2025 in Books
This is a followup to last year’s 2024 in Books post where I said
For 2025 I don’t have any exciting goals, really I just want to keep reading at much the same pace, books are somehow much better when you get through them regularly. Reading something stretched over months is rarely a good experience.
That didn’t really come to pass to be honest. Though the year started off much the same as the one before I had a huge reading slump in the summer and only slowly got back into books in the autumn. I got 33 books read in the end. I did give out plenty of five star ratings though; ten of them, which is the same 30% as last year so something was consistent at least!
The books I gave five stars to were
- Ordinary Time by Cathy Rentzenbrink
- The Home by Penelope Mortimer
- Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow
- Notes on Surviving the Fire by Christine Murphy
- Potholes and Pavements by Laura Laker
- Air by John Boyne
- The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
- In This Sign by Joanne Greenberg
- The Grand Scheme of Things by Warona Jay
- Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
It’s always good to find great new-to-me authors so I’m happy that a full seven of those were authors I hadn’t read before. Still only two non-fiction books getting five stars though, I think I’m probably stingier with the ratings for non-fiction than fiction, like I want the ratings to be more objective whereas I’m comfortable with my own subjective view of fiction.
Storygraph tells me that my most popular read of the year was The Fifth Season which makes sense considering it was a book I borrowed from the library and then found we already owned a copy of at home. The least popular was Knowing What We Know which is certainly more niche being a heavy bit of non-fiction but I’m pleased to have read it. Everything is Tuberculosis was the most highly rated of these books by other Storygraph users though so interesting non-fiction does get out of the niches sometimes.
For 2025 I, as ever, want to read consistently, and pick up more non-fiction but hopefully without picking up less fiction! I like and get a lot out of both of them. I’ve tried to get to the bottom of why I had such a slump in reading in the summer. There was a time consuming and unexpected work-related hurdle in the summer but I don’t think that accounts for all of it. There’s also the fact that I now have reading glasses (and less headaches) but they don’t have sunlight reacting lenses like my everyday glasses do which stops me from reading outside as much which is something I enjoy. Perhaps I should get over my “how much?!” reaction to the price of glasses and get the ones that will actually make the rest of my life better!
Genre wise I don’t think this shows any particularly significant changes from last year, just the ordering of the same categories going up and down a bit. Still not got science fiction back into the list though.
And this mostly shows off my summer reading slump but also that the year did get off to a good start and recovered a bit afterwards.
I’m not bothering with saving the mood map this year as I think I’ve decided it’s not useful to me.
There are only three new books that I bought for myself in the list this year. I have a stack of book tokens and Waterstones’ rewards to spend so that is likely to change! Though I do find I tend to put books on hold at the library these days where once I would have bought them. We aren’t short on books on our shelves at home and getting rid of them to make space for more is always a bit traumatic. I think there are twenty-one library books there this year and only four ebooks. I’ve been attempting to get back into reading ebooks since it’s nice to have something to read under the covers but I’m not really getting back to speed with them mostly because the BorrowBox app my local library irritates me in tens of small ways.
