Greg's (ocgreg34) Reading in 2026

Happy New Year!

Intros first... My name is Greg, and this is my ninth 75 Books Challenge and managed to read 142 books last year. I'm an avid reader, movie-watcher, and gamer, currently living in Laguna Niguel, CA, with my partner of 20 years and our cat River. I've also had a few short stories published in anthologies and am trying to convince myself that I have a book rattling around inside my brain wanting desperately to come out.

As for additional reading challenges, two of them are posted below, but I'm also working my way through reading something by all the recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Looking forward to a lot of reading in 2026, so let's get reading!!

Completed in January

1. Deadlight Jack by Mark Onspaugh 🏳️‍🌈 -- 250 p.
2. You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian 🏳️‍🌈 -- 382 p.
3. Ecstasy by Ivy Pochoda -- 209 p.
4. The Original Bambi by Felix Salten (Austria) -- 156 p.
5. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (Argentina) -- 103 p.
6. A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand 🏳️‍🌈 -- 322 p.
7. Dead of Winter by Darcy Coates (Australia) -- 341 p.
8. A Queer Case by Robert Holtom (England) 🏳️‍🌈 -- 316 p.
9. Game Changer by Rachel Reid (Canada) 🏳️‍🌈 -- 366 p.
10. The Museum of Mysteries by Steve Berry and M.J. Rose -- 90 p.
11. We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian 🏳️‍🌈 -- 369 p.

Completed in February

12. Fateless by Imre Kertész (Hungary) NL -- 191 p.
13. The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager -- 349 p.
14. Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez -- 387 p.
15. Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio (England) -- 122 p.
16. The Jewel of the Isle by Kerry Rea -- 319 p.
17. Manhole, Volume 1 by Tetsuya Tsutsui (Japan) gn -- 208 p.
18. White Butterfly by Walter Mosley -- 266 p.
19. Clotel, or The President's Daughter by William Wells Brown -- 209 p.
20. Awakened by James S. Murray with Darren Wearmouth (USA/England) -- 283 p.

Completed in March

21. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates nf -- 152 p.
22. Say You'll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez -- 353 p.
23. Ghost Radio by Leopoldo Gout (Mexico) -- audiobook
24. Disappearance at Devil's Rock by Paul Tremblay -- 327 p.
25. The Happy Ever After Playlist by Abby Jimenez -- 370 p.
26. 6:40 to Montreal by Eva Jurczyk (Canada) -- 323 p.
27. Basketball Jones by E. Lynn Harris 🏳️‍🌈 -- 226 p.
28. Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yeager nf -- 207 p.
29. What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Leslie Nneka Arimah (England) KP -- 152 p.
30. The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica (Argentina) 🏳️‍🌈 -- 175 p.
31. The Last Season by Eric Blehm nf -- 327 p.

…continued in post #15...

* = re-read
gn = graphic novel
🏳️‍🌈 = lgbtqia+
NL = Nobel Prize for Literature
nf = non-fiction
PP = Pulitzer Prize
WPF = Women's Prize for Fiction
KP = Kirkus Prize

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Reading Challenge (bolded books have been read):

1918 His Family by Ernest Poole
1919 The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
1921 The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
1922 Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington
1923 One of Ours by Willa Cather
1924 The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson
1925 So Big by Edna Ferber
1926 Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (declined)
1927 Early Autumn: A Story of a Lady by Louis Bromfield
1928 The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
1929 Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin
1930 Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge
1931 Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes
1932 The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
1933 The Store by T.S. Stribling
1934 Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller
1935 Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson
1936 Honey in the Horn by H.L. Davis
1937 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
1938 The Late George Apley: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir by J.P. Marquand
1939 The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
1940 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
1942 In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow
1943 Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair
1944 Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin
1945 A Bell for Adano by John Hersey
1947 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
1948 Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
1949 Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens
1950 The Way West by A.B. Guthrie, Jr.
1951 The Town by Conrad Richter
1952 The Caine Mutiny: A Novel of World War II by Herman Wouk
1953 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1955 A Fable by William Faulkner
1956 Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
1958 A Death in the Family by James Agee
1959 The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor
1960 Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
1961 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1962 The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor
1963 The Reivers: A Reminiscence by William Faulkner
1965 The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau
1966 The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter
1967 The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
1968 The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
1969 House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
1970 The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford
1972 Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
1973 The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
1975 The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
1976 Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
1978 Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
1979 The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
1980 The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
1981 A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
1982 Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1984 Ironweed by William Kennedy
1985 Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
1986 Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
1987 A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
1988 Beloved by Toni Morrison
1989 Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
1990 The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
1991 Rabbit at Rest by John Updike
1992 A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
1993 A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories by Robert Olen Butler
1994 The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
1995 The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
1996 Independence Day by Richard Ford
1997 Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
1998 American Pastoral by Philip Roth
1999 The Hours by Michael Cunningham
2000 Interpreter of Maladies: Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
2001 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
2002 Empire Falls by Richard Russo
2003 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2004 The Known World by Edward P. Jones
2005 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
2006 March by Geraldine Brooks
2007 The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2008 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
2009 Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
2010 Tinkers by Paul Harding
2011 A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
2013 The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
2014 The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
2015 All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
2016 The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
2017 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
2018 Less by Andrew Sean Greer
2019 The Overstory by Richard Powers
2020 The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
2021 The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
2022 The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
2023 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
2023 Trust by Hernan Diaz
2024 Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips
2025 James by Percival Everett
2026 Angel Down by Daniel Kraus

Another self-imposed reading challenge...

