The first half of the year is over and that makes it a great time to check in on the goals I set at the beginning of the year and recalibrate for the second half of the year.
Feel free to check out my original goals post if you missed it (I also include lots of photos of my reading journal, if that’s something you’re interested in), but otherwise I do a brief recap of each of them in this post as well so feel free to start with this one.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at the progress on each of my 2026 reading goals.
Big Yearly Goals
Read 52 books (excluding rereads).
Read 20,000 pages.
Read at least 2/3 days of the year (244 days total).
I’m happily on track or surpassing all three of these goals.
I am currently at 53 books (-9 rereads = 44) books, which puts me 87% towards my book goal, and I’m at 79% towards my pages goal as well.
I’m also at 123 days read, putting me exactly 50% through my days read goal. Although this isn’t as impressive as being 80% through a goal, it’s actually the one of the three I’m most proud of since I greatly exceeded 52 books and 20k pages last year but fell short of my 2/3 of days read goal in 2025 (I got to 57%). Now I just need to keep it up into the second half of the year.
Goal 1: Be Consistent
Read 20/min day at least 3 times/week.
Read 2 short stories or essays per month (or just 24 across the year).
I’m not doing too badly on the first part of this goal, and I’ve been especially good at it in quarter 2. Of the 26 weeks of the first half of the year, I read at least 20 minutes 3 days of the week 21/26 times, and I’ve only missed this goal 1 time in quarter 2. I’m pretty happy with that.
As for the second goal, it’s going both well and poorly at the same time. I’ve reached 8 short stories and 2 essays, so just under halfway and I’m pretty happy with that. However, I had hoped to do half stories and half essays, so I really need to pic up my essay reading in the second half of the year – which I think will be more doable once I’m not doing readings for my thesis.
I also said in my goals post that I would start by considering only 1 short story or essay/collection per author and reassess if needed, but I think the rule can stay as I’m actually doing pretty well – I just need to switch from short stories to essays.
Goal 2: Decrease my TBR and keep on top of purchases
Read more books off my TBR than I purchase.
I made a really complicated points tracking system for the first part of this goal and I won’t bore you with all the details, but let’s just say I made it a lot less strict because I wasn’t following it at all. If we disregard all the various exceptions and rules, the basic rule used to be that I had to read 3 books from my owned TBR before buying 1 new book, but I changed that almost immediately to 2.
I still haven’t done a great job of following it – I was 8 books over in quarter 1 and 7 books over in quarter 2 – but it’s still worked to limit my buying compared to 2024 when it really got out of control. I’m keeping this goal as-is in the second half of the year but I’m going to try and be stricter with it and I also crossed off a couple buying slots to make up for some of the looseness in the first half of the year.
I’m going to attempt to only buy a book after I’ve already fulfilled the requirement to get it (instead of trying to fill a backlog) with the exception of books that I want to put on my TBR for the current/coming month which I can front load and then read during the month. We’ll see if this works at making me stick to the goal.
Tackle sections of my bookshelf that are under 20% read.
I’m doing okay (not great, but okay) at this one, except that I realised that two of the three books I’ve read for the challenge are not actually books on my TBR (I borrowed them from the library).
I’ve decided to just go with it (don’t want to mess up my spread) and accept that I might not quite meet the TBR decreasing goal – but at least I’m reading in the right categories.
Goal 3: Read and review new releases promptly
Read new releases and review them within a couple weeks of their coming out.
I’m counting books that came out in English this year that I also reviewed on my blog. I’m at 5 right now (it would be six, but I decided not to count mini reviews of DNF books), which is half way to my general goal of 12 and I’m pretty happy with it.
Click on the covers above to see each of my reviews!
Goal 4: Revisit authors and continue series
Read more books by authors I’ve read from before.
I identified 9 authors for this challenge and so far I’ve only read a book by one of them, so needless to say this challenge isn’t going quite so well. I do have another book for this challenge in progress at the moment, and I think it might be an easier challenge to complete in the second half of the year since a lot of the books I would want to read for the challenge are currently in storage boxes (but I’m hoping that will change before the end of the year).
