my owned TBR will get completed before 2026 ends.
Now it’s time for 2026 goals!
- Maintain (or increase by 5%) my nonfiction percentage of books read.
I had incredible success with a lot of the nonfiction books that I read in 2025, especially with several of the books that I read that were in the History and Biography category of the Goodreads Choice Awards. Since I read so many of these books that I really enjoyed, I want to keep that up. - Complete year long TBRs. (repeat)
Of course I’m doing this again. I even have a couple new ones but they align well with my overall goals. These are the ones that I plan to tackle in 2026. Several of these have their own dedicated TBR post coming up this week and into next week.- HRCYED – I will most definitely make a TBR for version 3.0 if Qwordy releases one.
- r/fantasy – I have to buckle down on this one because I forgot (until recently) that one of the prompts is finishing a series and I put on the last book in the Dandelion series. I still have books 2, 3, and 4 to complete. I will also make a TBR for the next version as soon as that releases.
- Pokethon – I did better with that this year but ran out of shorter books to use on gym days so I did not quite finish all of the gym prompts on gym days. I want to stock up and prepare this TBR as soon as Jade releases it.
- Fully Booked – these challenges come from littleinklingdesigns reading planner. I did them last year and want to do them again this year. This time I made storygraph challenges for them to have a nice visual as well.
- Read What You Own – I have not made a TBR or number goal for this one yet but I plan to soon. This is run by Shae (Shaegeeksout) and Izzy (happyfornow). My focus is going to be on my out of control libro TBR. I get a little click happy when the new ALCs drop each month.
- TBR Takedown – This is run by Rescuse and reads. I put on a lot of backlist TBR books as well as overlaps from a couple other challenges to incentivize myself to actually tackle my TBR.
- Catch up on Netgalley. (repeat)
Since I have gotten my percentage to 80, I want to make a dedicated focus on catching back up, at least one month every month which would practically mean two months. For example, in January, I want to make sure to read my July 2025 and August 2025 ARCs so that I’m only five months behind and so on and so forth. - Complete my SCASL project
This year that will consist of reading the 20 books on the YA list as well as the books on the consideration list for the next year for the Junior books. I really want to make sure that I read every single book on the list. Last year, I had not gotten to a few of the books that got voted off at the first meeting so I did not bother reading those. I also did not read one of the books on the final list (it did not get voted on) because of how difficult it was to get ahold of the book. If I start now, I might just make it. - Complete all series started pre-2023 and maintain a net negative.
This is actually one of my goals for the “challenge yourself” prompt for HRCYED so I have already made good progress on this one. I plan to complete this prompt by the time the challenge ends at the beginning of July so after that point I will switch to maintaining a net negative. - Read at least 50% of all books brought into my home library.
I noticed that I approached this percentage with my 2025 hauls but did not quite get there. I think that this year, I will have an easier time of it, primarily because I have eliminated so many of my book box subscriptions. I also am focusing on paying as much as I can on my mortgage so my plan is to limit my book spending (beyond the limited subscriptions I have) to pango or thriftbooks money that I get from selling any unhaul books throughout the year. - Improve review posting consistency.
I really want to improve at this. I think that the process that I started creating towards the end of the year will work really well going forward. So…my specific goal for this is to maintain written reviews for what I read getting no more than a week behind with writing. That gives me some wiggle room but also, hopefully, holds me accountable.
Here’s to 2026!