The Women's Prize for Fiction (previously, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Bailey's Prize for Fiction) -- bolded books have been read:

1996 A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore
1997 Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
1998 Larry's Party by Carol Shields
1999 A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne
2000 When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant
2001 The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville
2002 Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
2003 Property by Valerie Martin
2004 Small Island by Andrea Levy
2005 We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
2006 On Beauty by Zadie Smith
2007 Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2008 The Road Home by Rose Tremain
2009 Home by Marilynne Robinson
2010 The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
2011 The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht
2012 The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
2013 May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes
2014 A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
2015 How to Be Both by Ali Smith
2016 The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney
2017 The Power by Naomi Alderman
2018 Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
2019 An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
2020 Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
2021 Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
2022 The Book of Form & Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
2023 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
2024 Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan
2025 The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

And not to forget one of my most unusual reading challenges: at least one book (play, novel, poetry, essays, etc.) from each of the Nobel Prize for Literature winners, dating back to René-François Sully Prudhomme (1901). I've crossed out the authors that I've read.

1901 Sully Prudhomme
1902 Theodor Mommsen
1903 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
1904 Frédéric Mistral
1904 José Echegaray y Eizaquirre
1905 Henryk Sienkiewicz
1906 Giosuè Carducci
1907 Rudyard Kipling
1908 Rudolf Christoph Eucken
1909 Selma Lagerlöf
1910 Paul Heyse
1911 Count Maurice Maeterlinck
1912 Gerhart Hauptmann
1913 Rabindranath Tagore
1915 Romain Rolland
1916 Verner von Heidenstam
1917 Karl Adolph Gjellerup
1917 Henrik Pontoppidan
1919 Carl Spitteler
1920 Knut Hamsun
1921 Anatole France
1922 Jacinto Benavente
1923 William Butler Yeats
1924 Wladyslaw Reymont
1925 George Bernard Shaw
1926 Grazia Deledda
1927 Henri Bergson
1928 Sigrid Undset
1929 Thomas Mann
1930 Sinclair Lewis
1931 Erik Axel Karlfeldt
1932 John Galsworthy
1933 Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
1934 Luigi Pirandello
1936 Eugene O'Neill
1937 Roger Martin du Gard
1938 Pearl S. Buck
1939 Frans Eemil Sillanpää
1944 Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
1945 Gabriela Mistral
1946 Hermann Hesse
1947 André Gide
1948 T.S. Elliot
1949 William Faulkner
1950 Bertrand Russell
1951 Pär Lagerkvist
1952 François Mauriac
1953 Sir Winston Churchill
1954 Ernest Hemingway
1955 Halldór Laxness
1956 Juan Ramón Jiménez
1957 Albert Camus
1958 Boris Pasternak (declined the prize)
1959 Salvatore Quasimodo
1960 Saint-John Perse
1961 Ivo Andrić
1962 John Steinbeck
1963 Giorgos Seferis
1964 Jean-Paul Sartre (declined the prize)
1965 Michail Sholokhov
1966 Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 Nelly Sachs
1967 Miguel Ángel Asturias
1968 Yasunari Kawabata
1969 Samuel Beckett
1970 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1971 Pablo Neruda
1972 Heinrich Böll
1973 Patrick White
1974 Eyvind Johnson
1974 Harry Martinson
1975 Eugenio Montale
1976 Saul Bellow
1977 Vincente Aleixandre
1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer
1979 Odysseas Elytis
1980 Czeslaw Milosz
1981 Elias Canetti
1982 Gabriel García Márquez
1983 William Golding
1984 Jaroslav Seifert
1985 Claude Simon
1986 Akinwande Ouwoe Soyinka
1987 Joseph Brodsky
1988 Naguib Mahfouz
1989 Camilo José Cela
1990 Octavio Paz
1991 Nadine Gordimer
1992 Derek Walcott
1993 Toni Morrison
1994 Kenzaburo Oe
1995 Seamus Heaney
1996 Wislawa Szymborska
1997 Dario Fo
1998 José Saramago
1999 Günter Grass
2000 Gao Xingjian
2001 Vidiadhar Surjprasad Naipaul
2002 Imre Kertész
2003 John Maxwell Coetzee
2004 Elfriede Jelinek
2005 Harold Pinter
2006 Orhan Pamuk
2007 Doris Lessing
2008 J.M.G. Le Clézio
2009 Herta Müller
2010 Mario Vargas Llosa
2011 Tomas Tranströmer
2012 Mo Yan
2013 Alice Munro
2014 Patrick Modiano
2015 Svetlana Alexievich
2016 Bob Dylan
2017 Kazuo Ishiguro
2018 Olga Tokarczuk
2019 Peter Handke
2020 Louise Glück
2021 Abdulrazak Gurnah
2022 Annie Ernaux
2023 Jon Fosse
2024 Han Kang
2025 László Krasznahorkai

Welcome back, Greg!

