Really Challenging Myself in 2026

Happy New Year to you all! I hope your year as started off on a happy note. Today is the day where we usually make our resolutions to ourselves about what we are going to do better in the new year. I’m terrible at making goals, but I’ve discovered that I am pretty good at doing reading challenges. I had a really good time doing three reading challenges in 2025, so much so that I have decided to add two more! It will be a challenge I am sure, but I think I am up for it. This post is just for the fiction reading challenges. I did a separate post for the Nonfiction challenge which you can find here. Here is the list of all of the challenges I will be doing and some of the books that I already have planned for them.

Buzzword Cover Challenge and Buzzword Reading Challenge

I wish I had some cute badge or banner for these two but alas I do not. I’m doing these together because they are both hosted by booksandlala. I was only going to do one of them this year, but they both had such good prompts that I couldn’t resist doing both. This is a monthly challenge and I only have to read one book for each of them. Here are a couple of books from each that I already have planned for the first two months of the year.

52 Book Club 2026 Reading Challenge

I had a lot of fun doing this challenge last year, but I seriously considered not doing it this year, because some of the prompts are really hard, and there were a couple that will have me reading out of my comfort zone. But as I thought about it I decided to go ahead and do it. Challenges are suppose to challenge you right? Also I started looking at the ARCs and some of my anticipated reads for 2026 and thinking about what prompts they would fit. Before I knew it I had about 20 books picked out. Here are four of the ones that I will be reading.

2026 SPECCY Reading Challenge

This is a last minute addition and is being hosted by the lovely Shellyrae over at bookdout. This is another one that could be a monthly challenge if you want. Basically there are twelve prompts and different levels of participation and all of your books must be considered speculative fiction. I mostly read these types of books so it shouldn’t be too hard to get this one done. I am planning on doing the survey level where you have to read and review 12 books. I am up for this one, especially because she is ok with me combining it with other challenges. So far these are the ones I have planned for this challenge.

The Buzzword and the 52 Book Club challenges have pages on Storygraph where you can join and keep track of your books that you want to read for the prompts as well as the ones you have read. Last year I just used a spreadsheet to keep track of my nonfiction reads. But I discovered that you can create your own challenges on Storygraph that you can keep private, so that is what I have done for the other two challenges this year. I do like the ease of just adding the books to the challenge pages when I add them to my read list. Hopefully this will be easier to keep track of my other two challenges than the spreadsheet was.

Are you planning on doing any challenges this year? Which ones? Let me know in the comments. Until next time…

Happy Reading!