I track my reading on Goodreads. The site has various challenges that you can track toward different goals.
The one I use is setting a goal for how many books I read over the year. For 2026, I set my goal at 30 books, which felt ambitious.
Today, I reached that goal.
With my spine issues, I’m on my back a lot, and found myself having more time to read than I expected, so the yearly challenge was completed quite early in the year.
Another goal was reading all the Hugo and Nebula nominated novels so I’d have an opinion on the winners. There are 11 different novels due to the overlap.
I made a short video about my thoughts on the nominees.
After finishing the Hugo & Nebula nominees, I’m now reading through the Locus Science Fiction and Fantasy novel choices. That’s 14 additional novels beyond the books on the Hugo and Nebula lists. I have 8 more to go on that challenge.
After hitting the 30 book Goodreads milestone, I decided to run my goodread-tools script to create a graphic of the 30 books I read so far in the challenge.
As you can see, I did fit in some books that aren’t award contenders, sometimes you need a little cozy fantasy to clear your head.
Some of the award winners aren’t what I would have chosen, mainly due to my tastes being developed on sci-fi/fantasy books from the 60s & 70s. My parents were big readers and I grew up with a large book collection at home.
Still, I’ve only read a few frustrating books this year that I really didn’t like.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed focusing on the nominees with a dash of booktok recommendations tossed in.
