2026 Reading Challenges!

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Here’s hoping for a healthy book-and-story-filled 2026.

I always set myself more than one reading/viewing challenge per year. Some goals carry over from year to year, and some are new. Some are broad and some are themed. And in many cases, books read will help me meet more than one challenge. In 2024 I also started making some formal movies, television, and live theatre viewing challenges.

On the reading side of things, in 2025, I hit my overall book and short story goals but on the viewing side of things, I only got close to my goal for live theater, and majorly dropped the ball on my television and movie viewing goals. Instead of one large annual wrap-up post, I’m going to make a series of shorter posts: one for overall numbers (probably tomorrow), one for books, two for short stories (the first of which will go up on Sunday January 4), one for comic books, one for live theater and other live events (Thursday, January 8), and one for television/movies.

Once again, this year, I’m sticking mostly to the basic challenges:

365 SHORT STORIES CHALLENGE

Every year, I challenge myself to read one short story per day. Some years I keep the pace well, and some years I fall behind and then scramble to catch up (and some years, I catch up and fall behind again, and some years I blow past the goal handily). I’m defining “short story” as anything from flash fiction to novella-length. I am going to once again make an effort to review one or two stories every Sunday in my “Sunday Shorts” feature.

GOODREADS CHALLENGE

Goodreads allows members to set a challenge. In previous years, I’ve set goals ranging from 125 to 150 books. For 2025, I’m setting a goal of 120 to start with (10 books per month), and we’ll see what happens.

MOVIE CHALLENGE

I own a lot of DVDs. (I know, you’re shocked. Shocked!) Every year I say, “This is the year I’m going to make an effort to watch them!” And then, somehow, I … don’t. One year, I did a list of 12 and two alternates as I used to do for the ToBeRead Challenge, called it the ToBeWatched Challenge … and failed it miserably. In 2024, I got about halfway to the goal of 52 movies (an average of one per week). In 2025, not so much. So this year, I’m setting myself the same challenge. This includes movies on DVD, streaming services, and any trips to an actual movie theater (which have become rare for me).

TELEVISION CHALLENGE

Did I mention I own a lot of DVDs? And that I’m subscribed to a lot of streaming services? I did? Well, you won’t be shocked to know that it’s not all about the movies. So I’m setting myself a “TV Series Watch” challenge akin to my Short Story Challenge: an average of one full episode of a television series (regardless of length) for each day in the year, which this year means 365 episodes.

LIVE THEATRE CHALLENGE

I did pretty well with this one in 2025, even though I didn’t manage to post reviews of everything. So I’m continuing the goal for 2026: I want to see at least 1 live theatrical performance per month. Most of them will be in New York City, but I’ll count any play, musical, opera, ballet, or staged reading I see anywhere, regardless of whether it’s fully professional productions, college, community theatre, whatever. (Music concerts, author signings, and conferences/conventions do not count towards this but will be tracked separately.)

COMIC BOOK CHALLENGE

I also own a lot of comic books. I went “cold turkey” on buying new comics about 20 years ago for budget and space reasons. But then in 2018 Seanan McGuire and Saladin Ahmed, two authors whose work I love, started writing various comics for Marvel and thought brought me back into buying monthly comics. And I keep buying more. 2025 was the first year I actually tracked every individual comic book issue (“floppies,” as some people call them) I read, so I’m going to make this an official Challenge for 2026: as with the short stories and the television episodes, I plan to read at least one comic book (new or back issue) for every day of the year … so again, 365 total.

ALPHABET CHALLENGE

I saw at the beginning of 2025 several book bloggers posting about various alphabet challenges: one book title for each letter of the alphabet, one author for each letter of the alphabet. I made a good run at both in 2025 without necessarily making reading decisions based on either, so I think I’m going to do them again in 2026.

 NOVELLA NOVEMBER

I’ve made NovellaNovember (or, as another book blogger on Bluesky coined it, Novellavember) a thing for the past few years. My goal is to promote and discuss novellas and short novels (and even novelettes) throughout the month, including publisher, author and editor interviews. I say every year I’m going to shoot for a novella day, but I think I’ll make that a novella every two days for 2026.

