I want to go into 2026 with more intentions, I have set myself a word of the year. 2026 is going to be the year to linger. When thinking about what I wanted for the new year, I decided I wanted to slow down, be more intentional with what I engage with, quiet my mind and disconnect from my phone more. My wife was trying to work out her word for the year, and she found linger for me. What I love about the word is the way it seems to cover all my intentions in a single word. Linger tells me to stay in the moment, to be present and not performative, to be quiet and grounded, but also, I can remind myself not to linger on my phone.

I have taken up journaling recently as a way to slow my thoughts down. I find that taking the time to write with a pen and paper to be freeing and while I realise this is just a small step in the never-ending journey of self-improvement; It really has been meaningful to me, and I hope I can stick to it. I have been doing a course on creative rebooting in the hope to develop better practices for activating my creativity and there is a piece of advice that has really stuck with me. “Reengage with your notebooks”; even a simple act of transcribing what I wrote a week ago into a document allows me to interact with my previous thoughts. This could lead to new ideas or projects, but also it allows me to have a conversation with previous thoughts while I centralise my data into one place.

What I really liked about this idea is not that it is a form of editing; it’s almost like translating; and if you’ve seen my handwriting, it does need to be translated into something readable. Also, I am engaging with previous thoughts and seeing if I agree or disagree now. I am taking the time to interact with myself and hopefully finding ideas to expand into something more. I am hoping this will help me understand my mind a little better and also be more creative.

I plan to engage more with the media I consume as well; I find I think about music more than I do any other form of media at the moment. I thought maybe it was because I listened to over 200 albums last year, but I have realised that it is the simple fact that I have been engaging with these albums on AOTY. With each album I wrote a few words of what I thought about what I heard and picked the tracks that stood out to me. It might only take me a few minutes but the fact that I am reflecting and trying to understand my thoughts as well as document my journey has been quite insightful. It is interesting to see what albums I rated highly but were not in my most played albums on last.fm.

I have seen a few journaling videos on YouTube recently and there is this phrase that keeps getting used: “journalling ecosystem”. The idea is that not all journals are the same, there could be a commonplace book, a media journal, a planner, and any type of journal. I saw one person that loved talking about their K-pop journal and I have no idea how much information you could write about Korean music, but I am not someone that is actively listening to it. The idea of a media journal is the one that interested me; why not do what I do with music and write my thoughts on films, shows, podcasts and anything else. It can help me engage with the media and maybe even write reviews. I know I neglected literature here when talking about media, I did that intentionally.

For my reading plans of 2026, I want to get back into the habit of writing reviews, I might not blog every book I read but I will write something somewhere about them all. I hope to get more out of what I am reading. The simple act of writing something about my favourite books of last year made me realise my feelings towards them a little better. Like when I wrote about Giovanni’s Room, I realised themes in the book that I did not pick up on while reading it. That act of reflection made me like the novel more.

I have not set myself a reading goal for a few years now, I always wanted to read without worrying about hitting the goal, but why am I scared of failing? Does it change anything? I am going to try for 50 books this year because I want to intentionally push myself more and disconnect from my phone as well. When I stopped setting a goal, I can see a decrease in reading. I was reading over 100 books a year and then it dropped to 83, 65, 56 and then last year only 46 books. I was disappointed with the amount of reading I did, I know it has been a busy time, but I want to see if the act of goal setting has any bearing on how much I read.

This is my plan for 2026; I hope this sparks some creativity and thoughtfulness in my life. I wrote the term ‘sparks some creativity’ and realise that is wrong, creativity requires practice, but I left that in as a reminder. I am really hoping to be less online and, on my phone, and more in the moment. I want to be more creative and slow my mind, I hope this plan works for me.

I have been talking about my future in blogging and other mediums for a while now. I still do not know what the right answer is. As my reading has shown, I want to spend more time talking about books in translation. I am so passionate about my new-found niche that I keep having thoughts of killing my blog and rebuilding it with a focus. Although I think this is a bad idea, I keep wanting to find new ways to promote world literature, because I think it does not get enough attention. It has improved in the past few years but there is a long way to go.

One of the reoccurring thoughts was to build something like Book Riot, Electric Lit or Lithub but have it focus solely on promoting books in translation. However, this idea is just far too big for one person and would require others to help. My past experiences with trying to get others involved have taught me that something like this rarely works unless everyone has the same level of passion. Which has led me to try and come up with new ideas to promote books in translation.

