My Not Completely Unrealistic Reading Goals for 2026

I don’t know why I do this to myself

“Man Reading” by John Singer Sargent, ca. 1904 (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Every year between Christmas and New Year’s I set a reading goal for the upcoming year. As with all resolutions, I typically start off strong and fade well before Groundhog Day. This was certainly true for 2025, which has been one of the worst reading years I can remember. I could take the easy route and blame it on my stepfather’s passing in April, but that doesn’t account for my literary sloth in January, February, or March.

However, much like I still believe at start of each new football season that the Dallas Cowboys will finally reach the Super Bowl again or that Springsteen will finally play my birthday party, I am once again confident in the reading goals I have set for 2026. In addition to the shame that will result if I fail yet again, I have the added motivation of 2026 being the 100th anniversary of a pivotal literary event.

I am fully aware that both my kids and my doctor would say that there are more important goals to set than what I will read this year, silly little things like quitting smoking, occasionally drinking coffee without Wild Turkey or Bailey’s Irish Cream as the sweetener, and getting more exercise than the walk from the door to the car, but I have lived my life the same way for 60 years and am unlikely to change now. Besides, while good health is temporary, great books are forever.

One of my mistakes with my 2025 reading goal was that far too many of the titles were of a religious/spiritual nature. Reading the entire Catechism of the Catholic Church and all of the documents of the Second Vatican Council sounded cool during the Christmas season but the novelty quickly faded in the gloom of February. There were far too few novels on the list, and we all know that truth (or Truth, if you prefer) is far better told through fiction than through some treatise by a bunch of dead cardinals.

All that said, below are my reading goals for 2026. I have tried to keep them ambitious yet realistic; we’ll see how I’m doing come spring.

1. Keep the streak alive. It’s more of a habit than a goal, but the one thing I have managed to do every year is re-read four books that are especially important to me: The Razor’s Edge, The Shadow of the Wind, A Moveable Feast, and 84, Charing Cross Road. I encourage you to read these as well, whether you have before or not; every year I get something new from each of them. This is especially true of The Razor’s Edge, which (as I wrote in a piece for the book’s 80th anniversary earlier this year) literally changed the way I look at the world and thus changed my life in a way rivaled only by the Bible and Springsteen’s Born to Run album.

2. Make it the Year of Hemingway. I mentioned earlier that 2026 is the 100th anniversary of a pivotal literary event; that event is the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. That makes next year the perfect time to both revisit the parts of Papa’s catalogue I have read for years (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, A Moveable Feast, the short stories) and to finally tackle the parts I’ve either avoided or started and never finished (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Death in the Afternoon, The Garden of Eden, the five-volume biography by Michael Reynolds).

3. Read Ulysses. I can hear you laughing at this one, especially since it’s been on my list since the early 1990s. I firmly believe that this could be the year I finally conquer James Joyce’s cinder block of a novel for a simple reason: I am running out of time to actually do it. It is also possible that after a steady diet of short sentences from Hemingway, I will be able to tolerate sentences from Joyce that run for five or six pages.

4. Read more horror novels (and actually at night). Despite the positive influence of Simon Dillon over the past few years, I still don’t read enough horror fiction. My plan for correcting this involves reading all of the novels by Grady Hendrix that I own but have yet to open; I have read Horrorstör and My Best Friend’s Exorcism, but We Sold Our Souls, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, The Final Girl Support Group, and How to Sell a Haunted House sit untouched on my bookshelf (and I’ve pre-ordered Witchcraft for Wayward Girls as well). As for the reading at night part, ever since I read The Shining at 11 years old in 1977, I can only read scary stories in the daylight. It’s well past time to conquer that particular phobia.

5. Finally finish the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series. It is well documented that Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s first book in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, *The Shadow of the Wind, is one of my all-time favorites. The second novel, The Angel’s Game, is almost as good and book three, The Prisoner of Heaven, is better than most authors could ever hope for. The fourth and final book, The Labyrinth of the Spirits*, however, continues to languish on my shelf unread, for a reason I detailed here. For those afraid of clicking on links, I will sum it up: since Zafon died of cancer in 2020, there will never be another novel from him and I couldn’t bear the idea of the final novel truly being the final one, so I’ve avoided reading it for the past five years. It’s time to put that behind me and complete this masterpiece of a series.

This is more than enough to keep me busy for the entirety of 2026 and while it will be challenging (as it should be), it is also an achievable goal. Well, maybe not with Ulysses, but certainly with all the others. Let me know your reading plans for the new year in the comments.

Keep on reading, my friends, and may Hemingway be with you.