OTHER UNOFFICIAL CHALLENGES

There are a few ongoing (in some cases, sort of life-long, or at least second-half-of-my-life long) challenges that I don’t think I’ve ever written about here. For instance, I’m well on my way to having read everything Bram Stoker ever wrote. Here are those challenges, and I’m going to do my best to create dedicated posts early in the year showing what I’ve already read/watched for each challenge and then update as I go along. Again, these are multi-year challenges:

·       The Complete Bram Stoker Read-Through

·       The Complete Seanan McGuire Read-Through

·       The Complete Silvia Moreno-Garcia Read-Through

·       The Complete Philip Jose Farmer Read-Through

·       The Complete Edgar Rice Burroughs Read-Through

·       The Complete Maurice Broaddus Read-Through

• The Complete Perry Rhodan Read-Through

·       The Complete Dark Shadows Rewatch

·       The Complete Doctor Who Rewatch

·       The Complete Star Trek Rewatch

·       The Complete Planet of the Apes Rewatch

·       The Complete Brother Cadfael Read-Through and Rewatch

·       The Complete A.A. Fair (Cool and Lam series) Read-Through

·       The Complete Marvel Comics 1970s Novels Reread

·       The Complete Hard Case Crime Read-Through

·       The Complete Radium Age of Science Fiction Read-Through

·       The Complete American Mystery Classics Read-Through

·       The Complete Doc Savage Read-Through

·       The Complete Three Investigators Read-Through

·       The Complete Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Girl From U.N.C.L.E. Read-Through and Rewatch

·       The Complete All-Star Squadron Reread

·       The Complete The Invaders (Marvel Comics) Reread

·       The Complete Starman (2000’s DC) Reread

·       The Complete Tomb of Dracula Reread

·       The Complete Micronauts and ROM Reread

·       The Complete Shakespeare Watch (either Live theater or filmed)

·       Read A Book or Story From Every Nation in the World

·       Read a Book From Every State and US Territory

·       Read a Book from Every Canadian Province/Territory

And one of these days I would really like to finish creating a list of every book I remember reading in my life.

ACCOUNTABILITY

So how am I going to hold myself accountable? I’m planning to bring back my monthly Reading RoundUps. (I know, I know … I said this in the 2025 Challenge post and failed miserably at actually doing it. Second time’s the charm?) I’m not going to rename/rebrand because I like the alliterative title (which falls well in line with Series Saturday, Sunday Shorts, and a few other blog series I’m hoping to make regular features again in 2026), but those posts will also track the Viewing challenges.

I would love to hear what YOUR Reading, Writing, or Viewing Challenges are for 2024. Let me know in the comments!

Guest Post: ZOOM OTHELLO by H. Kevin Opela

It has become hackneyed to say that coronageddon has changed everyone’s lives, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Our lives have been forever disrupted by a seemingly random act of nature, and each of us is trying to figure out how to make sense of it in our own way. How do we continue to find meaning without our jobs, without our friends and family by our side, without human interaction? And while every one of us will define their answer differently, in the aggregate I believe our collective answer is that we are all trying to discover a new path in this new reality. 

For me, that meant coming back to the thing that gives my life the most meaning – theatre - and figuring out a way to make it work on a digital stage. And so I started by asking myself, “How can theatre continue (even thrive) in a time of social distancing?” The only way to answer that was to experiment, and so Zoom Othello was born.

After each performance, the audience is invited to remain online and share their thoughts and questions with the cast and me. The questions I hear most during these conversations are “Why Zoom?”, “Why Shakespeare?”, and “Why Othello?”

The answer for “Why Zoom?” is mostly mercenary. I wanted to take advantage of the incredible popularity of the platform. It’s simple to use, good quality and, most important, almost everybody is familiar with it. Theatre doesn’t have to be populist, but it does require a willing audience. So if I was going to do something new, I had to do it where the most people would have access to it.

The answer to “Why Shakespeare?” might seem to contradict that, but art lives in contradictions. That made it an almost obvious choice – that and my affinity for the Bard! I wanted to see if the immediacy of an online platform made Elizabethan language more - or less - accessible to the general public. What could we do with the extreme limitations of movement, staging, costuming, props and scenery? How can we effectively stage a fight scene when the actors are on different screens, thousands of miles away? How about love scenes? Can we create an emotional connection with the audience through an imperfect medium?

Which is probably what prompted most people to ask the last question, “Why Othello?” But to me, Othello is the best choice. It is one of Shakespeare’s most tightly wound plays. The characters’ choices are easy to understand, and they don’t suffer from too much psychological complexity. Heavily focused on plot, it drives forward relentlessly to an explosive climax.

More important, though, is that it’s all about contagion. One character, Iago – our ‘index patient’ – spreads the plague of jealousy to every other character. No one is immune. And in the end, there’s no justice. Iago is never punished, he never suffers for his crimes. But the world around him, the world he was a part of, is forever changed. To me, it is the perfect analogy for what’s going on right now.

Our collective story – the story of all humanity - is one of defiance in the face of chaos. When the chaotic forces of the universe threaten, we are compelled to strike out on a journey of discovery; we innovate; we create. That’s why we have art and industry. That’s why we tell stories and build narratives. It’s how we define who we are and stake a claim in the history of our species.

