2026 Reading Challenge discussion

Yearly Challenges:

TBR Jar
Clear the Shelves

Personal Challenges:
36 books in 2025
Classic Books
Banned Books
Canadian
Indigo Reading Challenge

Books Read
46/36



Currently Reading:
Physical Book


Ebook


Audiobook

Yearly Challenges: TBR Jar

TBR JAR
Duration: January 1 - December 31, 2025
Progress: 1/10

1. Read the book that has been on your TBR list the longest. Girl with a Pearl Earring
2. Read a book you added to your TBR within the last year Crown of Midnight
3. Read the book with the most pages on your TBR or one that is over 500 pages. The Goldfinch
4. Read the book with the least number of pages on your TBR or one that is under 100 pages. We Should All Be Feminists COMPLETED Feb 25
5. Read the earliest published book on your TBR The Illiad
6. Read the most recently published book that’s available on your TBR Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
7. Read a book with the highest average rating on your TBR, or over 3.8 The Nightingale
8. Read a book with the lowest average rating on your TBR, or under 3.0 Book of Wings
9. Read the book with the most number of ratings (i.e., not the actual average rating, but the number of people who have rated it). The Great Gatsby
10. Read the book with the least number of ratings. The Snow Kimono
11. Sort your TBR by title. Read a book from the first page The Alice Network
12. Sort your TBR by title. Read a book from the last page Yellowface
13. Sort your TBR by cover. Read the first or last book.Mansfield Park
14. Sort your TBR by author. Read a book from the first page.The Crossover
15. Sort your TBR by author. Read a book from the last page.The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family
16. Randomize your TBR and read the first book.Next Episode

Yearly Challenge - Clear the Shelves
Duration: January 1 - December 31, 2025

Progress: 5/15

Physical Books:


Audiobooks:


The physical books I will either be keeping if I think my daughters will want to read them in the near future, lending them to family or placing them in Little Free Library down the street.

Also, plan to clear my 'currently reading' shelf on Goodreads. Many were library books but some were others I own but got sidetracked by other books.
Progress: -/5

Must-Read Classics
No timeline - ongoing
Based on Penguin books list and others found online for must read classics by poc.
(I don't count the ones I read in highschool)

Goal for 2025: 5

Progress: 5/130

1. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) completed 2018
2. To Kill a Mockingbird completed 2015
3. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude
5. In Cold Blood (Truman Capote)
6. Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)
7. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
8. I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
9. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
10. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
11. The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
12. The Call of the Wild (Jack London).
13. Persuasion (Jane Austen)
14. Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)
15. Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
16. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
17. The Death of the Heart (Elizabeth Bowen)
18. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
19. The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
20. The Go-Between (L.P. Hartley)
21. The Iliad (Homer)
22. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey)
23. 1984
24. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
25. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
26. The Code of the Woosters (P.G. Wodehouse)
27. Dracula (Bram Stoker)
28. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
29. The Chrysalids (John Wyndham)
30. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
31. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
32. Another Country (James Baldwin)
33. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
34. The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton)
35. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
36. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
37. Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
38. Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
39. Vanity Fair (William Thackeray)
40. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
41. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
42. The Mill on the Floss (George Eliot)
43. Barchester Towers (Anthony Trollope)
44. Lady Chatterley's Lover (D.H. Lawrence)
45. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
46. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
47. Ulysses (James Joyce)
48. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
49. The Lord of the Rings (J. R. Tolkien)
50. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
51. Buddenbrooks (Thomas Mann)
52. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
53. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson)
54. Scoop (Evelyn Waugh)
55. Love in a Cold Climate (Nancy Mitford)
56. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
57. Diary of a Nobody (George & Weedon Grossmith)
58. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
59. The Betrothed (Alessandro Manzoni)
60. Orlando (Virginia Woolf)
61. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
62. The Time Machine (H. G. Wells)
63. The Art of War (Sun-Tzu)
64. The Forsyte Saga (John Galsworthy)
65. Travels with Charley (John Steinbeck)
66. Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller)
67. Don Quixote (Miguel Cervantes)
68. Staying On (Paul Scott)
69. The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)
70. The Quiet American (Graham Greene)
71. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
72. Perfume (Patrick Suskind)
73. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
74. Of Human Bondage (Somerset Maugham)
75. Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
76. Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)
77. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
78. A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
79. Silas Marner (George Eliot)
80. Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
81. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
82. The Sea, The Sea (Iris Murdoch)
83. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
84. The Castle (Franz Kafka)
85. I, Claudius (Robert Graves)
86. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)
87. A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)
88. The Razor's Edge (W. Somerset Maugham)
89. Lark Rise to Candleford (Flora Thompson)
90. The Return of the Native (Thomas Hardy)
91. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)
92. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
93. North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell)
94. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) completed 2019
95. Giovanni's Room (James Baldwin)
96. The Godfather (Mario Puzo)
97. The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
98. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
99. White Nights (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
100. Hard Times (Charles Dickens)
101. Romeo and Juliet
102. Emma (Jane Austen) completed 2018
103. The Hobbit
104. Hamlet
105. Anne of Green Gables completed 2018
106. The Old Man and the Sea
107. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
108. Memoirs of a Geisha
109. The Odyssey
110. Invisible Man
111. Twelve Years a Slave
112. Classic Haiku (Basho)
113. Life Among the Paiutes (Sarah Winnemucca)
114. Madwomen (Gabriela Mistral)
115. The Weary Blues (Langston Hughes)
116. Rashomon and Other Stories (Ryunosuke Akutugawa)
117. Native Son (Richard Wright)
118. Ficciones (Jorge Luis Borges)
119. Go Tell it on the Mountain (James Baldwin)
120. The Cairo Trilogy (Najib Mahfuz)
121. Cane (Jane Toomer)
122. American Indian Stories (Zitkala-sa)
123. The Souls of Black Folk (WEB Dubois)
124. The Rubaiyat (Omar Khayyam)
125. The Prophet (Khalil Gibran)
126. The Stranger (Albert Camus)
127. The Trial (Franz Kafka)
128. The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann)
129. The Road to Wigan Pier (Oscar Wilde)
130. The Color Purple (Alice Walker)