I currently have podcast called Lost in Translations dedicated to talking about books in translation, but I want to do more. I need ideas. I would love to grow the brand and offer more but I need to think smaller. I have decided to do more on the blog that is less reviews and more in the style of essays. Maybe I can incorporate my desire to improve my writing with my passion to promote translations. Maybe I need to start writing those articles promoting world literature but post them on my blog. I do not know, my desires to do more are far greater than my personal abilities. I have big ideas but need to focus on my capabilities.

I hope to be blogging more in the future, it really is my favourite medium and I have tried many. I love my podcast, which needs guests if anyone is interested, but I do think writing might be my primary focus. Next year makes ten years blogging and I hope it will be a successful year for my writing. I write this to communicate the thoughts circling in my head lately and help get myself back into blogging. Between being made redundant and then NaNoWriMo, I have not dedicated much time to writing for the blog. I hope to do more, I miss it. It is almost like an addiction. If I am not posting something it feels like I am not writing, which is not always the case. I guess I just like the feeling of accomplishment I get when I post my writing on my blog.

I think in 2019 I will try transforming my blog more into a media type site, focusing more on writing articles and keeping people informed about world literature. I am not sure what this will look like, if this will mean a name change or anything else. I will just do my part to work towards creating the content I would like to see.

Recently I decided to participate in bloggers reading challenge; actually I joined two. I wanted to read more books in translation so I joined the German Literature Month but that is not what I want to talk about here. The other group activity I joined in on was Nonfiction November and I did this because this year I wanted to make more of an effort with reading non-fiction books. There was a theme post as part of this challenge where they asked everyone to answer four questions about our year of reading non-fiction.  These questions where:

• What was your favourite non-fiction read of the year?
• What non-fiction book have you recommended the most?
• What is one topic or type of non-fiction you haven’t read enough of yet?
• What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

I thought rather than just answering the questions, this would be a good opportunity to practise writing another personal essay. If you are unsure what I’m talking about, check out my October wrap up post. So here I am back with another What I Think About When I’m Not Blogging post and of course that means another essay where I talk about books.

I owe a lot to non-fiction; it was a book about music and the Romantic Period that saved my life and turned me into a reader. In 2009 something clicked within me and I went from a man with no passion to a bibliophile and it was thanks to Craig Schuftan’s book Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone!: The Romantic Movement, Rock and Roll, and the End of Civilisation as We Know It. I listen to a lot of music and that book come out at the right time; suddenly I want from a loser to someone that wanted to learn everything they could.

Yet I still wasn’t reading much non-fiction, I was reading everything I could get my hand on in fiction but that was it. I knew I had to make more of an effort so I set myself a personal challenge in 2013 when I realised I was avoiding non-fiction. I could never understand my aversion towards non-fiction; I often considered myself autodidactic (which I guess I can no longer call myself since I am at uni) yet I kept avoiding it. I try to be a literary explorer and you can tell that by my blog name, and while I do struggle with some genres, I had no justification for avoiding non-fiction.

So I pushed myself to read more and in 2013 I set myself the challenge of reading 20 non-fiction books. My first book for the year was Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and I thought this would cure me. A book about books was the perfect medicine but I did not reach my goal of 20 books. I did read some wonderful books including You Are Not So Smart, Perv and Practical Classics but in the end I only achieved fourteen books. This is not a bad effort but I was not content with this and set myself the same challenge again.

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff started off my 2014 challenge and I fell in love with this book. I don’t know if would call it my favourite for the year anymore (Ex Libris was more inspiring) but 84, Charing Cross Road is the kind of book I could recommend to every book lover (see I have answered the first two questions now). This led to the realisation that if I wanted to push myself into loving non-fiction maybe I should focus on these books about books. I have since read other interesting memoirs by bibliophiles including My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff and The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller.

I couldn’t tell you when I found joy in reading non-fiction but I do know it happened sometime this year and it isn’t just books about books. I have enjoyed memoirs by authors (Little Failure), actors (Yes, Please) and even someone contemplating the priesthood (The Dark Path). I have tried some books about the TV (Difficult Men), Crime (In Cold Blood), Feminism (The Fictional Woman) and I have discovered there is so much more to learn.

I want to read some more about literary criticism after reading Critical Theory and Literary Theory but I think I need to put more of a focus on psychoanalysis. I have an interest in psychology and I realise I do not know anything about it. I know I will need to read some more Freud and I am sure there are plenty of others I am yet to discover. I know this all seems so obvious to other readers but I am still navigating the literary landscape.

