📚 My Bookshelf For 2026

30 Jan, 2026

The main hobby I guess I've been keeping up with in the past year has been reading, so I feel like just talking about it a bit¹. Last year I made a goal to read through more of the books I already own, and tried to buy as few books as possible. I ended up falling off of reading mid-year, which was fine - we sold our house last year and bought a new one, so I was very busy. I got back into reading once we settled down in the new house.

I wanted to start working down the number of books I own that I haven't read. I like having a lot of books to choose from when I want to read something new, but I also like the idea of someone walking into my house and asking if I've read my books, and I'm able to tell them what most of my books are about. But also buying new books is fun, and I have a new bookshelf to fill up with plenty of space. Check it out.

But overall my reading last year looked like:

• 9 books read from my owned books
• 1 book read that I checked out from the library
• 4 books read that were impulse buys in 2025

For a total of 14 read. At least with the books I bought last year, I read four of them right away, yeah? But I bought an additional seven that I haven't gotten to yet. But by going with my "don't buy", it discouraged me in general from buying books and ending up with too many I just won't read ever. I sold a few that I either don't see myself reading after all, or that I read and didn't like enough to keep. So that cleared them off my bookshelf.

(I've already bought a lot of new books this year. I'm giving myself a bit of an excuse to do so after having a really, really bad December. Like "one of the worst months of my life" bad. So maybe after a bit I'll try to limit it again, but right now, nah.)

My Bookshelf

Let me just talk about my bookshelf because I rearranged it recently and I like it.

The top three shelves of my bookshelf. These are mostly decorative, as you can see, but the second row is being used for books I've read this year. So we're closing January and I've already finished two. 👏 I like having a space dedicated to this to kind of encourage me and see my progress. And sometimes I forget all that I read in a year, so it's just nice to visually see what I've done.

The third shelf has a couple of books that were formative for me. I read Dragon's Blood in middle school and Dragonsbane in high school. Dragonsbane is my favorite book, and while Dragon's Blood I now think is kinda just okay, I love the cover and I love my memories of the book. I bought the old editions of these books since these were the covers in my school libraries and I adore them.

The box is a cigar box I store some of my taller fountain pen inks in. It looks nice on the shelf. 😊

The next two shelves are my to-read collection. These are all either completely unread, or books I'm planning to reread. Though right now they're all unread. The top shelf here is fantasy while everything else is the bottom. Though I think some fantasies have wormed their way into the catch-all. It's my favorite genre, after all.

(The pink unicorn books are for my step-daughter. We're reading them together, on the first one currently.)

The dragon figures are ones I've collected over the years, since I was young. They're a mix of ones I'd gathered myself and gifts from friends. I keep re-arranging the dragons in various ways, so they don't even look like how I have them in these photos anymore.

And the bottom two shelves are books I've already read. Shelf 6 (top in this photo) has my favorite books that I own, so they get to display separate. As you can see, I have another copy of Dragonsbane - this was the first one I'd bought, and I bought it when I realized there were sequels. So I have the Winterlands quartet with matching spines. This shelf may get merged with #3 later down the road, but I don't have enough books to fill all this space, so I like them where they're at for now. I had this shelf higher up for a while (and merged with #3 at the time, until I decided to put the box on that shelf) but wanted my to-read shelf higher so I can look through it easier.

Shelf 7 are just all the books I've read that aren't being "displayed." Most of these are books I will keep. There's a small number that I won't - because like I said, I sold some last year already. I've decided I don't want to keep books I didn't enjoy or can't see myself ever reading again. I'd like the shelf to be a collection of books I can talk about and enjoy, not a record of things I hate.

#2026 #books