The Bookish Mindset

If reading more is one of your new years resolutions or goals for this year then I’m super excited for you, this is going to be a great year for you!

As I’m sure you already know, reading can have so many benefits, especially surrounding your mental health (check out my blog on this topic here) but it can be so much more than that. It can be a place for escapism, a place for joy, a place for nostalgia. Your reading journey is personal and I want to help you get there.

So why listen to me? Reading isn’t only my hobby, it’s my life. I’ve been a bookworm from the moment I could read and it’s been a pleasure bringing my love for all things literary to the digital world in blog form and social media too. I’m a book blogger, which means I regularly post book reviews and recommendation lists (read more here), I work closely with publishers reviewing pre-released books and love to interview authors on literary panels too.

If working out how to read more and to fit more reading into your already busy life feels like an impossible task, or if you just need some pointers to get you started, then let me share my top tips for getting more reading into your life in 2026.

Read books that you enjoy. It sounds really obvious but it really helps! Spend some time looking for books that interest you and inspire you – it’s so much easier to pick up a book if you’re excited to read it. If you really don’t know where to start, think about kind of films do you like to watch, or what you enjoyed as a child perhaps.

Remove the stigma that you have to learn something from a book, or it has to be non-fiction to be worth your while. Your rest does not need to be productive, you can read something just for the love of reading it. Non-fictions and self help books are brilliant for learning, but you’d be amazed how much you can learn about yourself and others in fictional work too.

Take a book with you everywhere. And I mean everywhere. You’d be surprised how often you find yourself with five minutes spare to read. Queues, waiting rooms, journeys, lunch breaks.. which leads me nicely onto my next point.

Get familiar with audiobooks. Not only are they brilliantly accessible for those that struggle with physical books, but they’re also one of the best travel companions. They’re perfect for commutes, mental health walks and so much more. Try out Libro.fm to get yours and support indie bookstores too.

Track your reading. Let me recommend The StoryGraph app. It’s a brilliant app for tracking your current reads, the books you want to read and so much more. You can set yourself reading goals over the year, track your daily reading streak and also enter reading challenges to keep you motivated.

Join reading challenges. One thing I love about The StoryGraph app is the challenges you can set or join yourself. There’s one for reading a page a day in January, there’s another to encourage you to read books from different countries around the world and so much more. I’ll also be hosting one later in the year!

Find your community. Reading with other people can help you stay accountable and keep you motivated. Why not try setting up a book club with a friend to read the same book and take it in turns? I’ve also got something exciting in the works for the new year under this title too!

Let me know which points you’ll start with and if you’re trying to make reading a habit this year by dropping me a comment, I’d love to help!

If you like what you’ve read and would like to access more content or want to keep up with future events and more, I’d love if you could take a look at my substack and consider supporting my content on there too. You can also find more content on my Instagram here.

And don’t forget to check out my other blogs and reviews – you can find books with similar themes in the same folder link below, or click back onto blogs to see the whole offering.

Last updated 30/12/2025