I feel like I don’t prioritize reading as much as I should. Reading gives me great joy, and yet I default to TV watching, doom scrolling, and silly things like work, eating, chores, etc. My wife gave me the book, BR00283 Everyone in my family has killed someone by Benjamin Stevenson, for Christmas and I went deep down the enjoyment rabbit hole. It was unique, it was unusual, it was delightful.

I have also been reading Elizabeth Wheatley’s Tears of the Wolf and Oath of the Wolf. They have also been excellent. I haven’t reviewed them yet, and therein lies a source of consternation for me.

Book reviews. I could have said B was for the book reviews as they go hand in hand, do they not? If you’re anal-retentive like me, yes, they do. I read it, I review it.

Except I am way behind on book reviews. I’ve done 283, which is amazing to me. I remember when I was back at 25 and 50. Now, how many are in the backlog, let’s see…there are 27 books on my Kindle in the “READ” collection, but I won’t review all of those, probably 22 or so (others were DNF’s or just reference materials I was looking at). Then I have another 31 that are relatively “recent reads” in the last year or so. Still fresh in my mind. Then another 63 from the previous year or two, and then another 186 that are sitting there. Taunting me from years gone by. So, that makes, lemme see, carry the one, and ummm…302 pending review. More than I have accomplished in the last ten years combined.

But I digress. I’ll make progress on that “backlog” this year, but it is a digression. The real question is…

What will I read this year?

I fear that I do not read enough non-fiction. I have about 150 books on my Kindle that are non-fiction, although some are more for browsing than complete reading. I put them there so I would remember I had them, like a Chair Yoga book. It isn’t the type of book you “read” so much as open on the desktop perhaps and apply part of it to a routine. But I threw it on the Kindle so I can flip through and see what’s there. My biggest challenge for NF reads is that I often feel like I want to highlight as I go. Except the Kindle is designed to save those highlights in a separate file (MyClippings). Which means even if I synch the book back over to the PC, the highlights are still ONLY on the Kindle in a separate file.

I’ve been experimenting and I came up with a couple of options. If I read it on my PC, and make highlights there, they stay with the file. Alternatively, if I do it on my Kindle, I can run a plugin to Calibre that will lift “annotations” from the MyClippings file and put them in an extra field in Calibre. Either or both would work. It’s “easier” if they’re just in the file itself, if I go back later, but harder to find perhaps; alternatively, the annotation highlights in a separate file make it really easy to write a review and lift stuff out, but often out of context.

I’m leaning toward setting aside 30 minutes every day to just read non-fiction. I’m currently working my way through a Harvard Business Review collection about toxic workplaces (I know, riveting, right? I like it, though, seeing how academics and other experts approach issues that I myself face as a manager, and how they explain their views) and highlighting as I go on the Kindle. If it works, I’ll stick with that method as the Kindle is portable; if it doesn’t work for my subsequent review and blogging, I’ll likely open the file directly on my desktop. I tried to get it to an old iPad 2 that we have, but alas, not quite the tool I wanted.

But I think I can at least categorize the main areas of Non-fiction that I’ll delve into this year, and I’ll push myself to do 14 books. I should have a biography in there somewhere but maybe I’ll count that instead in the fiction category (there’s a few options below where a person could show up in rebel, for example).

PolyWogg’s Reading Challenge for 2026: Non-Fiction

I’ll come back to the non-fiction side of things again when I get to my L is for Learning post. 🙂

Let’s talk fiction

My goal is 50 fiction books a year, although if I was totally honest with myself, 300 would be my real goal if I thought it was attainable. 🙂 I am struggling with how to read established series, to be honest. So many different books out there by different authors, all of which interest me, and yet I also want to read series. The only series I feel “finished” on probably is Sue Grafton — all 25 of her Kinsey Milhone alphabet series (A is for Alibi, …) plus two of her older books that nobody ever mentions, both of which were quite good and I’m glad I chased them down.

But I would love to read all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, plus a full-on deep dive into a year of Sherlock Holmes and all the new books — they may not be canon, but they are often fun. Or I could go “legal” (Grisham, Berhnardt, O’Shaugnessy, Gardner), sagas (Archer), fantasy (P.C. Cast, Jordan, Wheatley), action (Child, DeMille, MacDonald), forensics (Cornwell, Reichs), light (Evanovich), British sleuth (Francis), procedurals (Jennings, ), westerns (Butcher, L’Amour), etc. And I’m not even talking hundreds of sci-fi books in the Star Wars and Star Trek universe, cozies, other types of detectives and sleuths, etc. It’s a lot.

Huh, I just realized that my latest review isn’t even complete — I forgot to code it properly in the HTML file, so that it will show up in the indexed pages. Sigh.

But where was I? Oh, yeah, deciding what to read this year between established series and new authors or standalone books. Obviously, duh, the answer is both! 🙂

PolyWogg’s Reading Challenge for 2026: Fiction

Some resources that I’ll draw upon from earlier Reading Challenges:

• My reading list from the 2015-2017 years, some of which I never got around to reading (https://www.thepolyblog.ca/books-and-reading/my-reading-list-2015-2016-2017/);
• My 2020 reading challenge which had a better set up of various award lists than it did in 2019 (https://www.thepolyblog.ca/books-and-reading/reading-challenge-2020/);

And I’ll try to update each month on how it’s going. What are you going to read this year?