Reflections on My “Failed” 2025 Reading Goals

It’s that time of year again–time to be brutally honest with myself about how I did on my 2025 reading goals and resolutions, and hopefully learn from them in 2026.

You can read about my 2025 goals and WHY I chose them, according to January me, here.

While writing this, I went back and read my 2024 reading goals (lol, but I did okay on that year) and my 2023 reading goals. Both were eye-opening, humbling, and clearly reflective of the evolution of my reading process. I was really good at keeping up with this blog in 2023…

Some of my super specific reading goals, like which titles I would read, are hilarious to look back at because at least half of those books I still haven’t read 2-3 years later…

Anyway, back to reflections.

My goals this year were simple and discrete, and yet I only did one of them….mostly.

Read the Collected Stories of John Cheever

I did not do this. Maybe I was still fatigued (all year?) from Flannery O’Connor in 2024, but I read not a single Cheever short story. Frankly, I don’t think I read a single short story collection at all….so maybe in 2026 I don’t try to change who I am as a reader.

Read books within 3 months of purchasing them

I think I did this with like 80% fidelity. I didn’t buy THAT many books, and the ones I paid money for I read quickly, except for two notable and thick exceptions: Oathbound (Legendborn #3) which I bought on Kindle with some no-rush credits and haven’t gotten to yet, and Skander #5, which I bought a physical copy of. I also bought some book club books that haven’t been read yet due to the impending book club being months away, etc. A notable exception to this success though is books I picked up from Little Free Libraries….but does that really even count since I didn’t pay for them?

Reread and annotate Little Women

I wanted to do this, and I want to do it still, but I simply didn’t make the time.

Read Donna Tartt’s Little Friend

I started this in January 2025 and DNF’d it and simply never got back to it. Maybe it’s because it’s less in my dark academia/art heist wheelhouse than her 2 other books. I will keep my eye on this one in 2026…maybe by making a stack of 500+ page books that “scare” me and tying to get through them slowly by surely.

Here’s what I DID do though, that makes me feel like less of a failure:

I used Storygraph all year long!

Committing to an app again after years of being unable to use the apps to track was great. It wasn’t a perfect system, and I will likely go back to Goodreads for a lot of reasons, but I appreciated the system!

I read 170 novels or nonfiction books!

This is according to Storygraph and is probably short 1-4 from my pre-pub reading for Booklist and SLJ, and doesn’t include picture books, easy readers, or the 4 chapter books I read aloud in their entirety to my students in the spring.

One of those books was Fourth Wing–I am now a part of human society!

This is a big deal for someone who has as many books as I do, and while I still have a lot of books, I’ve done less library checkouts and more reading at home.

5 of those books were more than 500 pages (according to Storygraph) and that doesn’t include Heir by Sabaa Tahir, which was also really long.

About 15 of those were audiobooks, which is pretty impressive considering how much NPR I listen to every single day.

My boyfriend and I did a book club TOGETHER

And we read three great books together this year: All the Light We Cannot See, Luncheon of the Boating Party, and Love, Theoretically.

I reviewed a lot of books for Booklist & SLJ

Getting back into reviewing middle grade and YA novels was a struggle at first, but my editor knows me so well, and I’ve read some really great books this year, even if some of them I had to read in a PDF on my computer. By my count, I read about 17 novels for review this year across the 2 publications

15 Dragon Masters chapter books

I’m a good school librarian because I’ll read the first book in a series kids are into….and then I’ll read 14 more.

As I wind down this year and think about my reading goals and resolutions in 2026, it was helpful to see that I can learn a lot from myself…but that still doesn’t mean I will read that 800 pages Kiera Cass novel I pre-ordered in July 2022.