Banned Books
Any book from the list found here: https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/
Progress: -/5

The ones I'm most likely going to read (since they've been on my TBR for awhile):

The Kite Runner
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Bluest Eye
Sold
Thirteen Reasons Why

Canadian

I usually try to read at least one book on the Canada Reads current years' shortlist and read any other Canadian book

Progress: 12/10

Indigo Reading Challenge 2025
https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/reading-c...

1. First in a series:
Outlander
SPY×FAMILY 1
2. Retelling of a classic:
Ayesha at Last
3. Japanese Cozy Fiction
Norwegian Wood
4. Translated book:

5. One-sitting Read:
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
6. Published in Your Birth Year:
7. Banned Book:
The Glass Castle
The Kite Runner
Heartstopper: Volume One
8. Inspire Personal Growth:
The Let Them Theory
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity
The 5am Club
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
9. Global Perspective:
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
10. Romantasy Read:
11. Nature as Main Character:
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Toward Personal and Ecological Healing
Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World
Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging
Moon of the Crusted Snow
Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
12. Author’s debut:
13. Book Everyone’s Talking About:
14. Canadian Indie Publisher:
15. Page to Screen:
16. Local Author:
17. Celeb Book Club pick:
18. Timeless Classic:
19. Enemies to Lovers Romance:
20. Non-Celeb Bio:
21. Unreliable Narrator:
Yellowface
22. 2025 Release:
23. Graphic Novel Adaptation:
24. Local Staff Pick:
Stolen
25. Award Winner:

Around the Year Challenge

Progress 7/15 books

Out of the 36 books I want to read:
5 classics, 6 non-fiction (not including memoir), 4 memoir, 6 from my currently reading on Goodreads (which are mostly library books that had to be returned before I finished with them-- part of my clear the shelves challenge), 10 from Canadian authors, 6 audiobooks, 6 POC authors, 20 woman authors. There is some overlap between these categories.

0/5 classics

4/6 nonfiction


2/4 memoir


0/6 Goodreads currently reading

10/10 Canadian authors


5/6 Audiobooks



6/6 BIPOC



14/20 Women authors
Ashley Audrain:

Leigh Bardugo:

Kalynn Bayron:

Cassandra Clare:

Suzanne Collins:

Viola Davis:

Sunyi Dean:

Emma Donoghue:

Amal El-Mohtar:

Alice Feeney:

Joy Fielding:

Carley Fortune:

Allegra Goodman:

Carol Goodman:

Alice Hoffman:

Helen Humphreys:

Shirley Jackson:

Ellie Keel:

Allison King:

Florence Knapp:

Ann-Helén Laestadius

Shari Lapena:

Ariel Lawhon:

Jamie Chai Yun Liew:



Madeline Miller:

Premee Mohamed:

Toni Morrison:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Britney Spears:

Catherine Steadman:

Miriam Toews:

Ruth Ware: