Top Ten Tuesdays #483: Goals

2026 Goals

Top Ten Tuesdays were started by The Broke and the Bookish and are now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, where we make lists of our top ten books (or something else!) based on that week’s prompt. The topics are provided ahead of time and can be found here. Book links bring you to Goodreads or my review.

I plan on reading 100 books this year. Yes, I’m back closer to the olden days on my blog. I don’t think I’ll ever read 150-180 books again but I really would like to read a couple of books per week at this point. I thought it would be fun to see my progress – the highs and lows of the last few years. I started my blog in 2014 midway through the year so the 91 books I read were actually from like June to December, which is wild. I was pretty jacked up about reading for a few years and always read over 100 books, usually more than 150, until Covid happened. I barely squeaked out 100 books and decided to go with a lower amount for the following couple of years. I got my mojo back in 2023 and 2024 before kind of crashing again this year. 100 may be optimistic but I decided I will reduce my goal if needed at the end of Q1 and not give myself too much shit for it. Along with this specific number of books, here’s what I’m hoping to accomplish:

Spend more time with audiobooks over podcasts

Sometimes I get lazy with my audiobook listening and pick a random podcast to listen to that I’m barely interested in. 2025 was a super lame year for podcasts for me – nothing grabbed me and I quit SO many of them after a few episodes. Instead of forcing podcasts, I really want to listen to audiobooks more. I have friends who I see multiple times a month that live 40+ minutes away…why not listen to my audiobook instead as I drive?

Read over an hour per day

I’m currently doing #75booked and my challenge is two 30-minute reading sessions. I’m really enjoying “forcing” myself to read this long because it’s actually not hard, and I end up enjoying it. Having small goals like this will help make reading (instead of doom scrolling) a habit again.

25% of the books I read should be owned/physical books

I have a nice library of books that (at the time of writing this) my friends will be helping me catalogue and organize. I buy a lot of books that just sit around, despite my interest in them. I hope to get to the end of the year and have at least a quarter of my read books be ones from my shelves, even if I mix in the audiobook to get it done.

Finish or continue five series

I’m really good at tracking my series in my spreadsheet but I’m not the best at continuing in them. I have a few specific books or series in mind right now that I’ll be very disappointed in myself if I don’t finish this year!

Update StoryGraph daily with reading progress

I like seeing the calendar each month and the other graphs with reading progress based on each day. Since I started using Bookly to time my reading for #75booked, I find myself updating that all the time and forgetting to put progress percentages/pages in StoryGraph before bed. I definitely want to be good about keeping that updated.

Complete my reading challenges

I’ve signed up for a few reading challenges this year and have abandoned a couple of recent mainstays. The Buzzfeed and 52 Book Club challenges just included a bunch of prompts that didn’t resonate with me so I set out to find new ones. Here’s a snapshot:

• Read with Allison Reading Challenge
  • 52 prompts – ideally one per week – to read various books, genres, topics, etc.
• Shelf Reflection Reading Challenge
  • 45 prompts with the same idea as above
• Books and Lala’s Buzzword Challenge
  • 12 books for the 12 months of the year featuring specific words in the titles
• Books and Lala’s Buzzword Cover Challenge
  • 12 books for the 12 months of the year featuring specific items or images on the covers

Watch more TV shows and less doom scrolling during sports

Chris and I have been really bad about keeping up with shows lately. I know most of it was from wanting to dissociate and scroll on my phone while watching random sports, but I absolutely have to break that habit next year. We have entire seasons of shows we love that we haven’t watched yet. I hope to keep up with weekly shows and enjoy a few each night before settling in to read while some sport is on TV. I need to get off my phone.

Date night/dinner out 2-3x per month

I love going out to eat and Chris sort of does not. He came up with the idea of us going out to eat weekly throughout the new year to get out of the house and experience new things, so he can enjoy dining out with me! I thought once a week would be a lot so we settled on a couple or few times per month. I like getting takeout and staying inside so I didn’t want to overdo the restaurant food. Plus, Chris works in media and often gets free food when he does shoots at restaurants. Anyways! We started a list of places near and farther from us that we want to prioritize. We technically started this in December but it counts.

Get into a good routine

I feel like my routine now involves being as lazy as possible every day lol. I want to get back to the gym a couple of times per week. We need to make a cleaning and home maintenance calendar since we own a home now. There are things that just slipped by until I checked in with my dad lol.

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