2026...First Book of the Year and Reading Challenges

Another year that went WAY too fast and here we are already over two weeks into 2026. What a year 2025 was, and while I'm trying to stay hopeful, I won't lie and say I'm not deeply distressed and downright scared about what is happening in our country. Who will save us, and at this point, are we even savable? As we approach the 250th birthday of our nation, I wonder what the Founding Fathers would make of all this. I have a feeling many of them are currently rolling in their graves (especially John Adams). But I digress...enough gloom and doom for now. 

My first book of 2026, which I'm currently reading, is The First Witch of Boston by Andrea Catalano. Sheila at Book Journey was my bookish secret Santa this year and it was part of my wonderful gifts she sent me. It's really good so far, but a difficult read because of the subject matter. When you're a witch yourself, reading about what happened to women in the past accused of being one is very hard indeed. I'm also reading Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann for my book group on Goodreads, True Book Talk, and I'm starting The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. We're reading Darwin for my 1000 Books Project this year. More on that below.

As I mentioned in my last post, I beat last year's goal by 10 books...I met my 2025 goal of 60 books read! I'm upping the ante again this year, but only by five. So my 2026 goal is 65 books. I can do it!

The new year for me always comes with a fresh start at reading challenges. This year I'll once again be doing Book Challenge by Erin (which is twice a year), in addition to the four challenges I host. I'm also going to do Horror Aficionados' (Goodreads) A to Z Challenge.

Challenges listed below:
Book Challenge by Erin 24.0

2026 A to Z Challenge, Horror Aficionados on Goodreads
2026 I Read Horror Year-Round

1000 Books Project 2026: Charles Darwin
2026 Book to Movie (and TV) Challenge
2026 Read Your Shelf Challenge

First up...the twice a year challenge - Book Challenge by Erin 24.0 

(Facebook group)

The first round of the year runs Jan 1 - April 30.

Freebie : A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin

Book title beginning with A, B or C: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab

Epistolary: A People's History of the Vampire Uprising by Raymond A. Villareal

Book with clock on the cover: The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher

Strong father figure: Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski

Radio National Pick: Circe by Madeline Miller

Occupation in the book title: The Art of War for Writers by James Scott Bell

School or Academic setting: Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo

Reader's pick: White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

Biography/Memoirs/Historical fiction: Chronicle of the Pharaohs by Peter A. Clayton

This is a private Facebook group. You can check it out and join here. You can join in at any time during the four months. Second challenge of the year starts July 1st. Categories announced in June.

Horror Challenges

2026 A to Z Challenge - Horror Aficionados on Goodreads

Look for book titles or author's last names that start with each letter of the alphabet but now we're including a fun change:

The A to Z can be all BOOK TITLES, all AUTHOR'S LAST NAMES or A COMBINATION OF BOTH.

That's right. You chose what you would like to include in your personal A to Z Challenge.

Some letters, such as Q, X, and Z, are a bit more difficult to find, so any title or author's name that includes those letters is acceptable.

I host this challenge at my sister blog, the horror blog, Castle Macabre.

I have some ideas on what I'll be reading, but not sure on all of them yet. I'm going for the Chilling level again this year. I completed the level in 2024 so I'll stick with it for now.

Here are the categories and levels...

• Winter - set in winter or snow on the cover or winter in the title
• Epistolary horror - found footage, told in letters and/or diaries
• Cult and/or ritual
• Haunted house
• Full moon and/or woods on the cover
• Indigenous, Asian, or Latino author
• Pumpkins/Jack O' Lanterns on the cover
• Black author
• Book published in the 60's, 70's, or 80's
• Social justice horror
• Yule/Christmas holiday themed
• Whatever scares you the most
  

Levels:

Spooky: Read 6 books from 6 categories
Chilling: Read 12 Books from all 12 categories
Frightful: Read 2 books from each category for a total of 24 books
Horrifying: Read 3 books from each category for a total of 36 books

This year I added an optional bonus challenge - Complete the Word

Read a book with a title that starts with each letter of your chosen word. Complete as many as you want. One of your main challenge books can count for one of the letters.

The words
DREAD
FEAR
FRIGHT
HORROR
SCARED
TERROR

I'm not sure what word (or words) I'm going to choose yet. TBD. 

Full details and sign up here.

The next three challenges are hosted by me at Gather Together and Read, my reading community site.

Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle

Reading is Political - Follow the Science

We have already started reading. The reading schedules are posted here, along with all of the information about this year's project.

