Happy new year! May your 2026 be better than your 2025.

I had to do a weird speed-up slow-down thing with reading this week because I finished a book faster than I thought I would, and then had to race through an additional book to make it an even number again. Why an even number? Who knows. But I felt strongly that I needed to close the door on 2025 with an even number in my Goodreads end-of-year review. Though I don’t always put re-reads in that review so the number isn’t correct anyway.

The world is chaos.

But now it’s a new year. 2026. Let’s make it a good one.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Scientist on the Roof talks about a general sense of unease, disconnected from any single event. Everything is fine, “And yet, there is a nagging sense of discontent that’s just kind of there. Like a film on top of boiled milk. Like an unpleasant aftertaste that just lingers. I feel like I can’t trust myself. Like I am on a cliff edge but have no idea that I am a step away from a catastrophe.” This perfectly captures how I feel right now, too. Let’s hope that we’re not one step from catastrophe. May all of our fears not come true.

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix talks about recovering from burnout and taking time to rest. This thought stayed with me: “Moving doesn’t get easier. Maybe it gets harder. I was comfortable where I was. I lived there for five years. For four years, I lived in a home that I owned. I won’t be settled like that for a while. But I’m glad I moved.” Doing something more doesn’t always make it easier. Hope we all get stability in 2026.

The roundup to the Roundup: Happy new year. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between December 26 – January 2) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.

For the past five years (2020) and (2021) and (2022) and (2023) and (2024), I set reading goals tied to the year — 20200 pages, 20210 pages, 20220 pages, 20230 pages, 20240 pages. As of December 30th (which is the date GoodReads last updated my reading stats), I hit 22,745 pages with 66 books. So definitely beat my goal.

I still wish GoodReads would give you a running page count throughout the year.

To stay on-brand, I set 20260 as a goal for 2026.

My favourite things I’ve read this year:

• You Be Mother (Meg Mason)
• Mr. Wilder and Me (Jonathan Coe)
• The List of Suspicious Things (Jennie Godfrey)
• Proof of My Innocence (Jonathan Coe)
• The Rachel Incident (Caroline O’Donoghue)
• Sunrise on the Reaping (Suzanne Collins)
• Fair Play (Louise Hegarty)
• The Impossible Thing (Belinda Bauer)
• Probably Nothing (Lauren Bravo)
• Consider Yourself Kissed (Jessica Stanley)
• Bitter Sweet (Hattie Williams)
• What a Way to Go (Bella Mackie)
• Bring the House Down (Charlotte Runcie)
• Marble Hall Murders (Anthony Horowitz)
• The Killer Question (Janice Hallett)
• What We Can Know (Ian McEwan)
• The Queen Who Came in From the Cold (SJ Bennett)
• The Impossible Fortune (Richard Osman)
• The Rose Field (Philip Pullman)
• The Heir Apparent (Rebecca Armitage)
• That’s Not How It Happened (Craig Thomas)
• The Correspondent (Virginia Evans)

What is on your list of favourite reads this year? (Feel free to list movies or television shows if books are not your thing.)

This is a monthly series, published near the end of the month summarizing what I found, ate, watched, googled, and felt this month. New categories added from time to time.

Books Added to My TBR (e.g., books I just learned about that I’m excited to read… maybe)

• Alice with a Why (Anna James)
• The Rainshadow Orphans (Naomi Ishiguro)
• A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer (Maxie Dara)
• Dolly All the Time (Annabel Monaghan)
• Shady Hollow (Juneau Black)

Notable Meals (new recipes, old favorites, and restaurant items we ate this month)

• Salad (lettuce, red and yellow pepper, cucumber, shredded carrots, macadamia nuts, and won ton wrappers) with sesame balsamic vinaigrette.
• Peanut udon noodles with steamed broccoli.

Television, Movies, and Music (watching and listening)

• We finished Down Cemetery Road. I am thrilled this has been renewed for a second season. All of the actors are phenomenal. Ending was a little meh, but I didn’t care because everything that came before it was so good and endings are hard.
• The Traitors UK, Season 4. It’s marked as Traitors Celebrity on Peacock. I worried I wouldn’t like it as much as the regular UK Traitors, and it would feel more like the US version, but everyone is polite and kind and very very British. So we loved it.
• My Oxford Year. As long as you go into it knowing there are 1,000 plot issues (make that 10,000 plot issues), you can enjoy this tearjerker for the Oxford views and scenes from Hatfield House. Don’t bother screaming things like, “You cannot take one class and get a masters degree!” at the television. The actors cannot hear you. Instead, put small details like character development out of your head and enjoy Harry Trevaldwyn’s bar monologue.
• The Holdovers. It was sadder than I thought it would be. I loved seeing western MA, especially Buckland, Shelburne Falls, and Deerfield. And the performances were all fantastic.

Added To My Ongoing Mix Tape

• “Yellow” (Coldplay)
• “Born This Way” (Lady Gaga)

Tabs I Left Open (things I Googled and left up on the screen)

• The landing page for the game Blue Prince.
• The Richard and Judy book club list.
• A low-poly weasel I’m trying to convince the Wolvog to 3D print for me.
• The route of a 102-mile walk in the UK we’re considering doing.

Micro-Joys

• Josh left his charger behind in a hotel room, but the hotel staff found it, and my in-laws were able to pick it up for him. Three cheers for not having to repurchase existing chargers. Except… the charger they brought him was not his charger. Boo. Except the Wolvog directed him to a piece at IKEA that saved the day for $4. So all is well that ends well.
• Finished the final book in His Dark Materials. I’ve now read all 10 books/novellas in the series.

Mood

• Happy that the kids are home and antsy because I always get antsy this time of year.

What about you? Let me know what you’re eating, seeing, listening to, googling, feeling this month.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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For whatever reason, I still had free access to the New York Times mini until about a week ago. It didn’t shut off for me when it shut off for everyone else, and I secretly hoped that my account had slipped through some crack and would go unnoticed for years. Not the case. It was a sad day when the little lock appeared on the mini.

I tried a handful of other mini crossword options — Washington Post, LA Times, Apple News, etc — but the closest one I’ve found to the New York Times mini is Crossherd. The clues feel like New York Times clues, even if the interface looks different.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Flying is usually my chosen superpower (not that anyone is bequeathing me with superpowers). I used to think that invisibility would be a close second, but I could also see a lot of issues with invisibility, and I wouldn’t actually want to overhear conversations.

But more and more this year, I’ve been thinking that optimism would be a more useful superpower. I’m not talking about ostrich-like head-in-the-sand optimism (which, apparently, ostriches do not do). I’m talking about hearing all of the facts and still holding hope that things will be okay.

It has been a hard year to have hope.

It is so much easier to get swept up in the chaos — everything feels in flux, and it has been a long time since I’ve read the news and felt any positive emotion. So it feels like a superpower to be able to see everything happen and still feel like everything will be okay.

So while I would still choose the ability to fly — it just feels so useful — always being able to access hope would be a close second.