The Back to School Reset

Does anyone else still get that back to school feeling when we hit September? I know that my friends who have kids do, but there’s always been this feeling that I know I and one of my best friends has always had when the end of summer feels like a fresh start. I tend to start planning, cleaning and just in general organizing.

Some of the nesting and taking on house projects probably is ingrained in me from growing up where winter lasts from October to May. However, as an adult the end of summer brings to a close most of my more strenuous traveling / social habits. I will still have a few days of Ren Faire, but DragonCon brings my convention season to a close. This is also the start of my favorite time of the year, and yes like every other white girl out there I love fall. As I said earlier, I didn’t really grow up with fall because the snow came too fast so I always had said the holiday season was my favorite. I stand by that. This is when we tend to slow down, we prioritize friends and family, good food and good memories. We as a society when school starts get back into a routine, and I think that’s one of the things that also provides a small amount of comfort in a chaotic world.

Right now I know I’m in the middle of it as I have made a batch of chicken stock from leftovers I’ve been collecting in the freezer, I’ve had a corned beef on to cook for ten hours, and I’m already planning baked goods to make with the stone fruit that came in my most recent food box. My house is organized, and my is AC off and windows finally open as we’ve officially dipped under 70. I’m ready for fall. 

As I’ve been reflecting, I’ve also been looking at some of my goals. At the beginning of the year I made a bingo card1 of goals for the year. Some were very fun (go see a live show, try a new work out class, host more girls nights), others productive (workout 2x a week, cook once a week), and others were actively directed towards my creative pursuits. So as I have been evaluating my year, I made a fun little “gallery wall” for instagram of the books I’ve read this year and some still on my TBR. But I wanted to come and dive into the ideas I had for the year, what I’ve accomplished and what I still need to focus on. 

Read Six Classics

For someone who is a self proclaimed bibliophile… I didn’t really read the classics growing up. I was blessed to have a boom in children’s, middle grade, and YA literature as I came into reading. So I had a great thought of trying to read more classics and then read a book inspired by the classics as a fun spin. My traveling bookclub actually already got us started with The Princess Bride and Tress in the Emerald Sea. It was a delight to get to read Tress after TPB because you could see how much inspiration Sanderson pulled from the narrator voice. I also listened to the audiobook of As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of the Princess Bride which was so fun to hear the cast talk about the book and their memories. I will also admit this one is a little bit of a cop out because I have indeed already read The Princess Bride when I was in college, but we were annotating it for bookclub and it felt like a great way to dive in. 

I am ashamed to admit I never read all of the Narnia books growing up, even though I adore them so much and the movies and comfort watches for me I got halfway into The Horse and his Boy and petered out. So I decided to pick them up on audio and try again. However, I am chagrined to admit that I am once again stopped in the middle of book three. I do plan on finishing it but this has been a slow pick up when I’m in the mood. 

The other two classics I’ve listened to this year are Pride and Prejudice I listened to the podcast that has Julie Andrews reading it and loved it! She’s now doing Emma so I’m going to pick that one up when there’s more than two chapters out. This is going to open up so many adaptations to read, do you have one you’d recommend first? I also finally listened to Ben Barnes read The Picture of Dorian Gray which I had bought eons ago. It was such a fast listen and I really enjoyed it. I finally decided to sit down to listen because Every Exquisite Thing by Laura Steven was coming out and you might remember that I adored Our Infinite Fates by her. I… still haven’t read it but that is on my list for the fall! 

Emma, the rest of Narnia, as well as Dracula are on my list to keep digging into. What other classics would you recommend?

Current Status:
5.5/6 Classics Read

Read 10 books from the library & Read More Middle Grade / Children’s

I don’t know about you, but I used to be so much better about library books. Some of my favorite authors (Looking at you Sooz!) were ones that I picked up from the library. But then between NetGalley and then growing into adulthood and being able to afford to buy more books, I let my library patronage lapse. So this year I wanted to try to read down my shelves (see below) but also to read from my local library. I thought 10 means 10 less books I’m buying and that’s just under one a month and that’s doable! And it is…

But ten books obviously wasn’t enough of a challenge so I also told myself I wanted to read more Middle Grade and Children’s novels, especially after I saw Claire Linney’s instagram reel talking about how if your ‘best books of the year list’ doesn’t have children’s literature you’re being a literary snob and truly yes yes yes. Please go watch her reel and then consume more of her content because it’s wonderful. I loved the line she says that is “think of children’s books as literary vodka” which is so incredibly true. I have friends I’ve yapped at in frustration at the idea of 1000 page novels, especially when so many can be edited down to be better. I’m not saying there can’t be great novels that large, but most don’t earn those pages.