My main level...
The Enthusiast: read 1-3 books being made into movies/series for release in 2026
Also, additional levels...
Not Ready to Let Go: read at least one (1) book made into a movie or series in 2025
vc iving in the Past: read at least one (1) book made into a movie in previous years
The Movie Was Better (What?!): watch the movie(s) for the book(s) you read.

Potential books (including some I didn't get to last year):

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, George R.R. Martin (2026)

The Book of Magic (Practical Magic 2) by Alice Hoffman (2026)

Fire & Blood: 300 Years Before A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin - House of the Dragon streaming series (2022, 2024, 2026)

Klara And The Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro (2026)

Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns by Lauren Weisberger (2026)

Remain, Nicholas Sparks & M. Night Shymalan (I don't usually read Sparks, but I'll make an exception when Shymalan is involved.)

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood (2026)
Wicked, Gregory Maguire (2024, 2025))

The Witching Hour, Anne Rice (reread) Second season of streaming series (1/5/25)

The Cabin at the End of the World, Paul Tremblay (2023)
Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann (2023) Currently reading
My Lady Jane, Cynthia Hand - streaming series (2024)

Klara And The Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro (2025)
The Running Man, Stephen King (2025)

The Long Walk, Stephen King (2025)

Full details and sign up here.

Pretend your house is a library: A strategy for actually reading the books you own.

My "holds shelf"...

My full list of books on my holds shelf are listed on my 2026 Reading Challenges page located in the blog menu above.

Full details on how this challenge works (you can adapt it to fit your needs too!) and sign up here.

Last, but not least, my independent project called Backlist Challenge. I'm keeping track on a separate page which you can see up in the blog menu. As always, there are also links in the menu to my long term challenges like the Classics Club, etc.

That's it! What is (was) your first book of the year? What are your reading plans? Doing any challenges, or perhaps thinking of joining one (or more) of mine?
Whatever your plans are, I'm wishing you a Happy New Year of escaping the world into reading.❤

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My 2025 year in reading

I met my goal of 50 last year so I raised my goal by 10 to 60 for 2025 and I did it...I read 60 books last year! 

My top 12 favorite books (well, eleven...I didn't have a favorite in November for some reason):

1. Holly, Stephen King (this was my favorite book of 2025)
2. Horseman, Christina Henry
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
4. The Hacienda, Isabel Canas
5. The Eulogist, Terry Gamble
6. The Vampire Armand, Anne Rice
7. The March, E.L. Doctorow
8. Diavola, Jennifer Thorne
9. The Pale Blue Eye, Louis Bayard
10. John Adams, David McCullough
11. All the Fiends of Hell, Adam Nevill

You can see the list of books I read last year on Goodreads here.

I did okay on reading challenges, completing most of my own challenges, and one (a twice a year challenge) not my own. My final update on 2025 reading challenges can be found here.

I didn't make a list of resolutions, just have a few goals in mind...

• Survive whatever 2026 throws at me
• Write my novel (I'm starting this weekend)
• Read 65 books

My word for 2026 is DETERMINED. I am going to need every ounce of determination I can muster.

Stay tuned for my 2026 reading challenges post.

Happy New Year and happy reading all year long!

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Cat Thursday - Happy 2026!

Cat Thursday...Thursdays. No set weeks (since I'm so forgetful). Just one, or a few times a month. Of course, this feature celebrates the wonders and the often hilarity of cats! Join me by posting a favorite cat meme you may have come across, famous cat art, or even share pics of your own beloved cat(s). It's all for the love of cats! If you would like to join in, share the link to your post with your comment below.

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Cat Thursday - Merry Christmas!

Cat Thursday! No set weeks (since I'm so forgetful). Just one, or a few times a month. Of course, this feature celebrates the wonders and the often hilarity of cats! Join me by posting a favorite cat meme you may have come across, famous cat art, or even share pics of your own beloved cat(s). It's all for the love of cats! If you would like to join in, share the link to your post with your comment below.

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Cat Thursday: Christmas - O Christmas Tree!

Cat Thursday! No set weeks (since I'm so forgetful). Just one, or a few times a month. Of course, this feature celebrates the wonders and the often hilarity of cats! Join me by posting a favorite cat meme you may have come across, famous cat art, or even share pics of your own beloved cat(s). It's all for the love of cats! If you would like to join in, share the link to your post with your comment below.

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Cat Thursday - Happy Thanksgiving

Cat Thursday...Thursdays. No set weeks (since I'm so forgetful). Just one, or a few times a month. Of course, this feature celebrates the wonders and the often hilarity of cats! Join me by posting a favorite cat meme you may have come across, famous cat art, or even share pics of your own beloved cat(s). It's all for the love of cats! If you would like to join in, share the link to your post with your comment below.

