304: 2026 Unabridged Podcast Reading Challenge

Are you the kind of reader who loves a little structure, or do reading challenges make you want to run the other way? 

In Episode 304 (our first episode of 2026!), we’re ringing in the new year with a conversation about reading challenges, reflecting on what worked for us in 2025, what didn’t, and how we’re thinking about setting reading intentions for 2026. 

Then we dive into the 2026 Unabridged Podcast Reading Challenge, walking

through all 12 categories and sharing a few ways we hope the challenge will feel flexible, fun, and community-centered as you read along with us this year. We’re excited to kick off another reading challenge for the new year and can’t wait to have you join us. For more about the 2026 reading challenge, check out this info on our website. 

If you’re joining our challenge (or tackling another one), come tell us what you’re reading on Instagram @unabridgedpod!

Bookish Check-in

Ashley - Roan Parrish’s The Holiday Trap (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Jen - Julia Alvarez’s The Cemetery of Untold Stories (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Lit Chat Game

Listen in to hear our answers!

#shownotes #readingchallenge

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Interested in what else we're reading? Check out our Featured Books page.

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Full Transcript for Episode

[00:00:00] Ashley: Hi, and welcome to Unabridged. This is episode 304. Happy New Year. In this episode, we are discussing our 2026 Unabridged Podcast Reading Challenge.

[00:00:10] So we'll talk a little bit about what we discussed last year with reading challenges, and then looking ahead a little bit, and then we will also dive into what our Unabridged Podcast one looks like for 2026. Before we get into that discussion, we'd like to do our book check-in. Jen, what are you reading?

[00:00:26] Jen: So I just started Julia Alvarez's, The Cemetery Of Untold Stories, and this has been on my shelf for a little while. So I actually received an ARC of this and have the A LC from Libro fm. I am listening currently. This one is about an author, Alma Cruz. And she has been a pretty successful author. You know, she has not found great fame, but she has had a successful career, and she has decided that she is ready to retire from writing. And as many authors do, she has all of these stories that she did not finish, and she had a friend.

[00:01:03] This is actually how the book began. She had a friend who was a quite famous and successful author who had one story that somehow she could never get written, and it literally like made her insane. And Alma had kept telling her, you know, you need to write it down. Even if it's not perfect, the stories that you repress will come back against you in some way.

[00:01:28] And the woman could just never write it. So Alma does not want this to happen to her. So she inherits land in the Dominican Republic, and she decides that she is going to literally build a cemetery for the stories that she started, but never finished. And so every unfinished book has its own little plot and

[00:01:53] What happens is, I'm still pretty early in this part, but the stories start telling themselves, so there's a woman, Filomena, who Alma hires to be a caretaker of this cemetery, and in order to access the cemetery, there's this little box,x, and you have to speak a story into it. And when you speak yourstoryy or you know the story you wanna tell, it then opens the gate and lets you in and

[00:02:19] Filomena starts hearing the stories that are untold. Anyway, so I really think it's such a beautiful idea, and I think Alvarez's writing is always so, it's not showy, but it's so beautiful. The audio is really working for me, but I do think I might dip into the print a little bit just because there's something about seeing her work on the page that I really love.

[00:02:42] But yeah, so far it's great. So that is, Julia Alvarez's The Cemetery Of Untold Stories.

[00:02:48] Ashley: Oh, that sounds beautiful, Jen. I love her, but I haven't read any of her stuff in a while.

[00:02:52] Jen: Yeah. This is my first in a long time too, and I know we saw her at a local college at Bridgewater College, and I just think she's a wonderful person. It's always nice when the authors that you get to see back up the wonder that is their books. So she's definitely one of them. Yeah.

[00:03:06] Ashley: For Sure.

[00:03:07] Jen: So what are you reading?

[00:03:08] Ashley: I am. We're recording a little bit early, so I'm still reading some holiday books. I'm reading Roan Parrish's The Holiday Trap. Have you heard of that?

[00:03:16] Jen: It sounds familiar.

[00:03:18] Ashley: Okay, so this involves a house swap, and it is two protagonists, Truman and Greta, and they have a mutual friend. Truman lives in New Orleans, and Greta lives up in a tiny, small town in Maine, but they have a mutual friend who lives in New Orleans.

