I’ll be relying on Project Gutenberg for a fair amount of my reading in 2026. As it says at the top of their home page, “Project Gutenberg is a library of over 75,000 free eBooks,” which is a number too large to browse without getting fatigued. (That’s how I “watch movies”: scroll for 20 minutes, get bored and tired, and not watch a movie.) I needed a book-choosing strategy.
Enter the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Each year, Columbia University awards Pulitzer Prizes in (currently) 23 categories. The prize in Fiction is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” The prize was first awarded in 1918.
The first 10 winners are out of copyright and available through Project Gutenberg. Given my prior experience with early 20th century literature and the sort of people typically at leisure to write it, get it published, and be awarded a cash prize by a jury of their peers, 10 will be more than sufficient to scatter throughout the year.
To keep track of reading order, I created a challenge on Storygraph. It’s not “public” as in searchable, but it is public as in “anyone with the link can join.”