2026 Beat the Backlist

It's that time when I'm sorting out my reading wants and needs for 2026. Setting my goals is easy, but deciding whether to add more to my plate is always the hard part. Between my job, co-hosting Silent Book Club, and just life in general, do I really want to add another reading challenge to my list of things I'm doing? Usually, the answer is no, I want to read for fun, not feel like I'm doing more work. However, thanks to Instagram Beat the Back list came back into my life. I had completely forgotten about this challenge.

Years ago, I did this challenge just for fun to see some stats on the books I was reading. Was I sticking to one year, did I bounce around, etc? I thought it was fun, then life happened, and it slipped my mind. Now I'm going to jump back into the challenge, but I'm going to do it with a little twist. I've joined the Storygraph Challenge just to see the publishing years of the books I read next year. But! For the Google Doc set up by the creators of Beat the Backlist, I'm going to count books I actually own. As a sort of way to start reading the library I've created over the last five years. 

I'm not going to set a goal of knocking a certain number of books off my physical tbr since I want to keep this low stress. Instead, I just want to see if I can use this to motivate me to pick up one of the books on my actual shelf instead of my Kindle or local library (though I love it so). As a way to hold myself accountable, every month I'll post an update on how I'm doing. An extra layer to get myself to read at least one book. Because one book is better than nothing. It could be one more book off my TBR and off to a new home!

So I'm excited for the challenge because it fits into my busy schedule, and will hopefully motivate me to work on my physical TBR. If this sounds like something you want to join you their website is here, and it has all the information you need. Along with links to Google Docs and access to their images!

HAPPY READING!!