This coming year I plan to continue my annual reading challenge, a practice I took up at the start of my retirement in 2020. What started as a reading pastime, a casual return to my original life-love with the refound ‘lost times’, has turned into a life focus as we become more aware with each passing day that the hour of a reckoning gets very surreptitiously ever closer and there is so much that will be left undone. So, hurry up!

There are so many books I ignored for years while pursuing other also interesting calls! From business to information technology. And I am on a mission to catch up with as many of them as I have time left to do.

I have gone from 12 books the first year I began to keep a record (2023) to over 30 this past year. Mainly letting my curiosity guide me as I ran into so many beautiful possibilities and candidates. But from the beginning and considering the size of books, the varied number of pages, etc. I decided not to count books but number of pages read. And so, I went from 3k pages in 2023 (the first year I decided to systematize and keep a record of my reading) to over 7K pages in 2025. The subjects have been so varied, styles so radically different, genders intermingled from poetry to novels to essays to illustrated novels to very creative hybrids. I have also been adding more political theory and history to the book roster. But always spontaneously in the discovery.

This past year Wanda, who is a way more voracious reader than I could possibly hope to be, started her own record of books and pages read. It was fun to share the excitement when one of us added another book to the list of books read and commented on the book that you were currently reading. The buddy system is always way more fun. At the end we finished close enough but, brother, it was hard to keep up with her! That woman seems to inhale the books in one clean sweep!

In 2026 I plan to add another control. Just to make it more fun. Taking a page from my 2019 year of bread baking, and the 2017 Gastronomic Tour (remind me to tell you about that one sometime), I will take a world-wide reading tour, reading authors from all over the world in an organized way. I will travel west, beginning my trip from my homeland Puerto Rico (with Magali García Ramis and Ana Teresa Toro), jumping over then next door to the Dominican Republic, then Cuba, Mexico, U.S., Canada and from there fly over the Pacific to Japan to revisit one of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami and to China where I will explore a newly discovered SciFi author, Yiming Ma and then keep moving west to eventually return home via Great Britain and historian Daniel J. Boorstin (The Discoverers) . Many others in the way.

I will strive to read Italian, Catalan and French authors in their original language where possible, a variation I started back in 2022 with an Italian version of One Hundred Years of Solitude (ok, so he’s not Italian, but I knew it was going to be a hell lot of fun!) and in 2024 with Irina Pampararo (Respiro Nomade) and  last year with the Catalan novelist Irena Solá (Canto jo i la muntanya balla). This year I am adding French (candidates are Nadja and the Little Prince, you have to start small…). And, of course, Latin American authors in Spanish, my mother tongue as some of you probably guessed by now.

I plan to write a short one paragraph commentary on each book read (a suggestion I lifted from Everyday I Read (Hwang Boreum) that I will share with you all. I am already noticing the difference doing that makes: I am reading more carefully, taking notes, and underlining to guide me later. That will most likely mean less pages read but more enjoyed.

So, I have my flight plan worked out but I know it will be unavoidable that detours will pop up unannounced and maybe bad weather will force us to skip a stop, etc. But all in all it is going to be amazing. So far, the two Puertorrican novelists are proving to be a perfect pick to begin my tour. Highly recommended. See you ‘en la Republica’.