[00:03:35] And, but it goes to school with Greta is how they got to know each other, as she goes to school up in Portland. And so. Truman, when we first encounter him, has just discovered that his longtime boyfriend, a year and a half or something, has a family, like he has a husband, a kid.

[00:03:55] Truman suddenly realizes that their relationship is completely different, obviously, than what he thought it was. He had no idea that was going on. And then he is both heartbroken but also like kicking himself that he can't believe he didn't realize this unbelievable thing was happening. And then it's like, oh, there were all these signs, right?

[00:04:14] That, like,e he completely ignored that he feels he should have realized. So he's heartbroken. They're coming up on the holidays, and he's just reeling from this realization and also from, I mean, just a lot of self-judgment, right? And just working his way through that and trying to figure out what to do.

[00:04:30] but he has this giant Great Dane horse. And so, he wants to get away, but he's like, I can't leave my precious dog. So then on the other end, up in Maine, Greta is really close to her family. They all live in this tiny island town together. She's close to them. She has several siblings. She has a twin.

[00:04:55] I think there are four or five sisters. And then her parents, all of them, get together all the time. They're always spending time together. But right at the beginning, her mom and her, I think it was her older sister, like they had this town, and they suck Greta into being like auctioned off for a date night.

[00:05:14] So they are completely ignoring. Everything about her. She's appalled on a million levels of this. Like she is a lesbian. They know that they're partner, like they're expecting a guy to do the date night. And you know, of course, I mean, she's also obviously like against this whole idea of like raising money by auctioning people off.

[00:05:38] Okay. So there's like a lot of egregious things that have happened. She's really upset, but they're very dismissive of her being upset. And so sshe'soh my gosh, I've got to get away from this. Well, she has all of these plants, and they're all over her house, and she just absolutely loves them, but they have taken over.

[00:05:55] So she has all these humidifiers that have to be turned on and off, and she's gotten really into carnivorous plants specifically. So she has this one area that is for the carnivorous plants, which are delicate and require a lot of care, and so she's like, I can never go anywhere because I have these plants and I've gotta take care of my plants. So the mutual friend is like, Oh my gosh, both of your lives are falling apart. You both need to get away. You should do a house swap. So that is the premise is she convinces Greta and Truman, who don't know each other, to switch, and for him to take care of the plants, and for Greta to take care of the dog, and for them to just take a month-long hiatus from their own lives and go house-sit for the other person.

[00:06:35] And they both have jobs where they can do that. It's just like convincing them to make the change and then, you know, seeing what happens. So, I mean, I'm loving it. I came across this, like, I think I was just looking on Libby to just see what was available, and I had no idea. If it were any good, but I'm really enjoying it.

[00:06:52] So, I think I like the premise of those kinds of things where it's like you take a kind of capsule situation and you put them somewhere else and then you see what happens. Like, I think all that's interesting. So, I'm enjoying the way it unfolds. So again, that's Roan Parrish's The Holiday Trap.

[00:07:06] Jen: Oh, that sounds really good.

[00:07:08] Ashley: So now we're moving on to our main discussion. We really want to talk a little bit about reflecting on our 2025 reading year, and then we're gonna be looking toward 2026, what we're doing personally, and also what we'll be doing with Unabridge. Jen, what are your thoughts about 2025?

[00:07:25] Jen: So I had cut down on the number of challenges to which I was committing because. I get so compulsive about it that sometimes it's a real stressor, and I'm always like, Why am I doing this to myself? I do not need to be stressed about meeting these challenges that are supposed to be fun. You know, enriching, but if they're causing stress and anxiety, that's bad.

[00:07:46] So the ones that I had committed to, and I did finish, all of them were our podcast challenge. The tournament of books and camp ToB. And then that had a little twist that I'll talk about in a minute, and 25 backlist in 2025. And I really liked that mix. I feel like I always love our reading challenge, of course, and we do a lot of that reading for the podcast.

[00:08:07] So that is. It is not usually adding anything to what I wouldn't already be reading. The backlist book challenge I've done for several years. I plan to do it again next year because I just have so many books that I really am eager to read. But sometimes that lure of the new and shiny, or I'll put things on hold at the library, and that means I'm never choosing the books that are on my shelf.

