Reading Resolutions Roundtable, 2026 edition

As 2025 fades around us, Frumious Consortiumists Doreen, Doug and Emily are thinking about our reading plans for 2026! Whether we make official resolutions or not, we all have some definite goals.

Emily: Okay, let’s chat new year! Do you make reading resolutions? Anything you’re planning or particularly looking forward to in 2026? Starting in January, I’m going to be doing a readalong of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series that I’m excited about. I’ve so far only ever read the first one, So You Want to Be a Wizard, and I hear they’re all great.

Doug: I am looking forward to reading the third book in Miklos Banffy’s Transylvania trilogy, They Were Divided. They aren’t exactly timely — the third was published in 1940, though it wasn’t translated into English until this century, and they are all about pre-WWI Hungarian nobility — but they are wonderful and extraordinary books. I want to enjoy it and find out what happens to everyone, but I will also be sad to come to the end because after that there isn’t any more.

Doug: There is a new Francis Spufford book coming in February (Nonesuch). I’m looking forward to Jo Walton and Ada Palmer writing about science fiction in their book Trace Elements, which comes out in March.

Emily: In 2025 I resolved to read fewer books than I read in 2024 and failed. I thought I might get by on a technicality and end up with fewer pages than 2024 and that … also failed. I am not bothering to resolve that again.

Doug: I’ll probably finish this year closer to 50 books than to the 60-ish that I read in each of the two previous years. I’m not really sure why, though I see from my list that I read three in February and two in April, and I wasn’t even reading something long or densely German (or indeed both) on the side in that time. Some years are just like that, I guess.

Doreen: I, too, wanted to read fewer books in 2025 than in 2024, and am definitely on track for that. According to Goodreads, I read 336 books last year, and 270 so far this year. Like Modern Mrs Darcy, I agree that just shy of 300 tends to be the sweet spot for feeling like I’ve really enjoyed my reading. The years that I’ve gone well over 300 always feel like I’ve been reading Too Much.

Emily: That’s wonderful! I’m so glad you’ve had Numbers Success.

Doreen: THAT SAID, this has been a truly awful year for reading for me. Part of it is definitely paralysis from the sheer horror of this US administration, as their antics soak up the time I’d much rather be spending absorbed in fictional drama. Another part, as much as I hate to admit it, is an unfortunate preponderance of middle of the road schlock. I go into every book I read wanting to love it, but there are only so many formulaic “mysteries” and “thrillers” I can read. Sometimes, I think it is because I am jaded and too easily anticipate the “twists” that surprise the less widely read. At other times, I think that cynical marketing departments are just throwing anything at the wall and hoping for the next surprise sensation that mystifies all the professionals (I won’t name names but y’all know exactly what I mean.)

Doug: What Doreen said about twists and formulaic books put me in mind of something Colin Brush (whose excerpt of Exo we published) wrote on Scalzi’s Whatever: “But then comes a smaller but no less significant problem – the exact opposite of the first. Now you need to pitch your novel to an agent or publisher. You need to condense your 100,000 words into a succinct hundred or so that will persuasively sell your book. This, of course, is the challenge publishers face every time they launch a new book. What’s the hookiest way of pitching the story? Both editor and author know the story backwards, but is that any help in persuading someone who hasn’t read the story that they’d want to read it? The multiple elements that draw a reader through a tale often aren’t the same elements that invite the uninitiated in.” And when I read that, it reminded me about what I wrote last year about The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz:

The Issa Valley would not do well in an elevator pitch. Nor could it be easily described as “Book A meets Book B,” much less “Movie C meets Movie D.” The first sentence — “I should begin with the Land of Lakes, the place where Thomas lived.” — is not a grabber. (The first-person narrator never returns.) The first chapter is given over to landscape descriptions, with diversions into how practically every item in a home in the Issa Valley was made within the household, and into the reasons for the relative prosperity of of the villages along the river’s course. Thomas, having been named in the initial sentence, does not reappear in the first chapter. Or indeed the second, which opens with the notion that “The Issa Valley has the distinction of being inhabited by an unusually large number of devils” (p. 6) and continues with speculation on what they might be up to, and saying what the local farmers sometimes do to propitiate them. Milosz’s book blithely breaks practically all of the norms of contemporary publishing. The point of view wanders a bit. The three-act structure is nowhere to be seen. There is barely a plot. There is not, properly speaking, a climax, nor is there a denouement, and there is definitely not a happily-ever-after. I cannot imagine that any part of it was workshopped, sent to beta readers, or circulated in any way to a marketing department or a sales team. The Issa Valley is where hype goes to die. And yet it is a lovely, affecting book.

Is there still space in the machinery of publishing for a book like The Issa Valley? Or are readers ordering from a menu — I’d like a cozy romantasy, m/m, no werewolves, no kingdoms, a little light angst is ok but hold any implied colonialist attitudes?

Emily: I also think it’s tough when a big reveal is one of the most interesting things about a book. I literally cannot include that in an elevator pitch.