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Singing the Forge: Poems by G.H. Mosson - Review

A diverse collection of poems, this collection confronts the personal, the stories of others, and even translated works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I have never read his poetry and found myself captivated by Mosson's translation of Nearness of the Beloved. Beautiful poem. 

I enjoyed the poems inspired by the works of the artist James Abbott McNeil Whistler. This one in particular was my favorite:

Whistler's Sketchbook: Circling Home

Village walls ivory in the moon's full tide

     where streets and doors hammock in intermeshes of darkness.

I follow a lone man who strolls home at midnight

     with steps that crack across the public silence.

Moonflood alludes to the songs of interiors

     of which the sunlight pencils mere outlines.

Moonlit walls cradle diaries and dreams

     shared inside with the day's earned bread.

I watch standing in the street's well

     as wind slips along the shuttered windows.

Half through this tour, I've gathered good sketches 

     touched at the root, touched at the limit.

The poetic vignettes based on historical accounts of trench warfare during World War I were striking. Thinking of the hundreds of thousands of people who perished at Verdun is eye-opening to the atrocity of war. Letter by a French Soldier, 1916, Found at Verdun was especially poignant for me...

I should've scribbled of this a week ago, but now we're here: 

The final road ahead -- "The Sacred Way" -- that snakes down

through farmer's fields to the rumble, we've arrived to camp

at its mouth.  Mammoth lines of men

file in, shoulder to shoulder past 

those filing out.  Marie, you'll know

where I am when you read of Verdun.  It was calm

in our last spot.   Grass sprung

in front of our trench.  German machine-guns raked us

just for an hour after supper.  Soon, I will be able to say

I was here, for this thrust

might end our trench life if we

can break through somewhere.  Now guess:

I picked up a lamb's wool vest

on the way, from an old villager, 

and chocolate -- which I've stashed --

all for my necklace -- the gold one Father

gave me. The wool will help me duck

winter frost in trench bogs

that's coming. Don't tell him though.

I can just picture this soldier, hunkered down in the trench, not knowing what will happen...not knowing if he will survive. It's the personal stories that are always the hardest.

This is definitely a collection for lovers of poetry, and even lovers of art. I highly recommend it.

About the collection:

Singing the Forge explores the singing of what’s shaped us and what we’ve shaped for ourselves.

Through poems at times personal, plus vignettes from men and women of the past two centuries in the book’s middle section, these poems offer mirrors of becomings.

Readers encounter melodies from diverse lives. Across free verse, meter, and poems of organic form, you might just see yourself.

Advance Praise:

“Through a series of beautiful meditative lyrics, Mosson links childhood and adulthood, journey and reckoning, memory and wonder. A humane and earnest poet, Mosson is as much attuned to ‘songless streets of Baltimore’ as to ‘trees’ unnamed relation to the world.’ He captures this attunement with carefully measured language and impressive precision. Many poems are probing observations of places and people, rendered in verbal landscapes revealing his debt to visual artists. Hans Hofman, Philip Guston, Henry Moore are three invoked in this volume. The poems in Singing the Forge create a philosophy of life centered around the idea of harmony with the universe – even if harmony’s always at the verge of disintegration. They should be paid attention to and cherished for this reason.”  

—Piotr Gwiazda, Professor of English, Univ. of Pittsburgh

“Mosson’s poems are magical, memorable and meticulous, speaking to the powerful pull of locales and weathers and loves, yet get pinned to the memories of a reader with lines like these, spoken by a physician in his old age: ‘The nursing home is out there like a shark/ that has swallowed so many of my patients one by one.’ Give a copy to someone you love but be sure to keep one for yourself.”
—Clarinda Harris, Professor Emeritus, Towson University

Available on Amazon and through David Robert Books.

About the Poet:

G. H. Mosson is the author of five prior books and chapbooks of poetry, including Questions of Fire (Plain View Press), Season of Flowers and Dust (Goose River Press), and Family Snapshot as a Poem in Time (Finishing Line Press). Two of the chapbooks are collaborative, Heart X-rays & Simultaneous Revolutions (PM Press). His poetry has appeared in The Tampa Review, California Quarterly, The Hollins Critic, The Potomac Review, Smartish Pace, Lines & Stars, Free State Review, and across the U.S. He has MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, MFA from New England College, and his poetry has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. Mosson is a lawyer, father, writer, and yes, dreamer. For more, seek www.ghmosson.com. He is on X.

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