 Children’s and middle grade earn every single word because kids won’t read them if they didn’t. To distill down and honestly get as weird as young readers stories are is such a skill and a beautiful work of art. And since most of the books I’m going to be reading for this age group I don’t need to own right now I’v either used the library or I read books I’ve passed on other friends kiddos and both of those are such a joy! I decided to keep these ones lower so a book every other month or so, but I’ve done much better than that so here’s to exceeding that goal!

So without adieu here are my library and children’s books I’ve read so far and 100% recommend going out to grab:

Children’s & Middle Grade Books

YA & Adult Library Books

Current Status:
10/10 library books read
6/6 children’s or middle grade books read

Read 20 Books Off my Shelves

Again here comes the, I’ve felt trapped in the buying spiral because I want to support authors I love, doubled with the suck of capitalism, and rounded out with the fact that I am literally running out of shelf space. It’s time to read down my shelves. Or at least that was the goal. This also helps because I know not every book on my shelf is going to be a book that needs to stay in my house. Some I will send to friends or their kids that I know will enjoy them, some I might thrown Pango, and others I know will be my free little library books. This helps clear space for more amazing stories to come into my life and spread the joy.

Now my issue in tracking this is I have things marked as owned, but some of them I bought this year. So I’m going to do my best to be honest on what I read this year that I bought this year, and what I read this year that I had already owned (and a number of those are indeed rereads! So should I count those?) and I will be counting the pre-2026 buys towards my 20 books goal, but I also am curious how many in total for this whole group.

Pre-2026 Owned

2026 Acquisitions 

Current Status:
Books read off shelves – 34 (excluding rereads: 25; excluding audio: 19)
Book read off shelves acquired pre 2026 – 17 (excluding rereads: 9; excluding audio: 7)
Books read off shelves acquired in 2026 – 17 (excluding rereads: 16; excluding audio: 12)

Now time to be slightly pedantic. I technically have read my shelves at the goal I wanted, but if the goal was to read old books off to make space I’ve only read 8 physical books, and yes two of those were audio listens but I have shelf trophies so I’m counting it. Which means that I need to read a lot more of my older books, but I have also acquired more books this year. I am drowning it books. I have an anti-library and I love it, but I do need to make space. This section might be absolute chaos, but I would recommend every single book on my shelves.

Read 65 books this year

Now everyone’s goals are valid for themselves. I know I read a lot more than 65 books, but we aren’t counting the insane amount of words I read in fanfiction. I have never gone a day with out reading, it’s just not always traditional book. I know when I was younger I absolutely read a book a day. I pushed myself last year to read what quantified as a traditional book a week. I exceeded that and set a new higher goal for this year. I am still reading fanfiction and probably always will but I go in spurts now, and I love that my traveling book club where we annotate a book and mail it to the next person has been retraining my brain to read physical books (I had been a hard audio book/ ebook bias for so long) and it’s also helped me once again think about the book I’m reading at times vs just consuming and that dynamic as well as being able to immediately dissect it and discuss with others has been such a wonderful experience that has sharpened some of my critical reading skills in ways I realized they’d been lacking in the past. So next year will I read more than this year? I hope so, I know I’m going to set a higher goal for sure just to see if I can. 

Current Status:
61/65 books read

Beyond Books

So my hobby type goals weren’t all book related, but I have realized that I have slacked on some of them (blogging twice a month, rebind 3 books, sew 3 non cosplay items) but I also added in way more cosplay plans this year than expected and I knocked them all out of the park (minus one) in a shorter time frame than expected! I don’t know if I’ll dive into my book binding for the later half of the year, but I can appreciate that I have actively pushed myself to do more and find joy in creating more and more versus just consuming. A lot of my non-hobby goals I didn’t actively track daily and maybe I’ll try next year but they were just generally lovely reminders to try. This has been a growth and a comfort year and we still have one season left to go!

Did you set goals this year? How are you doing on them? 

Also I linked the books to the editions as I read them as much as possible.

Do I feels strange for linking you books that I got from the library in some cases? Yes. But there are too many books here to link you storygraph/goodreads and buy link. So I opted for the ones that will give a portion of the proceeds to independent bookstoreas as much as possible by using Libro.fm and Bookshop.org. I am an affiliate of both and I used my affiliate links for full disclosure. However I have yet to earn a dollar with my codes, I instead keep them as an easy way to get links to the books I yap about because I’d rather the money goes to support Indies than anywhere else (other than libraries).

  1. If you’d like to make your own bingo goal card here’s my template. ↩︎
  2. I would recommend this one as a physical copy, I find the humor reads better, I listened to the audiobook as a reread to confirm to a friend if I had similar feelings as she did in this department. ↩︎
  3. The title has changed from my edition to what is on her website. ↩︎

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