I undertook Zoom Othello to embark on my own, small journey of discovery. Like the characters in the play, I am raging against a contagion that I can’t see and against which I cannot win. But I refuse to allow the chaos to deny me the chance to plant my stake, and to say “I was here.”

Othello will continue it's performances this week:

Thursday, May 14 at 8:00 pm EST (Act IV)

Friday, May 15 at 7:00 pm EST (Act V)

Join Zoom Performance
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87391802207

2019 By The Numbers

Earlier than previous years, here’s my media round-up for 2019: what I wrote, what was published, and what I read, listened to, and watched.

WRITING

Not much to report on this front. 2019 was not a good year for creating new content. I didn’t track what little writing I actually managed to do – but I know there were more days where I didn’t write than there were days I wrote, by far. I’m considering it a “recharging” year, as I consumed and processed a lot of wonderful (and not-so-wonderful) books, television, movies, live theatre and music events. The writing I did manage was mostly work on previous unfinished short stories.

PUBLISHING

2019 saw the publication of one short story:

• “Regardless of How Lost You Are Returning From, Regardless of How Far” appeared in Kaleidotrope magazine, edited by Fred Coppersmith

I also wrote a six paid book reviews for Strange Horizons magazine, and one for Out In Print (non-paid):

·         So You Want To Be A Robot: 21 Stories by A. Merc Rustad

·         Friday Black: Stories by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

·         Forget The Sleepless Shore: Stories by Sonya Taaffe

·         The Hidden Witch by Molly Ostertag

·         Sealed by Naomi Booth

·         The History of Soul 2065 by Barbara Krasnoff

·         Of Echoes Born by ‘Nathan Burgoine (Out in Print)

READING

I set myself a variety of reading challenges in 2019. I managed to complete a few of them.

Goodreads Challenge:

I challenged myself to read 125 books. I read 144 books from approximately 73 different publishers.

Here’s the breakdown of what I read:

• Fiction: 140 books

  • 6 anthologies

    • 1 crime

    • 1 horror

    • 1 romance

    • 1 fantasy

    • 1 science fiction

    • 1 mixed-genre

  • 12 single-author collections

    • 3 science fiction

    • 3 horror

    • 2 fantasy

    • 2 crime/mystery

    • 2 poetry

  • 33 graphic novels

    • 8 super-hero

    • 4 horror

    • 12 fantasy

    • 1 crime

    • 2 pulp adventure

    • 2 romance

  • 12 magazines (all issues of Lightspeed magazine)

  • 40 novels

    • 8 crime

    • 3 horror

    • 1 thriller

    • 1 mystery

    • 6  Fantasy

    • 8 science fiction

    • 3 paranormal romance

    • 4 urban fantasy

    • 1 romance

    • 3 pulp adventure

    • 1 suspense

    • 1 mythology

    • 1 Christmas

  • 34 novellas

    • 11 horror

    • 5 fantasy

    • 4 romance

    • 7 literary

    • 4 pulp adventure

    • 1 science fiction

    • 1 crime

    • 1 Christmas

  • 2 novelettes

    • 1 fantasy

    • 1 horror

• Non-Fiction: 8 books

  • 2 Memoir

  • 1 History

  • 1 literary analysis

Other Book Stats:

# of Authors/Editors: approximately 136 (including graphic novel artists; I need to be better at listing all of the creators of graphic novels somehow). The following breakdown is estimated because not every author shares their personal information online, but roughly:

·         39 female creators

·         5 Trans/Non-Binary

·         29 LGBTQIA+

·         10 Persons of Color

Shortest Book Read: 25 pages (Christmas with the Dead by Joe Lansdale)

Longest Book Read: 669 (Upon A Burning Throne by Ashok K.Banker)

Total # of pages read: 25,513

Average # of pages per book: 205

# of Rereads: 6 (including annual rereads of Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol)

Monthly Breakdown:

·         January: 11

·         February: 18 (most read in a month)

·         March: 14

·         April: 7 (fewest read in a month)

·         May: 11

·         June: 10

·         July: 8

·         August: 14

·         September: 11

·         October: 15

·         November: 13

·         December: 13

Review-wise on Goodreads I gave 2 two-star reviews, 21 three-stars, 86 four-stars, and 35 five-star reviews.