[00:08:27] So I'll do that again. And then I love tournament books. I've talked about that one often. Camp ToB is the competition that they have in the summer, and that has gotten bigger. And then this year, they did a Halloween pop-up. That happened very quickly. And I read a couple for that, but I just decided not to be stressed about it.

[00:08:47] And I just was like, I will read what I can. And it was interesting to follow, but I didn't get through all of those, and I just decided that I would be okay with it. And so I was, you know, that's always an effort for me. And then I do get pulled into a lot of those monthly challenges on Instagram. And so some of those are fun, but I feel like

[00:09:05] They're not as stressful as the ones that I make the big commitment to. And a lot of times, the reading that I'm already doing can meet those. I will say in the newsletter, I kind of had a back and forth with like, I hate reading challenges. Oh, wait, I love them again. Oh, wait, I hate them again. And so it's always interesting to see, depending on how my reading and life are going, how I'm feeling about that pressure I exert on myself.

[00:09:27] But anyway, just a little neurotic over here.

[00:09:31] Ashley: I love that reflection. And I think that's exactly, it is, like, yeah, enjoying them as a way to enrich your reading life without letting them take over or cause a lot of stress is sometimes tricky.

[00:09:42] Jen: Yeah. How about you? How do you feel about the challenges you took on for 2025?

[00:09:46] Ashley: Well, I've just had to make peace with the fact that 2025 was not a great reading year for me. And that's okay. I think we have those years. I did well with Unabridged, but lasJen said, we often read things that are related for our book club, or you know, we try to do things to help. If you're listening and reading along with us, we're trying to help you complete the challenge.

[00:10:08] So that felt really good, and I was enjoying that. M. Judson is our local bookstore, a nd I love them, but I really did not do much of anything with their challenge. So I'll be curious to see what their challenge is for 2026. Again, we're recording a little bit early, and they post kind of after the new year.

[00:10:25] So we're just a little before the new year right now, and I definitely will take a look and see what it looks like for this year. But I also am just hoping to, I think more than signing up for official challenges outside of our own. I think what I'd really like this year is to be a little bit more intentional about what I'm reading per month.

[00:10:46] And grounding myself in incorporating some of these books. I really want, I mean, kind of what you were saying about your back list, Jen, not necessarily like what's on my shelf, but just, taking time to look at what books do I really wanna get to and then how can I fit them in, instead of kind of feeling totally haphazard about how I'm reading, which is definitely how I've been.

[00:11:06] Reading lately. So, I'm excited for that. But I think it'll definitely be more of a personal reflection approach of like, what is working in my reading life, and what could I do better than signing up for a lot of official stuff, which I feel good about. So I

[00:11:20] Jen: Yeah. I feel like we always go back and forth on this every year. It's as if we looked back over our reading challenge episodes; it would be interesting to see.

[00:11:28] Ashley: That's true. Well, and I think you're exactly right that like there is just a tension there of it being helpful and not discouraging because we all know as readers that we need to make sure we're doing stuff that doesn't discourage us from reading because that is like really hard and that can happen.

[00:11:46] If you get too bogged down and feel like you're not doing what you wanted to accomplish, that can be hard. It can really like get you into a bit of a slump. So yeah, for me it's like okay, I was in grad school a lot of 2025 and now that I've finished that, I'm excited to have more time, but I do want to spend more time.

[00:12:04] Just being intentional, I think about like what I want to read, and I think that would feel really good. 

[00:12:11] We wanted to share our Unabridged challenge specifically. So if you follow us online or you're on our newsletter, you might have already seen, but we wanna make sure that we take a little bit of time.

[00:12:21] We always like to just invite everyone to participate and make sure that you know what the categories are. So we're gonna talk a little bit through that now. If you would like more information about our challenge, you can go to our website, unabridgedpod.com. You can click into the show notes and there'll be a link to this year's challenge.

[00:12:38] But there is a page that has all of the information for the 2026 challenge. Jen, do you wanna talk a little bit about what the categories are this year?

[00:12:47] Jen: Sure. So here are our categories. Book from a favorite author's backlist, memoir by a trans author, book by an Asian American Pacific Islander author.

[00:13:01] Book about the environment, book from an awards list, book published in the year of your birth, work in translation, work adapted into an award-winning film or television series, book about an animal. Middle-grade graphic novel, work of YA History, or historical fiction and nonfiction audiobook.

