The 2026 mission: conquering Mount TBR

2025 was the year of the Pratchett Project, which has obviously spilled over into 2026, but never mind that; 2026 still needs a mission of its own.

So the goal is to reduce Mount To-Be-Read from its current 60+ books (plus I don't know how many magazine issues) down to 20 or 30. I'm not going to set a hard target, but I am going to commit to at least one or two from Mount TBR for every new book I read.

Some of the books in the queue will need a reread—it's been an age since I read The City We Became, for instance, so I'd like to refresh myself on that before I tackle The World We Make; I really need to re-read Scarlet Odyssey before I go on to Requiem Moon and Primeval Fire.

So that's the goal for 2026: grind Mount TBR from a mountain down into a molehill.

Explore more of Mount TBR and see which books are on the pile.

What I'm reading now

Murderbot Diaries and Engraved on the Eye are both queued books, and thus count towards the Mount TBR project.

Cover art for All Systems Red

Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

The blurb:

On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid — a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.

That's from the blurb for All Systems Red, but this will be a read of the whole series of Murderbot books. I'll link them individually below as I read and review them; the ones still to read are:

  1. Artificial Condition (novella)
  2. Rogue Protocol (novella)
  3. Exit Strategy (novella)
  4. Compulsory (short story)
  5. Network Effect (novel)
  6. Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory (short story)
  7. Fugitive Telemetry (novella)
  8. System Collapse (novel)

I've linked to Compulsory because that's the only one I don't have on my e-reader. The rest all came as one big download (along with a bunch of other Martha Wells books) from Humble Bundle.

 

...and...

 

Cover art for Unseen Academicals

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett

The blurb:

Football has come to the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork. And now the wizards of Unseen University must win a football match without using magic...so they're in the mood for trying everything else.

To do this, they recruit an unlikely group of players: Trev, a street urchin with a talent for kicking a tin can; Glenda, the night chef who makes a mean pie; Juliet, the kitchen hand turned world's greatest fashion model; and the mysterious Mr Nutt, who has something powerful, and dark, locked away inside him...

And the thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football. Here we go, here we go, here we go!

What I've read

Still to read

On top of this, I've got issues of Clarkesworld, Forever and Khoreo, plus a bunch of year's best anthologies in horror and science fiction to catch up on.

Past books

Looking for past years' books?

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