Read:
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This – Omar El Akkad (McClelland & Stewart, 2025)
Writers & Lovers – Lily King (Harper Collins Publishers Ltd, 2020)
Your House Will Pay – Steph Cha (Ecco, 2019)
Lucy – Jamaica Kincaid (Plume, 191)
The Gulag Archipelago, Vol 1 – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Harper Collins Audio, 2020) (narrated by Frederick Davidson) (translated from Russian by Thomas Whitney)
Foster – Claire Keegan (HighBridge Audio, 2010)
A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981)
Shark Heart – Emily Habeck (Simon & Schuster Audio, 2023)
As For Me and My House – Sinclair Ross (New Canadian Library, 1971)
Sing to It – Amy Hempel (Scribner, 2019)
North Woods – Daniel Mason (Books on Tape, 2023)
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club – Charles Dickens (Adam & Charles Black, 1903)
The Ministry of Time – Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press, 2024)
The Last Man in Paradise – Syed M. Masood (8th Note Press, 2024)
At A Loss for Words – Carol Off (Random House Canada, 2024)
Did Not Finish:
The Taking – Dona Masi (DNF @56%)
Death of the Author – Nnedi Okorafor (DNF @pg 134)
Currently Reading:
The Rattle Bag – Seamus Heaney & Ted Hughes
Anne of the Island – L.M. Montgomery
The Dearly Beloved – Cara Wall
Collected Stories – William Trevor
2025 Reading Goals:
Pages Read: 3, 257 pages
Hours Listened: 47 hours, 18 minutes
Goliaths Conquered: 2 (The Gulag Archipelago and The Pickwick Papers)
Translated Works: 1 (Gulag Archipelago (Russian))
Pre-2024 TBR: 5 (Your House Will Pay (2019), Lucy (2013), The Gulag Archipelago (2013), As For Me and My House (2014), Sing To It (2019))
Current TBR: 204 (was also 204 at end of 2024)
Thoughts:
My 2025 reading is off to a tremendous start with 15 books completed in January. (Yes, a couple I started in December but I always count my books in the month I finish them.) Typically, January is a very good reading month for me. The weather’s lousy, work is quieter, and I’m full of goals and gusto. So I don’t necessarily expect myself to read 15 books (or even 10) every month in 2025 but I’m always pleased to start strong.
January is also a time to set or reset rhythms and routines and so it’s a time when I strive to use my time more wisely. More time reading good books, less time doomscrolling online. I’ve always been good about my morning reading, I think but this January I’ve been more deliberate about my evening time.
New to my reading tally this year are the chapter books I read aloud each evening with my kids. We’ve finished one already (A Wrinkle in Time) which I’ve reviewed this month, in a slightly different fashion than my usual reviews. I hope to continue sharing what I read with my girls and I figured if I was doing this, I might as well include in my reading totals. (Peter is a part of our reading time but I’m usually the one who does the actual reading.
I’ve also started strong so far in my book reviews, with reviews scheduled for Friday mornings. Rather than get too far ahead of myself, I’ll also publish some on Wednesdays, if needed. For books I don’t plan on reviewing, I’m toying with the idea of still sharing a little but I’m trying to think of the best setup for that.
I didn’t set a lot of reading goals for myself for 2025. I’ve put 100 down as a goal but mostly because it’s a nice round number that I know is both doable and takes a bit of focus to reach. I’d like to read more translations and I’d like to keep crossing off titles that have been sitting on my TBR for years. A more tangible goal I’d like to fulfill though is to read the stacks of books I have already in my home. I probably have close to 50 books piled up in my house. I hate to get rid of books I haven’t read but they also haven’t earned places on my shelves. So, to my husband’s chagrin, they pile up. My aim is to read at least 25 in 2025.
Karissa Reads Books 
I don’t make resolutions but like you, my plan this year is to read in-read books on my shelves and make them earn their spot!
I also just finished The Pickwick Papers! Absolutey loved it—miles better than I’d expected. What did you think?
I really liked it by the end. I thought I wouldn’t at first but Dickens won me over with the characters!
They’re great, aren’t they! Sam Weller is legendary.
He’s terrific!
So many of us seem to have read more than usual this January – I suspect we’re all trying our hardest to zone out of the news! I second Elle – what did you think of Pickwick?
Sadly, I think you’re right. Reading is much better for my mental health! I really enjoyed Pickwick. Much more than I thought I would at the beginning!
Oooh, tell me more about the pile of books vs books on shelves. Is the pile TBR and the shelves are Read? Or are the ones on the shelves TBR Soon because you’re more interested? I may need to refocus my reading. I didn’t review anything this past week, and I had almost no comments on my video review, though folks on Facebook from my Spooky Book Club watched and commented there.
Books on my shelves are ones I’ve read. But I often pick up books I want to read, at thrift stores or other secondhand sales, and then those get stacked on the floor beside the bookshelf in our room. They were neatly hidden behind a closet door but the pile has been getting out of hand and overflowing to a second pile. So it needs to be tackled in a more focused way!
Hahaha, I had high hopes that I would keep things under control by requiring all my TBR books fit into one plastic bin. LOL, that only worked for a few years.
Oh man, I boxed up some of my TBR stack but that made it worse because of course I never went digging through boxes to find something to read. At least if they’re front and centre in my bedroom, I won’t forget about them!
It was a clear plastic tote with the spines facing outward no matter where they were in the box. Then I used that box for Christmas stuff after we bought the house, and the replacement boxes are two short, I believe blue, boxes. This has not helped things.