a Look at a Book

For the last few years, I have posted a roundup of a few reading challenges that I can heartily recommend for the coming year, and I’ve encouraged my readers to choose some goals for their reading life. I have seen the difference that setting some type of reading goal makes in helping people read more consistently and more adventurously.

My roundups are purposely not exhaustive, because sometimes having too many options is overwhelming and counter-productive to actually setting goals.
If you’re looking for some massive roundups that are close to exhaustive, they are out there!
If you’d rather have a shorter, curated list, you’re in the right spot.
I do my best to pick ones with thoughtful prompts or themes, wholesome book recommendations, and ones that will help readers expand their typical genres of choice or try something new to them in reading. 

Alas, I am not posting this year’s roundup in advance of January 1st, but I still think within the first month of the year is a great time to set goals.

Below are a handful of reading challenges that I recommend to you. After that, I’ll share with you a reflection on my 2025 year of reading, along with the goals I am setting for 2026.

Reading Challenges for Adults

The Storygraph Challenges

Because of my sister, I have looked into the Challenges feature on Storygraph (thanks, sis!). One in particular, the Onboarding Challenge, is a great one for discovering all the ways Storygraph can help track your reading and give you ideas for more books to read. I have been enjoying Storygraph more this year, and I do recommend it as a great place to track your reading.

There are about four challenges hosted by Storygraph, with a multitude of other challenges that are created by users. You can search by categories, like genre, OwnVoices, Geographical; by keywords; by title or host; or just scroll. 🙂 The app is great, but I did link to their website here if that helps you.
Remember, you can also create your own challenge if you prefer, and track it there too.

So many options here, all in one place!

Book Girls’ Guide Challenges

These ladies continue to impress me with their challenges, their monthly curated lists for each challenge, and the way they have grown their community of readers. They add a new challenge almost yearly and keep updating and refreshing their other challenges’ book lists.

They are up to seven challenges that they are running this year. As I’ve said before, what I find so helpful about their challenges is that they curate a list for each month’s prompt for each challenge, so that you don’t have to flounder around the internet looking for a book that fits. It helps so you don’t spend as much time reading about books and helps you actually get to reading books.

Fun bonus is that they create fun, colorful trackers for each one and have a Facebook community for discussions about the books in each challenge. I highly recommend their challenges!

The 52 Book Club Challenge

Each year, there is a new set of 52 prompts to help you pick out a book, along with a whole lot of flexibility in the interpretation. If you complete this challenge, you’ll essentially read one book per week for the whole year – about 10 times more books than the average adult in the U.S. reads each year! 

I don’t normally love random prompt challenges, because I find them hard to find books for. Also . . . I prefer much more straightforward, black and white guidelines. (Those who know me in-person are likely laughing and rolling their eyes at what an understatement this is.) But for those of you who want to find a book with a “kangaroo word on the cover” (prompt #2) or a book with a “handwritten interior font” (prompt #42) – this challenge is definitely for you! 

The 52 Book Club has groups both on Goodreads and Storygraph, along with Facebook and Instagram. If you don’t have many in-person bookish friends, this would be a great way to connect with some like-minded people online (which is better than nothing!).

The NoveList Reading Challenge

Here is a reading challenge I haven’t found before.
NoveList is all about helping libraries fulfill their mission and helping readers discover more books. For their challenge, they have a year-long theme and a prompt per month. This year, each prompt is a different genre. Their goal is to help you discover a book you like within a genre you don’t normally like, because sometimes books (and their genres) surprise you! 

I connected immediately with their approach, because it is exactly my approach with students and other readers: if you don’t like reading (or a specific genre), it may just be because you haven’t found the right book (or the right book in that genre) that fits what you like! 

As I dug further into their website, it looks like they created curated book lists for each month, but those are behind a paywall for libraries this year. Makes sense, since libraries are their mission/customers, though it’s sad for us readers! Maybe you can ask your local library if they have NoveList/Library Aware in their library.

Or, perhaps, just 12 books for the year is a good goal, and you’re looking for a little motivation to try different genres. If so, I recommend this one to you! 

Tea and Ink Society’s Reading Challenge

Are you like me where you know classics are classics for a reason, but you find it tough to pick one out and read it? Or maybe it takes you a year or more to slog through a really long one (like Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo). 

Y’all, I have to recommend this reading challenge! This is the fifth annual reading challenge for their site, and this blogger has all sorts of curated lists. She has thoughtfully organized the monthly prompts to go with the flow of a year (a short classic in September, a wintry classic in December, starting the year gently with a serialized classic that you begin in January, but read all year.)  I am a little excited to try this one myself!

The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge

Interested in another classics challenge, but with a fun, TV twist? This blogger/substacker created The Rory Gilmore reading challenge in 2020 and has kept going with it. In this challenge, she encourages readers to read more classics by providing prompts each month and a list of recommended titles that are alluded to, quoted from, or mentioned in Gilmore Girls episodes. 

I found the page for this on Instagram earlier in 2025, but had forgotten about it until I was internet searching for this roundup. I’m tempted to include this in my personal goals for this year!

