2025: A Year in Books

The end of 2025 is almost upon us. Tomorrow, I will be posting my reflections on the year as a whole, but today, I wanted to summarise one aspect of the year that has been richly rewarding and important to me - my year in books.

Firstly, the stats. I track my reading through Goodreads, which tells me that I have logged 131 titles this year, but that is misleading, as it counts DNFs (things I started but didn't finish) as well as re-reads (I do comfort re-reads quite often!) 

Excluding both of these and looking at only new-to-me books (ie books I read for the first time in 2025, and completed), I actually read 105 new (to me) books in 2025, which is an increase of 15 on my 2024 total. I credit this to two things - my discovery of the joy of audiobooks, and a larger than typical (for me) number of novellas and short novels on the list.

I read across a number of genres, and undertook three reading-to-list tasks (the Hugo Award nominee list, the Stella Prize nominee list, and, as always, the Booker Prize longlist). Genre-wise, my reading broke down like this:

• Science fiction & fantasy (inc dystopia): 34
• Mystery / crime fiction and mystery-thriller: 27
• Literary fiction: 26
• Non-fiction excluding memoir: 9
• Memoir: 8
• Horror (all subgenres of): 4

This actually adds up to 108, but that's because there were a few books that so completely straddled genres that I felt compelled to list them twice. 

On these metrics, speculative fiction (sci fi and fantasy) is my top category, especially if you count horror as a subgenre of speculative fiction. However, the mystery numbers are misleadingly low, as I did an Agatha Christie re-read project this year, so 17 of the 25 books I excluded as re-reads or DNFs were actually mysteries. It remains my biggest comfort read genre.

I had favourites in each category, and then an overall top 10 for the year. First, the category winners.

SFF:

1. Five Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula Le Guin

Mystery / Crime:

1. Tea Lady series by Amanda Hampson (three books, which is a bit of a cheat, but I liked them as a set!)

Literary Fiction:

1. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Non-fiction minus memoir: This is a tied category

1. Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flynn
2. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

Memoir:

1. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Horror:

1. What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher

And now, my 2025 Top 10! I liked a lot of what I read this year, and it was quite hard to narrow it down. To get to this list, I excluded books that I thoroughly enjoyed and rated highly, but didn't make a lasting impact on me (ephemera is great and it must be embraced, but not for the purposes of these lists!)

In the end, I settled on this set. It is important to stress that they are not in any particular order - I definitely can't pick a top book as such!

2025 Top 10

1. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Literary)
2. Five Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula Le Guin (SFF)
3. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Memoir)
4. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (Literary)
5. Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (SFF)
6. What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (SFF)
7. Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flynn (Non-Fic)
8. Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser (Literary)
9. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (Literary)
10. Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent (Memoir)

So that's my reading year, wrapped! I'd love to know what made everyone else's top 10 lists this year (always hunting for new entries on the TBR list :-)