Well, hello! I can’t believe I’m putting together two blog posts in one week – it feels like forever since that’s happened. How has this week been for you? It has been downright frigid here in New Hampshire but I do my best to not complain about the cold. I save my complaining for the summer! So we’ve been bundling up, braving the cold, and baking at every opportunity. It helps in so many ways. Today we made a spice cake with brown butter frosting and homemade pizza – the house smelled incredible.
Today’s post is something of a placeholder. I’m outlining my reading goals for 2026 and hope to update them each quarter. A lot of them will seem familiar – several are extensions of my 2025 goals. But I have pretty new graphics and I’m ready to start filling them in!
❒ 12 Female Prize Winners
Like 2025, I’m aiming to read 12 female prize winners in 2026. Six from the Women’s Prize for Fiction and six female Booker Prize winners. I’m over halfway through both prize lists and should be able to finish in 2027 if I follow through this year, which is a very big deal for me.
❒ 12 Translated Titles
This is also a repeat from 2025. I love making sure I read at least one translated title a month!
❒ Finish the International Booker Prize Winners
10 books have won the International Booker Prize (as of this writing) and I’ve already read 5 of them. These are the last 5 on the list and I hope to get to them this year — as well as the book that wins in 2026.
❒ Quarterly Author Reading
I wanted to reread all of the Toni Morrison in 2026 but felt overwhelmed with that idea. I compromised with myself and decided to read one each quarter. And I’ve always struggled with Virginia Woolf, so I’d like to get some practice with her writing this year as well.
❒ Read 54,000 Pages
I was short on this goal in both 2024 and 2025. My goal is to read 150 pages a day for 360 days in 2026 (not 365 days because I want to be realistic about holidays, getting sick, etc.). 150×360=54,000. Maybe 2026 will finally be my year for this one?
Slow & Steady Titles
One of my favorite things to do is pick out books that seem like a challenge and assign it my slow and steady read for the moment. I aim to read 10-20 pages a day until its done, however long it takes. That’s sort of how I designed my personal curriculum last year — except then I had 4 slow and steadies going at the same time, which made the whole process a lot slower (and much more rewarding)! Here are the books I have sitting beside my desk, waiting for me to start:
- The Odyssey – Emily Wilson translation
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (currently reading)
- Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust
- The Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt
- Prequel – Rachel Maddow
- Black Moses – Caleb Gayle
- You Don’t Know Us Negroes – Zora Neale Hurston
- Jim crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle – Tyina Steptoe
- Paradise Lost – John Milton (currently reading 1 section a month)
If you made it this far, thank you for being here! I’d love it if you were interested in reading along with me. Let me know if you have any similar reading plans this year. And if you have totally different plans, what are they? I’d love to know.
I’m planning to fall asleep tonight to Best in Show, in honor of Catherine O’Hara. Her death is a tragedy!
I hope you’re able to have a good weekend and find time to do things that recharge your battery despite how awful things are right now. Take good care.
The Cozy Burrow 
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