Beneath A Thousand Skies

Hello!

It’s back to work and reality for me today (for a whole week before I have holiday), and the last of the posts of preparing for 2026 until the start of February. This year I am very much taking the approach of scheduling work around my fun as I spent last year giving far too much of my spare time and life to the job, and it wasn’t worth it. So, this year I have upped my general overall reading goal on GR to 100 books with the full intention of beating that.

I’m also setting myself the challenge of reading more outside of SFFH (not that I don’t love SFFH and that will always dominate, but variety is the spice of life and all that) which will be reflected in the set TBR each month.

I am also doing a bunch of series rereads/reads this year – with no set pace, other than the goal to read them.

Those series are:

• Redwall by Brian Jacques. I love this series so much, and it has a lot of nostalgia for me and I’ve been wanting to do a reread for ages, so why wait any longer?
• Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey. Every year I reread certain books from this series, but this year I want to do a complete readthrough, not least because I am writing my own dragon story at the moment so it feels right to get back to the series that triggered my love of dragons and fantasy.
• Tamora Pierce. Again I have yearly reread (sometimes multiple times a year) of The Protector of the Small series, but this year I want to work my way through all her work.
• Wicca Series by Cate Tiernan. I loved this when I was a teenager, not sure how it will hold up now, but I want to give it a go.
• Clive Cussler. This is one I’ve wanted to tackle for a while, starting with the Dirk Pitt, Numa Files, and Oregan Files series which I have read up until the new ones with different autors, and then moving onto the Fargo Adventures and Isaac Bell series which I have only read one or two novels from.

And finally, I came across ‘The Worldbuilders Book Club’ challenge by Quartzen on Bsky which is available on Storygraph, which I am going to use as part of my research for ‘The Gods Own Bones’.

1. Politics, Crime and Law – The Last Pharaohs: Egypt Under the Ptolemies, 305-30BC – J.G. Manning
2. Diplomacy, War and International Relations – The Pharaoh: Life at Court and on Campaign – Garry J. Shaw
3. Travel, Trade and Migration
4. Urban Life and Architecture – The Tomb in Ancient Egypt: Royal and Private Sepulchres from the Early Dynastic Period to the Romans – Aidan Dodson, Salima Ikram
5. Rural Life and Agriculture – The Nile and Ancient Egypt: Changing Land- and Waterscapes, from the Neolithic to the Roman Era – Judith Bunbury
6. Work, Labour and Daily Life – Ancient Lives: The Story of the Pharoahs’ Tombmakers
7. Culture and Religion – Temple Festival Calendars of Ancient Egypt – Sherif El-Sabban
8. Arts and Material Culture – Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds – Aurelia Masson-Berghoff, Franck Goddio
9. Science and Technology – Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology – Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Saw
10. Geography and Cartography – A Gift of Geology: Ancient Egyptian Landscapes and Monuments – Colin D. Reader
11. Weather and Climate – Meterological and Medical Observations On the Climate of Egypt – Donal Dalrymple
12. Flora and Fauna – The Cat in Ancient Egypt – Jaromir Malek
13. Single-Topic Deep Dive (Bonus) – Imhotep: The Visier and Physician of King Zoser and afterwards the Egyptian God of Medicine – Jamieson B. Hurry
14. Literary Criticism (Bonus) – Egyptian Literature – Epiphanius Wilson (ed)

Do you sense a theme?

And that is it for my 2026 reading challenges and series reads. What challenges do you have planned for this year? Or what series are you trying to read or finish in 2026?