Format Summary:

• 17 audiobooks

• 31 ebooks

• 96 print

  • 25 hardcovers

  • 71 softcovers

365 Short Stories Challenge:

Each year, I challenge myself to read one short story per day. I read 401 stories in 2019, beating the goal handily. The shortest was approximately 7 pages and the longest approximately 61. Those 401 stories appeared in:

• 12 Magazines

  • Nightmare

  • Lightspeed

  • The Dark

  • One Story

  • Analog

  • The Strand

  • Interzone

  • Lamplight

  • Black Static

  • Abyss & Apex

  • One Teen Story

  • Uncanny

• 9 Anthologies

  • Resist Fascism

  • From Sea to Stormy Sea

  • If This Goes On

  • A Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Godds

  • The Many Tortures of Anthony Cardno

  • Fool For Love

  • F is for Fairy

  • At Home in the Dark

  • Devil Take Me

• 15 Single-Author Collections

  • The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Physics by Carlos Hernandez

  • The Time Machine and Other Stories by H.G. Wells

  • Three Blind Mice and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

  • Beyond the Farthest Star by Edgar Rice Burroughs

  • Untranslatable by Alma Alexander

  • Hunt the Avenger by Win Scott Eckert

  • Trans Space Octopus Convention by Bogi Takacs

  • Oriental Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn

  • Spinning Around A Sun by Everett Maroon

  • A History of Soul 2065 by Barbara Krasnoff

  • Acres of Perhaps by Will Ludwigsen

  • Under the Sunset by Bram Stoker

  • Two Todd Tales by Joseph Pittman

  • In Re: Sherlock Holmes by August Derleth

  • Forget the Sleepless Shores by Sonya Taaffe

• 5 published as “back-matter” in the following novels

  • If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear

  • Ms. Tree: One Mean Mother

  • Rosemary and Rue 10th Anniversary Hardcover Edition

  • That Ain’t Witchcraft

  • The Unkindest Tide

• 16 Stand-alone (self-pubbed or publisher-pubbed in e-format)

  • Seanan McGuire (Patreon)

  • Lucy Snyder (Patreon)

  • Sabrina Vourvoulias (Cast of Wonders audio podcast)

  • Lydia M. Hawke (author website)

  • Jim Butcher (Evil Hat website)

Those 401 stories were written by 232 different authors. The following breakdown is estimated because not every author shares their personal information online, but roughly:

·         104 female creators

·         6 Trans/Non-Binary

·         33 LGBTQIA+

·         32 Persons of Color

I gave 13 two-star ratings, 208 three-star, 157 four-star, and 23 five-star ratings. The shortest story was 7 pages long and the longest 61.

Graphic Novel Challenge:

Because I own so many, I challenged myself to read one graphic novel per week. I didn’t make it, reading a total of 33 from 11 different publishers:

·         DC Comics: 7

·         Marvel Comics: 8

·         BOOM! Box: 8

·         Dynamite Comics: 2

·         Image Comics: 2

·         Hard Case Crime: 1

·         TO Comix: 1

·         Scholastic Books: 1

·         Panic Button Comics: 1

·         Dark Horse: 1

·         Self-Pubbed: 1

Non-Fiction Challenge: I didn’t do as well on this one. I challenged myself to read 24 non-fiction books in 2019, and I only read 4.

Read the Book, Watch the Movie Challenge: Completely bombed this one. Planned to do at least 10 of these and did 0.

Complete the Series Challenge: Bombed this one too. Planned to read 3 complete series, totally 16 books, and read 0 of 16, completing 0 series.

VIEWING

I tried tracking the movies, TV and live events I watched this year. Here’s how that went:

Movies: Apparently, I only watched 17 movies this year. (I suspect I forgot to enter a few things into the database.)

·         9 on DVD

·         2 on Netflix

·         6 in the theater

Live Events: I attended 15 live events this year.

·         10 plays

• 6 straight plays (4 on Broadway, 2 high school, one attended twice)

• 4 musicals (1 Broadway, 1 regional, 2 high school)

·         4 concerts (Dennis DeYoung, Greyson Chance, Blue Alien Mystic, and the Mahopac High School Pacapellas)

Television: I watched approximately 162 hours of episodic television:

·         Arrow (20 episodes)

·         Batwoman (9 episodes)

·         Beyond Stranger Things (7 episodes)

·         Black Mirror (2 episodes)

·         Doctor Who (1 episode)

·         The Flash (21 episodes)

·         Game of Thrones (1 episode)

·         Good Omens (6 episodes)

·         Great Performances (1 episode)

·         DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (9 episodes)

·         Planet of the Apes (14 episodes)

·         Stranger Things (25 episodes)

·         Supergirl (22 episodes)

·         The Big Bang Theory (2 episodes)

·         Vera (1 episode)

·         Vicious (14 episodes)

·         Watchmen (6 episodes)

·         Young Sheldon (1 episode)

So there you have it: my writing, publishing, reading, and viewing by the numbers, for 2019.

Earlier this week, I posted about my reading challenges for 2020. I plan to post about my writing plans, and possibly viewing plans, next week.