New Year greetings from Kuala Lumpur. My project is at least physically completed and an addition to the city scape.

Look forward to keeping up with you in 2026

And another challenge...winners of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. The prize was established in 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, and they also award prizes for non-fiction and young readers' literature. I've read the bolded books.

2014 Euphoria by Lily King
2015 A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
2016 The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan
2017 What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
2018 Severance by Ling Ma
2019 The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
2020 Luster by Raven Leilani
2021 Harrow by Joy Williams
2022 Trust by Hernan Diaz
2023 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
2024 James by Percival Everett
2025 The Slip by Lucas Schaefer

Hi. I'm Weird_O. I've been around the 75ers since 1915, but I don't believe I've made your acquaintance. So Hello. I like your lists. "The Women's Prize for Fiction" is a new one to me, and I'll have to copy it. I'm curious about your list of Nobel winners. Why the mix of bolding and lining out?

See you around, I'm sure.

Happy new Year, Greg - may your year be full of happines health and joy - and of course - books.

You have some very interesting challenges here. Maybe I'll take up one of them if I can manage it.

>8 weird_O: Hi Weird_O. The crossed out authors are ones that I've read. The bolded ones still await reading...if I can find them. Many of the older ones are harder to find in English translation.

If we put our combined reading of the Nobel Laureates together, Greg, we would only have 22 still to read!

>11 PaulCranswick: Wouldn't that be nice!!!

10 days into the New Year, and I'm finally posting my Top 10 Reads from 2025, in no particular order...

Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert by Bob the Drag Queen
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
James by Percival Everett
Ten Steps to Nanette by Hannah Gadsby
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The Lehman Trilogy by Stefano Massini
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
Bullet Train by Kōtarō Isaka
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
The Bear by Andrew Krivak

And just for kicks...

Longest book read: The Lehman Trilogy by Stefano Massini -- 708 p.
Oldest book read: Common Sense by Thomas Paine -- published in 1776
Different countries read (not including the U.S): 18 different countries

>13 ocgreg34: I have read four of the ten books, Greg and I would agree that all four (O'Brien, Isaka, Everett and Miller) were excellent in their own ways.

Completed in April

32. Scopophilia by Ellis De Keyzer (Belgium) — 422 p.
33. I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones — 384 p.
34. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (England) — 160 p.
35. The Overstory by Richard Powers PP — 502 p.
36. The Delight Makers by Adolf F. Bandelier (Switzerland) — 464 p.
37. The Husbands by Holly Gramazio (Australia/England) 🏳️‍🌈 — 383 p.
38. The Old Man and the Gun: And Other Tales of True Crime by David Grann nf -- 133 p.
39. We Burned So Bright by TJ Klune 🏳️‍🌈 -- 169 p.

Completed in May

40. Luke and Billy Finally Get a Clue by Cat Sebastian 🏳️‍🌈 -- 81 p.
41. Death and Dinuguan by Mia P. Manansala 🏳️‍🌈 — 283 p.
42. The Night That Finds Us All by John Hornor Jacobs 🏳️‍🌈 — 285 p.
43. The Shots You Take by Rachel Reid (Canada) 🏳️‍🌈 — 329 p.
44. Poems of Giosuè Carducci by Giosuè Carducci (Italy) NL — 111 p.
45. Numbers by John Rechy * 🏳️‍🌈 — 253 p.
46. Cleaning Up Finn by Sarah M. Chen — 158 p.
47. Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth by Stephen Graham Jones — 175 p.
48. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore -- 558 p.
49. Dead Fake by Vincent Ralph — 248 p.
50. The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer (Canada) 🏳️‍🌈 -- 304 p.
51. Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield PP — 222 p.
52. A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli (France) — 138 p.
53. Zombies of the Upper East Side by Jason Zeffir — 240 p.

Completed in June

54. The Ghost and Charlie Muir by Felice Stevens 🏳️‍🌈 -- 365 p.
55. The Thief of Always by Clive Barker (England) 🏳️‍🌈 — 225 p.
56. Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid (Canada) 🏳️‍🌈 — 368 p.
57. Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo 🏳️‍🌈 — 395 p.

* = re-read
gn = graphic novel
🏳️‍🌈 = lgbtqia+
NL = Nobel Prize for Literature
nf = non-fiction
PP = Pulitzer Prize
WPF = Women's Prize for Fiction
KP = Kirkus Prize