Reading 52 books in 2026

I used to read a lot of fiction as a kid. I think I bought several Geronimo Stiltons in every Scholastic book fair at school (yes, sometimes it was to get the stuff that you would get if you spent more than ₹x). Eventually, I did graduate to ye olde Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and stuff. A big influence for me was that my mother read a lot of books. We would go to Sapna, a book store in Bangalore once a month to buy books, and I was constrained to buy one fiction and one non fiction (sciencey/learning) book. She would usually buy self help, a category that I have not understood for the longest time, even though I have read some myself (yes I have read Atomic Habits).

Somewhere along the way, this ritual stopped. My time was filled more with YouTube and movies than Poirot or Holmes. Ironically, it was on YouTube that I kept seeing videos about people wanting to read more and challenging themselves to read a book a week. They touted benefits like better attention span (something which my generation desperately needs), reduced anxiety and even more imaginative dreams.

By this time, I was already mostly using e-books. I don’t use goodreads (owned by amazon + it feels clunky) and setting up storygraph kept getting procrastinated. So I checked my apple books reading log to see how many books I’d read over the years. I know I’m undercounting a bit (or a lot, I don’t remember) by not including physical copies, but I just don’t have that information. In 2023, I read 5 books. In 2024, I read 9. In 2025, I read a solid 20. A pretty nice increase YoY, approximately doubling. So for 2026, instead of aiming for 40, I decided to just go for 52.

My calibre library currently has 164 books, most of which are unread, and is ever growing. My strategy for deciding which book to read is vibes (mostly). Some weeks I pick the one that I’ve been wanting to read for a long while, some weeks I start a series and need to read all of the rest. In week 8, I read Ghost Eye by Amitav Ghosh because it had just come out and I hadn’t read an Indian authors work in a while. For week 9, I found the cover of Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa pretty. For week 10, I’m reading James Joyce because of it being mentioned in the show A Man on the Inside.

Clearly I have no structure to this. All I know is that I want to read books that I find interesting/ impactful/ worth reading. I don’t find the need to police whether I’m reading enough of an author or a genre. I am trying to work in more technical content (like O’Reilly books) on the side as well, but I’m not counting those towards my 52 books. I haven’t found myself looking for shorter books to have an easier time hitting 52 or pressuring myself to finish the book for the week. I think thats antithetical to what I’m trying to do, which is just to read more. Maybe I hit 52, maybe I don’t, but I’ll have read stuff.