Wednesday, January 7, 2026

My 2026 Goal and Three Reading Challenges

My goal for this year is a big one: to spend no money on books.  

This is huge for me, and I know it's going to be hard, but I have a huge backlog of Kindle books to read and quite a few nonfiction paper books, and I need to focus on whittling down all these unread treasures.  With the 1000 or so unread e-books, plus access to a good library system, I'm not going to run out of reading material.  

I may have to adjust my goal in regards to audiobooks later in the year, depending on how quickly I run through what I own.  We'll see how that goes.

Since I own so many, I have forgotten a lot of what I have.  To help me out, I made a Lucky Dip TBR jar.  I typed out and cut into strips over 150 authors/titles of Kindle books.  When I need a bit of help deciding what to read next, I'll just pull one out and see what I get.




Another way I'm going to help myself read what I own is to participate in a these three challenges.  I'll probably not be able keep up with them all but it's fun to have a little prompt when I'm thinking about what to read next.  I'll come back to the page I made for these challenges and add the books I read for the prompt.

The point of this one is to read a book with a certain word in the title.  The graphic below shows the monthly choices.




Calendar of Crime by My Reader's Block
This challenge is for mystery books only.  This spreadsheet shows the ten topics to pick from for each month.  I've got an enormous amount of Golden Age mysteries to read, so this might be a fun way to whittle them down.



This challenge is just to encourage reading books already owned.  I'll be working toward the Mt. Ararat level.  
Challenge Levels: 
Pike's Peak: Read 12 books from your TBR pile/s 
Mount Blanc: Read 24 books from your TBR pile/s 
Mt. Vancouver: Read 36 books from your TBR pile/s 
Mt. Ararat: Read 48 books from your TBR pile/s 
Mt. Kilimanjaro: Read 60 books from your TBR pile/s 
El Toro*: Read 75 books from your TBR pile/s (*aka Cerro El Toro in South America) 
Mt. Everest: Read 100 books from your TBR pile/s 
Mount Olympus (Mars): Read 150+ books from your TBR pile/s


Posted by Gypsi at 12:38 PM
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3 comments:

  1. Marianne January 10, 2026 at 9:31 AM

    Good idea. I have a long list on Word and often try to read the one that has been longest on my pile.

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