PotsandPlots

So the first new calendar year on PotsandPlots, and my main resolution is to keep up with posting on it. Over the quiet of Christmas, I’ve had some (half-formed) ideas about things I want to do with it. While I don’t expect to post every day. I will try to at least write something every day of 2026. Even if it is just one paragraph to a half-written review.

My main aim for the year is to keep reading and reviewing. Moving over from GeekDad should give me more room to explore my reads and reading in more depth. Having a space that’s exclusively my own, I can explore the links between my reads and the paths my reading journey takes me down.

I want to keep up with my “new seeds” posts, though it feels like I may have to write these every couple of weeks as they get rather long when left for a whole month.

What to Read?

I will open the new year with a book I was given for Christmas, Relearning to Read by Ann Morgan. Subtitled Adventures in Not-Knowing, I’m hoping this spurs me on to read differently, to open myself up to more challenging reads than I have in the last few years.

First choice for this idea is to read Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. I have tried Pynchon a couple of times in the past and found him difficult to penetrate. I want to remedy this with Vineland, mostly because the film of the book, One Battle After Another, has had tremendous reviews, but I like to read the novels films are based on before watching them.

Adjacent to this is a tentative project that I’ve had in mind for a long time – The Year of Reading Massively. Writing book reviews, especially of review copies, usually means reading to a schedule. This means I tend to shy away from larger books. I have a collection of them piling up, bought because I want to read them, but don’t ever manage to get around to it. (I have a copy of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem lurking somewhere.)

I was given The Count of Monte Cristo for Christmas, which is 1400+ pages, so I’ll start there, but I have books by Samantha Shannon and Eleanor Catton sitting on my shelf too. Who knows, if I enjoy Vineland, I might even retry Gravity’s Rainbow.

A few years ago, I read Susie Dent’s Word Perfect, a book that had an entry for each day of the year. I very much enjoyed the experience of reading it night after night. I tried to follow it up the following year by reading Interesting Stories About Curious Words, but because it didn’t have a “page a day” structure, I wasn’t disciplined enough to stick to it.

This year, I received A Year of Living Curiously. With “365 Things Really Worth Knowing,” I hope I can enjoy that last thing before sleep assimilation of information that I so loved about Word Perfect.

Death to Social Media

I often find myself caught in a trap with social media and a repeat resolution, which has been on the list for I don’t know how many years now, is to spend less time scrolling in 2026 than in did in 2025.

Like most of us, I loved the potential of social media 10 or 15 years ago. I hate it now. Of all the things the historians of the future look back on, it will be “why did we do that to ourselves?”

Yet, inevitably, there is a pull towards it. Not everything on there is bad. When writing a blog – you want people to read it, so you need to tell them somewhere that you’ve written it. I discover so many great books on social media, whether it be links to other (excellent) blogs or just bookshop and newspaper posts. While it might better to do, I won’t be able to completely give it up.

2025 conclusively proved that Instagram is not for me. I’m crap at taking photos, crap at remembering to post them, crap at composing artful shots, and crap at writing pithy short captions. The artful codger I am not.

I’ve settled on writing long-form here and just using Bluesky. I’ll perhaps try to boost my interactions on there, but to be honest, I often can’t think of anything interesting to say. Sometimes it’s nice just to listen.

On the gardening front, I’d like to add a small wildlife pond and hopefully augment the changes I made to the garden last year. I need to wait for the winter to pass to see what has survived, what worked and what didn’t.

Not terribly ambitious resolutions then. I’m not really a book counter, though I am going to try to use Storygraph more to track my reading. Perhaps some interesting stats will come out of it when I write my “Year in Review” post in 12 months!

Whatever you’re reading in 2026, have a good one, and if you’d like to connect so that I know that somebody is reading my ramblings, then please do!