Doug: Data point from bluesky: Suleikha Snyder‬ ‪@suleikhasnyder.bsky.social‬ · A Marriage of Undead Inconvenience by @stephanieburgis.bsky.social is a great example of how to hook an agent or editor’s interest with a first page. I’d request a full immediately. We’re dropped right into the story with a hilarious, compelling, snapshot of the protag. And the voice is stellar. [chef emoji][lips emoji]

Emily: Getting a reader engrossed by the voice on page 1 seems like a good goal for contemporary authors!  In 2025 I tracked money spent on books for myself and that turned out to be interesting. The vast majority of my reading is ebooks from free public libraries, and I am ending up spending about $160 on books total for the year and reading about 230 books. That book total is from StoryGraph, where I also include short fiction I read individually, so it is slightly inflated in a way I don’t bother to correct.

I think I will continue tracking money spent on books and try to have the guideline that in a given year, I should spend fewer dollars on books for myself than the number of books I read that year.

Doreen: Ooh, maybe I should start tracking how much I actually spend on books. Do you track just books for yourself or books for anyone? I know that the bulk of books I read are sent to me by publishers, so I actually don’t spend that much on books for myself (the three hundred bucks or so I just blew on getting the entire hardback collection of John Allison’s Giant Days notwithstanding. Tho technically that’s my co-parent’s Christmas gift to me, so I guess it doesn’t actually count, lol.)

Emily: This year I was just tracking money I was spending on books for myself specifically. I do also purchase books as presents for other people, but that comes from a gifts budget!

Doreen: For next year, I want to read more of the Hugo novel nominees, lol. I’ve been trying desperately to cut back on titles for CriminalElement.com but I do like getting paid. So I think I’ll still aim for about 300 books, but with slightly fewer mysteries and more speculative fiction and romance. I’m actually surprised that I’ve read four, maybe five romance titles so far this year. None of them have been mainstream (non YA, non fantasy) romance novels tho, so I’d like to remedy that in 2026.

Emily: Reading more of the Hugo noms is a great goal! According to StoryGraph I have read nine romances this year, but one of them is Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, and that certainly does not have a HEA! So I’m not sure what the genre definition is there.

Doreen: Oh, I should probably make a note of the fact that I’ve received almost 700 titles for coverage in 2025. Starting up the weekly-ish roundup column here at TFC has really helped with my guilt at not being able to say no to publicists who offer me their super tempting books (and I still turn away far more books than I actually say yes to!)

Doug: “More poetry” is a resolution I make nearly every year, and I usually fail at it — I see that I read exactly zero collections in 2025 — but it’s a good reminder to me all the same. I bought a more or less complete collection of Louise Glück, so maybe I will read more of hers. I didn’t connect well with the first four collections, but I’m intrigued by the titles of some of the later ones, so we’ll see. I also have several Philip Levine collections that I’ve dipped into from time to time but never read systematically. “What Work Is” struck me ages and ages ago when I first worked at a bookstore, and I’ve liked him ever since. So there’s a resolution that I will probably miss, and I am fine with that.

Emily: When I resolved to read more poetry several years ago, I subscribed to the poets.org Poem a day emails, and the Poetry Foundation poem a day emails! I like those because they were really diverse and introduced me to a lot of different poets, and two a day arriving in email felt very manageable.

Doug: Thanks for the tip! How did it go with that resolution?

Emily: It went great! I subscribed to both for years happily and ended up getting books by (and deciding to follow on social media) some of the poets I was introduced to that way.

Doug: I read a bunch in German in 2024 (thirteen books is a bunch for me), and then fell way back below that in 2025. What I did do, though, was a reasonable amount of reading in three sets put together by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and I hope to do more of that in 2026. This started way back in 2004 with 50 Great Novels of the 20th Century. A few years later they came out with 50 more in the same category. There were various other sets, and the two that interested me were 20 set in Munich and 20 that represent great cities around the world. I’ve read as much as I am likely to of the Munich set: read 18, DNF’d one, and haven’t attempted the one that’s 800 pages. (Erfolg [Success] by Lion Feuchtwanger) This year I read three in the Metropolen set, and three more from the two Great Novels set. The lists are interesting, and they have introduced me to authors I would never have read otherwise. Sometimes they have prodded me to read books I feel like I should have read — Mrs Dalloway, Swann’s Way — and led me to form my own judgements. They’re pretty much all off my usual path of reading, so picking them up is a good thing.

Emily: That sounds like a good publisher to gravitate towards! That’s one of the things I like best about readalongs and book clubs. I certainly would not have kept up with reading a chapter a day of War and Peace all year in 2025 if I hadn’t had a group of people to read along with. In 2026, I might be doing a similar thing with the works of Edgar Allen Poe, and maybe Middlemarch by George Eliot.

Because I read a lot of advance reader copies from publishers, I have already read a lot of the books I am excited about for 2026! Books by favorite authors who don’t publish frequently, like Jedediah Berry and  Cameron Reed; books by favorite authors who DO publish frequently, like Martha Wells and T. Kingfisher—I’ve read their 2026 offerings and they’re spectacular! Reviews forthcoming in this space, closer to their publication days.

This means that SOME of what I am most excited about reading next year includes books like Middlemarch, that I kind of can’t believe I haven’t read already. Thank goodness we’ll never run out of books.

Note: This conversation has been edited for coherence and flow.