Reading year in preview

In 2026 I'm focusing on re-reads, books I already own, and community

January first. No day in the calendar year lands quite like this one. The start of a new year ushers in the twin sensations of inspiration and anxiety.

It’s inspirational to start a new year by nature of it being a clean slate. Many of us are energized by putting the past year to bed and starting anew. In my intimate friend group, 2025 is a year we’d have put to bed six months ago if we could have, and the start of 2026 feels like stepping into a new world.

New Year’s can also be anxiety-inducing. I run a little anxious this time of year because I look at my goals and inevitably see that I didn’t achieve most of them. Add to it the many year-end wrap-ups and the publicly declared resolutions for this new year, and it can make those a little less Type A feel like they’re doing something wrong.

I hope however today finds you, you’re able to spend some time thinking through how you want this year to look. I’m not talking about goals or resolutions. I’m talking about how you want to spend the next 365 days.

For me, I’m hoping for a lot of reading and a lot of writing. As it pertains to books, I’m planning for a lot more intentionality. I want more “yes, this is the book I absolutely must read right now” and less “I should probably read this one.”

I’ve been enjoying everyone’s 2025 year in review posts about all the great (and not so great) books they read. It’s got me thinking about the reading I did in 2025 and how I want this year’s reading to look.

I started by asking myself some questions:

• If I don’t read the books languishing on my bookshelf this year, when will I get to them? Why have I been putting off books I consciously purchased in lieu of books sent to me by publicists? How important is novelty to me? (spoiler alert: it’s never been important)

• Is it as imperative to read my library holds when they come in as I gave them credit for last year? Putting a book on hold seven months ago doesn’t necessarily mean I should read it today.

• There are many opportunities to read along with others here on Substack. Do I want to partake in a group reading organized by someone else?

I realized at the end of the year that I want to be gentler with myself as far as setting my reading goal. I began setting reading goals on Goodreads in 2013 and now it’s just something I do (but on StoryGraph), even though I know reading isn’t something I need to set a goal around. For the last couple months of 2025, I was behind on my reading goal and every time I opened StoryGraph to track a new book, I was reminded of my delinquency. Even though I gave myself permission to not meet my goal, it still sat with me wrong.

For this year’s reading, I’m going to be gentle. I’m going to set a lower reading goal. I’m going to re-read some old favorites. I’m going to pick up more books from my overflowing TBR bookshelf, and I plan to do some co-reading, too. (Join me??)

🤓 Re-reads

I am a vibes reader so I seldom plan what I’m going to read. For me, planning my reading leads to mismatched desires and reading experiences. I like to pick a book based on how I feel at the time of selecting.

This year, though, I plan to start with two re-reads. While entirely different, each book is a concept I want to be reminded of yearly, and what better time than in January?

❄️ Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May

This book is outstanding. The wintering May refers to in the book is not the cold months we in the Northern hemisphere are experiencing right now. Everyone has their own personal winters, or seasons of difficulty in which we must nurture ourselves and our souls to come out better than we were upon entering them. The book guides us through retreating and rejuvenating during our winters.

Throughout the book, she uses winter the season as an analogy, and a perfect one for someone (me) who lives in Minnesota, where it snowed a half-foot the other day. May says, “We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.” Winter is the time we gather our strength so we can bloom in the spring.

Starting this year, I want Wintering to be an annual re-read. It’s that good.

⏰ Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

I refer to this book all the time because it so fundamentally changed the way I operate. It’s technically a time management book, but it’s more like an eye-opening reminder that humans get, on average, about four thousand weeks to live. What are you going to do with your weeks?

Once you think about what you want to do with your time, you need to understand the very real, very painful concept that when you say yes to one thing — for example, me writing this right now — you say no to everything else. Absolutely everything else. There is simply not enough time in this short life to do the majority of the things we want to do.

“At any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost everything, and by the end of your life, you’ll have gotten around to doing virtually none of the things you theoretically could have done.”

Rather than depress you, the author frames it as a relief. Once you accept that you’ll get around to so little of what you hope to, it frees you from the stress. “Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.”

The book is self-deprecating, funny, and approachable. If you read one book about maximizing your time on earth, make it this one.

📚 My bookshelf

Sometimes I forget that I am living the sweet life and get books mailed to me for free on a weekly basis. It’s one of those things I couldn’t even call a dream because I’d have never thought I’d be so lucky, but I am. It’s my actual life! It’s real! Who’s this lucky? Turns out it’s me!

It’s also kind of stressful though. I never want to say yes to a book and then receive it and never read it. I never want an author to have high hopes that I will rave about their book and share it with everyone I know, and then let their book die a sad death on my bookshelf. So I try to only say yes to books I think I will actually get around to reading. But because these books come at such a consistent pace, it means I’ve hardly considered all the books I’ve purchased in the past couple years that I haven’t read yet.

The poor, poor books on my bookshelf! I attended a talk with Curtis Sittenfeld six months ago and bought the hardcover of her newest book. Have I even opened it? Sure haven’t. I have stacks of books I’ve collected from library sales and indie bookstores that never made it onto my nightstand (that’s where I put my imminent reads) because they were put in line behind my library holds that just came in and the new shiny book a publicist sent me.

No more of this! More bookshelf reading in 2026.

📖 Co-reads

Like writing, reading can be such a solitary act. But not on Substack. People here get excited about reading together the way people elsewhere get excited about sports. Co-reading a book can be an exceptional experience if done with the right people and the right book.

In August, many of you joined me for a month of reading Elena Ferrante. That was so nourishing not only for my brain, but for my heart. The chats I had with you all about characters we hated (I’m looking at you, Nino Sarratore) and narrators we loved and those we had mixed feelings about — it was the best reading experience I’ve had.

I’m not sure if I’ll be hosting another read-along like that, but what I am sure of is that I’ll join someone else’s project. Or maybe a few. There are already many opportunities to read within a community this year. Here are a couple I’ve seen:

• haley larsen, phd is encouraging better, closer reading in 2026 by kicking off the year with a 4-week reading and reflection reset, after which she’ll be guiding readers through four books throughout the year.

• Martha is launching a book club! The first book she’s reading is The Wall by Marlen Haushofer and the meeting will be held on Zoom in February. If I were to join a book club this year, this is the one I’d choose.

• Simon Haisell started a steadily-growing conversation about group reads, book clubs, and read-alongs for 2026.

More opportunities for community reading pop up every time I go online. This year is ripe for community reading and I am so looking forward to it.

Questions for you:

• When reflecting on your 2025 reading, is there anything you plan to do differently this year?

• Do you have plans for your 2026 reading? Have you set a goal? Do you hope to do a community read? Join a book club? Read any classics you’ve put off for ages? Finally read that buzzy book everyone talked about all year?

Yesterday was my nine-year wedding anniversary. You’ll be happy (and not surprised) to know I got married in a library:

Happy reading in 2026! Love, Kolina

What are you reading? What are you underlining?
What I’m reading: Do you believe I am still reading Wellness by Nathan Hill? I’ve taken a few breaks. One break was to read Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza and sweet Jesus, I loved that book. It’s everything you want in a page-turner. It’s juicy, the chapters are short, the stakes are astronomical, the chatter around the falsehoods presented by social media are real — I could go on but I’ll stop there. I’m also gearing up for my two re-reads I shared above, starting with Four Thousand Weeks.

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