[00:13:23] So those are our 12 categories. We do make an effort to, as Ashley was saying, pick book club or buddy read picks that will help you to meet these categories. So if you wanna follow along in this next year, Instagram is a great place to find that. Or again, on our website, unabridgedpod.com, and sometimes you can read along with us, and we'll read books that meet these categories.

[00:13:47] Our book Club pick for January actually helps you to meet a book from an awards list. So we try to give you experiences that will help you check these off. But yeah, hopefully they're fun. There's some variety there, and there's still some choice. So, like book about an animal can be fiction or nonfiction.

[00:14:04] There are some great books out there that the animal narrations, or it can be a study of the animal. So just that one in particular. You know, so many of them you can go in a lot of different directions. So hopefully it still will fit the reading that you're already doing.

[00:14:18] Ashley: I love those. I'm excited for this year's challenge.

[00:14:21] Jen: I am too. I need to start researching books from the year of my birth because, you know, 76, I'm like, that feels like a long time away when I say it like that.

[00:14:30] Ashley: Right, same. I'm like, oh gosh, I better find something that, that one I better take on early. Mine's 81 and same. Then I'm like, oh, I need to do some reflecting and find something that I would like. I think one year we did like pre-2000, is that right? And I feel like I tried a couple that were not the right fit before I found one that was, so yeah, it's a good challenge. Well, we hope that you will join us for the Unabridged Podcast Reading Challenge this year. It's very low stakes and inviting, but as Jen said, it is also fun, and there is a community element that can help you come along with us on that journey. We'd also be interested to hear what other challenges you're facing this year.

[00:15:11] You can always let us know about that on Instagram at @unabridgedpod, 'cause we'd be happy to hear. But today we're gonna end with our lit chat game.

[00:15:18] Jen: All right, so today's question is, what book do you associate most with your high school experience, your college experience?

[00:15:27] Ashley: Huh. I think that for me, I would go with what came to mind immediately was Zora Neale Hurston's, Their Eyes Were Watching God. I adore that book, but I did read that in AP Lit. In high school, and then I also read it in a college class, and, did a pretty extensive research study related to that.

[00:15:47] So I think that comes to my mind as being something that was just a transformative book for me that I really, really loved, felt, really impacted my reading life. And it's one that I went on to teach myself, with lots of classes, and I think I found that it was equally enriching for other students. What about you, Jen?

[00:16:04] What book comes up for you?

[00:16:05] Jen: First, I wanna say I love that book, but I didn't read it till after school. So yeah, I read that one on my own, which makes me a little sad. But so for high school, the book that popped into my mind first was The Great Gatsby. That was the first of many times that I have read that book, and I really loved it.

[00:16:20] Then, even though now looking back, it's about someone turning 30 and so parts of it. I'm like, how did this resonate with me at that time? But anyway, and then my college experience, the thing that popped into my mind is Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, because I did my honors project on  Silko, and that was the book that made me fall in love with her work.

[00:16:42] So I have distinct memories of reading that one over and over and just noticing something new every time. So I really love that.

[00:16:50] Ashley: Oh, yes. And I did not realize it could be two different books.

[00:16:53] Jen: Oh, yeah. Well, I think it's fine that yours was. But yeah, if you want, do you wanna do a.

[00:16:56] Ashley: Well, it just came to my mind. I hadn't read Cormac McCarthy until college, so for sure Cormac McCarthy was very impactful for me in college. I've gone on to very much love and to teach, and you know, to come back tany, many times.

[00:17:11] But I think Blood Meridian is probably the one that was the most impactful for me first with McCarthy. But yeah, when I think about college separate from high school, that is one that comes up for me.

[00:17:21] Jen: Yeah, I also found him after school on my own.

[00:17:24] Ashley: Oh, man.

[00:17:25] Jen: Yeah.

[00:17:25] Ashley: Well, we hope you enjoyed listening, and we are so excited to do another year of a reading challenge with you. We hope that your 2026 reading life is getting off to a great start, and we'd love to hear more about it on Instagram at Unabridged Pod.

[00:17:37] Thanks so much for listening.

[00:17:38] Jen: Thank you.

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