So far this year I have read twenty-three books and I am glad to say, I have no plans on slowing down. I feel like I have hit a groove with non-fiction and joining Nonfiction November in the hopes to push myself a little further. I have one book left to read in my planned reading for the month, which is Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books by Wendy Lesser but I might fit in a few more. I was thinking about reading Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, has anyone read it?

I may not know how I found a love of non-fiction but it was somewhere between 84, Charing Cross Road and Excavation: A Memoir. I cannot believe how obvious it was, I have so much I want to learn about and yet I resisted for so long. Weirdly enough, if I think about it, I write non-fiction and I have a real passion about talking about books. I blog because I’m passionate about books and I cannot stop talking about them; I write essays like this because I want to get better at writing.

I have often considered this blog as a book journal that documents my reading life from its conception in 2012. What I Think About When I’m Not Blogging is an attempt to close the gap between book blogging and journaling. This is a (semi)regular stream-of-conscious where I explore all the bookish thoughts I currently have got on my mind.

I have been thinking a lot about book challenges and book projects lately. We are coming to the end of the year and it is about that time to start planning for next year. For the past couple of years, I have committed myself to a 36-book challenge, which included all different genres. This is The Literary Exploration Challenge and while it will be running again next year, I am not sure if I want to be involved. Sure I will be hosting it at the Literary Exploration book club but that does not mean I have to do it again.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the challenge and I think it is a great way to experience genres of different varieties. I just want to commit to something different next year. I have only been reading books since 2009 and in that time I have discovered close to 700 books (680 books according to my spreadsheet). I remember back in 2012 I wrote a post about re-reading and how there are so many books to discover, so I didn’t want to waste too much time re-reading.

Since then, I’ve changed my mind; I know there are millions of books out there that I want to read. I know that I will never get to them all and that does stress me out. However I have changed a lot as a reader and a book blogger and I want to see what I think of books I have read in the past. There are favourites I want to experience again but there are also classics I might not have been ready for. I am curious to see what I will get out of books from my past.

This is not an excuse to write reviews on books I have missed but that is a bonus. Next year I would like to devote some more time to re-reading. I am not sure I would set an amount but ideally I want to re-read at least one book a month. The reason why I don’t want to set an amount or a reading challenge is I want to also spend some time with some reading projects. Sometimes a big book or a complicated book needs that extra time and attention and I would love to leave myself some time to explore them.

So there you have it; this is what I would like to achieve with my reading next year. Have you thought about a reading challenge for next year? Are you going to try something different? I like the idea of reading challenges but I think I will feel more free to read bigger books if I don’t set myself a reading goal or join any reading challenges.

I am currently reading Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer and part of her English class, Jam has to write a journal and this got me thinking about journaling on the whole. I have always wanted to be able to journal but never really found an ability to do so; the words wouldn’t come out and I was never consistent enough to get any better. However, I am addicted to book blogging, I always want to talk about bookish things and I think I can work with that. I was talking to my wife about journaling. She is great at it; it comes naturally but she has been writing in a journal since she was ten. I do consider my blog here as a book journal that documents my bookish journey so why not expand on that a little bit.

My thought is to make a regular post about what I have been thinking about and my reading journey; a bookish stream of conscious just to see where this takes me. I would like to make this a weekly activity but it might only be semi-regular. I will start and see where I go. This might just fade out but if I make an effort then maybe I will be able to progress into journaling more frequently on and off this blog.

I have been fallen so behind on my book reviewing, it has taken over my book blog. I have thirteen posts to edit and schedule and five book reviews to write. The problem with being so far behind is that I don’t do any blogging outside of book reviewing. I don’t want every post just to be a book review; I want to explore all bookish thoughts and topics that come into my head. This is one of the main reasons to start with a post like this.

I have been lucky enough to be able to read a lot lately; I have been attending salt therapy to help clear up my sinuses and one of the requirements is no electronics in the room. This is giving me an hour a day where a have no distractions and I can read; sometimes I fall asleep but I normally force myself to use the time reading. I have so many books I want to read and salt therapy might be helping my reading life more than my sinuses.

I have worked out that I can get between 50 – 100 pages done in the hour of salt therapy and I’m there six times a week. This isn’t my only reading time but it has put a big boost to the amount of book I get through a week. Depending on the book, I often aim for the 100 pages each hour but if I love the book, I would rather read slower. The good news is I do think the salt therapy is helping; I’m starting to feel healthier. Anyway, maybe I should get back to Belzhar and I will see if this type of blogging takes off. If anything I hope to be able to turn my book blog into more of a book journal and explore more bookish thoughts.