Continue series I’ve started.
This challenge is going slightly better – I’m at 3/9.
However, I have also changed a couple of the series out for other ones. Specifically, I took the second book in the Moonfall series by Sarah A Parker and the sixth Before the Coffee Gets Cold book off the list as I don’t think I will continue further with these series. I have replaced them with the Murderbot Diaries (Martha Wells, Book 3) and Hidden Legacy (Ilona Andrews, Book 7) respectively.
Goal 5: Read more globally and diversely
This one has been a slightly slow start as well, but I’m someone what optimistic about it based on the kinds of books on my upcoming TBRs.
Read a book from each major region of the word.
Obviously “major region” is extremely subjective. I break it up in my statistics based more on my reading habits than on actual geography (smaller regions that I read a lot from get split out so that I still remind myself to read books from other regions in their ‘parent’ region). That leaves me with:
- Anglosphere (UK/Australia/Canada/US/New Zealand)
- Europe (all of Europe except the UK)
- East Asia (Japan/Korea/China)
- Asia (Other) – can split into West Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia etc.
- Central and South America
- Africa
I currently have at least one book from each of the overarching regions except Africa (and Africa will join the list once my July TBR is complete), but I also picked out four specific regions to read from and I’m only a quarter of the way done with that.
So I need to make sure I read one book from West Asia, Central/South Asia and Africa in order to complete that part of the challenge.
Bonus: Complete the Storygraph Reads the World Challenge 2026.
Of the ten countries on this list I have DNF’d a book from one and finished a book from one other. I’m not counting the DNF so far (I might add it at the end of the year if I need to complete it, but I don’t think I’ll need to). This puts me at 2/10, which isn’t great, but I have identified a TBR for the other books in the challenge and am feeling somewhat hopeful that I can at least make decent progress.
Read at least 6 books by POC authors (except East Asian), including at least 3 by Black authors.
This one isn’t going too well (I’m at 1/9, which is really awful, actually) so this is going to be a big focus of the second half of the year. Getting through more of the Storygraph Reads the World books will also help it increase naturally.
I would like to point out that I have read more than 1 book by an author who isn’t white this year, they were just overwhelmingly East Asian or of East Asian ethnic origin (I’m currently at 67% white and 29% East Asian – which is quite high percentage of white authors for me, but I’m pinning it on the fact that I reread a lot of Ilona Andrews books).
Additional Reading Challenges
Out of Your Comfort Zone Reading Challenge (@BookCheshireCat)
Current progress: 7/10 + 1/5 bonus prompts
Café Crawl challenge 2026 (@Genie In A Novel)
Current progress: 7/12 + 4/6 bonus prompts
Romanceopoloy 2026 (@Under the Covers)
I’m following an adapted version of this challenge so it doesn’t fully follow the official rules.
Current progress: 10/16
Nonfiction Reading Challenge
Current progress: 4/12 – but there is a lot of nonfiction that I’ve been wanting to read and just not having the energy with my degree, so hopefully this can pick up in the second half of the year.
2025 Purchases Reading Challenge
I had 12 books acquired or purchased in 2025 that were in English and bought for no reason but fun reading (I didn’t count books bought for my degree etc.) that were still unread at the end of 2025 (to be fair to myself, this included three books that I received for Christmas and birthday in the final week of the year). The challenge was to read all of them before the end of 2026.
I have removed one of the books from the challenge as it turns out it’s book 4 in a series (only by googling did I discover this). So we’re down to 11 books total.
Current progress: 4/11
Moving Forward
I was pretty happy with my progress in overall goals and reading challenges, and I think I managed to improve on some of the issues I was having in quarter 1 during quarter 2 as well, so my focus for the next few months is going to be sticking to the book buying restrictions I have self-imposed and trying to read more diverse books.
Keira x
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