New Year, New Reads, and New Intentions

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Novel Nest, hope 2026 has been kind to you so far. I wanted to make this post to give a heads up of sort to what kind of content you'll find here at the Nest in the coming year.

Getting down my TBR from 2025:

So as much as people say that buying books and reading them are two different hobbies, I do get tired of seeing that huge looming TBR on my bookshelf. I have a little over 40 books from my 2025 TBR and honestly, I get a sort of FOMO when looking at it. There are so many great stories that I could be missing out on because they are buried in my TBR. A great example of this is with the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, I'm still only 2 books into the series and I hear all of my coworkers talking about the later books in the series and I get so jealous. I have Books 3 and 4 in my TBR, but they are several books away and I have to get there. This will definitely be what I'm focusing on for the first half of the year.

Plus I do have some travel related plans which I'll need to save some money for I don't think that 2026 will be a super huge book buying year.

Breaking my Own Rules:

So, when I first started the Novel Nest, I was a little hesitant to talk about anything other than traditionally published books. Even though I also consumed audio books and comics I felt a little too nervous to talk about them on here as I thought the people who saw my posts would not take me seriously as a book blogger. If you look at my blog now, you'll see one post about audiobooks and two about comics, but I will definitely be moving away from that mindset in 2026. I love storytelling, and I want to talk about it in whatever format I choose.

New Opportunities:

As fun as it was last year, I am not doing any reading challenges this year. I still have a reading goal, but I am not doing anything specific like doing the Goodreads bookmark challenge last year. It was fun but it sometimes felt like a hassle as I didn't always have a book in my TBR that would fill the challenge requirement. Plus, after buying a book for the challenge, more often than not it would end up being a disappointment. So, no more wasting time or wasting money, whenever I shop for books now, I am going to get books I enjoy or are looking forward to.

I have also looked into joining a book club as I think they are great opportunities to be social. This is definitely something I'll be looking into in the second half of the year. I have read picks from Good Morning America and Oprah's Book Club before but the one that interests me the most is the Service95 book club hosted by Dua Lipa.

I can't wait to continue with the rest of 2026, only six days in and I've already read three books. I am definitely looking forward to enjoying reading again and continuing to enjoy a medium I love.

-Cam