I love setting goals, whether or not I actually end up achieving them. Last year, I set rather ambitious goals for my reading life, and surprisingly, most of them were met! I can’t say the same about some of my personal goals, but hey…maybe that can improve. 2026 is a chance for a restart, right?
One of the biggest things that helped me achieve these goals last year was that I wrote them down where I could easily access them, and I frequently refreshed my memory on what exactly they were. That’s something I’m currently trying to figure out how to do with my non-reading goals for 2026, as that was a game-changer for me last year on the reading front.
First, a few stats, because I love calculating them each year:
- Total books read: 130 (my highest yearly total since I started tracking!)
- Total nonfiction: 35 (27% of total)
- Total audiobooks: 57 (44% of total)
- New-to-me authors: 51
- Most read author: L.M. Montgomery (6 books, which I’m very pleased about, because they were all 5★ reads!)
I’ve mentally tossed around ideas for names for 2025’s reading year, but haven’t settled on one. It could be The Year of the Audiobook, because I listened to FAR more audiobooks last year than any other year. Or, it could be Nonfiction Wins!, because last year, I finally felt like I found my groove in the nonfiction world (maybe I’m finally old enough to appreciate it?).
2025 was also the year I branched out the most in my reading, it feels like. I know I pushed myself more to embrace different genres and stories than I would normally gravitate toward, and looking at the number of new authors I tried (compared with the total number of books for the year), that feels like a success.
My goals for 2025 were many and varied. One of my unofficial goals was to try to read more deeply—to allow myself to pick up a longer book and savor it, rather than rush through because I had a certain number of books I wanted to read in a given timeframe. You’ll see that reflected to some extent in this list, but unfortunately, for the most part, I don’t feel like I did that goal justice. I was hoping to take time for a couple of longer classics from my shelves, and that didn’t happen in 2025. Oh, well—I can try again in 2026!
- Read 75 books (YES!)
- Read 2 Christian living/devotional-type books (YES! I hardly read any in 2024, so I was hoping to expand my reading in this area. I ended up with around 10-12 in this genre.)
- Read 4 Christian biographies/memoirs (YES! I’m not sure how many of these I ended up reading in 2025, but I know my number was much higher than just four.)
- Finish the 5×5 reading challenge (YES! This was basically a set of five sub-goals for me, reading 5 books each of books I’d recently purchased, books over 500 pages long, old unread ARCs, books on the writing craft, and books published in the 1970s. I loved how this both stretched and focused my reading over 2025, and I’m really looking forward to trying it again in 2026!)
- Finish at least 2 reading challenges (YES! I finished 5 in 2025, just didn’t manage to complete the 2 readalongs I was hoping for—boo!)
- Finish 6 series/book collections (YES! I just squeaked through on this one.)
- Read approximately ⅓ of Josephus (NO, I read about 7 pages total)
- Read 20 books from my TBR shelf (YES! I just barely managed to get the last two in in the last few days of December.)
- Read 4 O’Henry short stories (NO, I was hoping to diversify my reading this way, but that didn’t happen.)
- Read 6 Chautona Havig books (NO, I read 4, which felt like a decent effort. She’s one of my favorite authors, and I have quite a backlog to catch up on, plus I’d love to reread some of the ones I first read 8-10 years ago, so maybe I’ll be able to do more in 2026?)
Whew! That was quite the list, but I’m thankful to have completed or almost completed so many of them. It was fun pushing myself last year, and I’m hoping to do that again this year.
My reading goals for 2026 look somewhat shorter and simpler than for 2025, but I think they’ll end up being just as challenging:
- Read 75 books (again, I’m hoping to read more deeply rather than trying to make a new personal record)
- Read 26 books from my TBR shelf (I barely managed to read 20 from that shelf in 2025, so it’ll be interesting to see how this goes; I am planning to use the ABC reading challenge for this one, choosing one book for each letter of the alphabet.)
- Get down to 12 in-progress series (I currently have 22 series in progress, so this will take some work, but I’m hopeful I’ll be able to get there!)
- Read 4 O’Henry short stories (trying this one again…2026 is the year to accomplish everything, right?)
- Read 5 devotional/Christian nonfiction books (last year was such a success in this area that I’d love to continue it in 2026)
- Finish the 5×5 reading challenge (this is basically a set of mini-goals for myself this year: 5 Christian classics/nonfiction titles, 5 books written by Chautona Havig, 5 classics (not the same ones as the Christian classics category), 5 old unread ARCs, and 5 books others have recommended to me (because I can never seem to remember to get around to them!))
And that’s it! Do you set yearly reading goals for yourself? What, if anything (even if it isn’t measurable!), are you hoping to accomplish in 2026, reading-wise or otherwise?
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