Your Local Library

Does your library have a reading challenge for 2026? One of mine has challenges throughout the year, so maybe rather than a year-long challenge, you commit to a couple of shorter challenges throughout the year. Or participate in a year-long one hosted by your library, and you get to meet some new bookish friends! Supporting your local library is important, so be sure to check yours and see if they have a challenge!

Note: Oftentimes, reading challenges through an organization, like a library, may have a prompt that you are not comfortable with or that doesn’t line up with your beliefs. While I believe that reading from a different perspective is a powerful way to challenge thinking and develop empathy, always, always, follow your conscience and adapt a reading challenge to fit what you need! And then consider it completed even if you didn’t follow someone else’s challenge verbatim 🙂

For Kids and Teens

From what I’ve seen online, kids’ challenges tend to be more static, meaning they don’t have a bunch of prompts that change each year. Rather, they are (rightly) encouraging kids and teens to explore different genres and topics to help them learn about their preferences as readers. Here are a few to encourage the young readers in your life.

Redeemed Readers’ Challenges

With fun printable trackers for each challenge, and 10 different mini-challenges for kids and teens, this is a great place to start with your kiddos.  If you do all ten challenges, your child will have read 100 books!

Bonus: they have some challenges at the bottom of the linked page for adults to help them learn more about children’s literature. Might I say, this is a brilliant type of challenge, especially for parents who feel out of the loop when it comes to kid lit.

Read Around the World Challenge

The Book Girls’ Guide has a reading challenge for kids that stays the same from year to year, though of course the books read each year would change. I recommend this because of their kid-friendly coloring trackers and because kids need to travel through books to as many parts of the world as they can!

The Ultimate Reading Challenge Portfolio

This looks fun – it’s focused on growing readerly habits and helping even reluctant readers explore more about reading. It’s not really focused on the number of books, and some prompts are just reading-adjacent. Geared more toward elementary students, it even has built-in prizes once the challenge is complete. Rather than simply a website, this is actually a product you would buy. Click on the link for more info.

Your local library

So many libraries have reading challenges just for kids, especially over the summer. Check out whether or not yours has a kids reading challenge, and join it if they have one! As a kid, I loved getting prizes from my library for reading – like a coupon for a free ice cream cone from a local shop or a ticket for free entrance to the water park. Does yours offer those types of incentives? Would your kid(s) be interested? It’s worth a look.

My Reading Goals

One of the reasons I enjoy making a list of reading challenges for you all each year is that it gives me time to reflect on the past year of reading and set goals for the coming year.

When I first started thinking back over the year, I didn’t remember articulating any specific goals – a bad sign, I know. 🙂 That actually isn’t true, as last year’s roundup post shows. What is true is that I did not set any traditional goals related to the number of books I wanted to read or any stipulations about genre. I knew that, as a mom to a baby, working full-time outside the home for the first half of the year, a goal with a number of books to read wouldn’t be helpful for me. 

The goals I set were: 

1. Read to my little guy every day for at least a minute or two. Mainly I want to build in the habit of reading every day.
2. Do something related to my own reading life for about 10 minutes each day. That could be reading, writing a review, or finding some new titles that I’m interested in.
3. Track what I read.
4. Track why I want to read a book when I add it to my TBR.

How did I do? 

Honestly, I’m impressed by the thoughtfulness of my January 2025 self. These were quite reasonable aims, but I finished the year with mixed results.

1. I didn’t record whether or not I read to my son every day, though, with few exceptions, we did! He has developed some more stamina for longer stories, and we have gone through several phases of favorite picture books and board books. 
2. Yeah…this did not happen every day. Especially once we got to September (more on that later)
3. I did okay at this, mostly because of Libby’s timeline feature that helped me see what I read or started to read. Then I transferred it to Storygraph more than Goodreads. However, with the books I read on NetGalley, they don’t seem to be added to Storygraph until publication, so that has affected my data in Storygraph. I read upwards of 35 books in 2025, mostly “fluff” books, with some heavier stories sprinkled in.
4. Yep…I didn’t find a workable/convenient way to record this, so this goal didn’t happen.

So what is working for me right now, and what goals can I set to help my reading life this year? 

Well. Since baby #2* is due in May, my reading life will likely continue to fluctuate. It already did when morning sickness hit in September. However, I think after a year of not doing any specific reading challenges, I’d like the structure of picking a challenge or two again. *No, I haven’t told my readership in previous posts, but it’s true! We are well on our way to welcoming another baby into our family! Also bad morning sickness is why I haven’t been writing or reading much in the last several months.

Do I think I’ll complete an entire challenge? Mmm…I’m not going to hold myself to it. It’s far more important that I help my family and myself adjust to life as a family of four than to read lots and lots of books (unfortunately, haha).
However, I found myself floundering on choosing books throughout 2025, and I know that having some specific prompts and curated lists will help guide my book choosing, and thus help my reading life flourish. Any reading this year will be a great accomplishment, even if I don’t “complete” a challenge.

So what challenges will I choose?
To start with, I’m going to work on the Decades Challenge by the Book Girls’ Guide and the Classics Challenge by the Tea and Ink Society. I haven’t tried either challenge before, but I have already put some books on hold at my library for the January prompts. I’m excited to read intentionally this year.

What are your goals or reading challenges for 2026? What’s at the top of your TBR list?
Share in the comments!