What I Read – 2025

I always enjoy a good retrospective post to close off a year of reading. At the beginning of 2025, I didn’t set a lot of firm reading goals, primarily because I hadn’t felt like I’d done much of a great job at hitting my goals in previous years. Perhaps that worked out well for me because I feel like I’ve had one of my most successful reading years yet. I read a lot and a wide variety. I knocked off a lot of titles from my TBR and I read more diversely and more works in translation than I believe I ever have before. Here are some 2025 stats:

• I read 132 books. When people ask me how I read so much, the honest answer is, this is basically all I do in my free time. I’m not much of a movie or TV person. I spend a lot of evenings at home. I’ve built in reading time to my morning and night routines. Audio books have really upped my game too.
• 29 of my 2025 books were audiobooks. That meant I could read while cooking, walking, cleaning, gardening, whatever.
• 12 of my audiobooks were from Libro.fm, 8 were from Spotify. The rest were from the library.
• 53 of my books came from the public library. Shout out to public libraries for being amazing!
• 14 of my books were ARCS
• 3 were borrowed.
• The rest were books I purchased for myself, either new or secondhand, at some point over the years.
• I read 9 books which I would classify as Goliaths (500+ pages)
• I read 11 short story collections
• 10 from the 2025 total were books read aloud with Pearl and Rose. (I haven’t included these in past years but I decided to this year and I stand by that choice.)
• 5 of the books I read this year were re-reads.
• 5 were poetry.
• 18 of my 2025 reads were non-fiction.
• 106 were fiction. Do those numbers add up to 132? No, they do not. Am I going to recount? No, I’m not. The point is that I mostly read fiction.
• I read 41 books written by male authors.
• 89 were written by female authors. Those numbers don’t add up either but that’s more likely due to anthologies and/or non-binary authors. Again, the point is that female authors tend to dominate my reading.
• I read books from authors from 24 different countries around the world. The USA was once again the dominant country with 43 authors. I was a bit surprised at that because I did actually make an effort to NOT read American authors for part of the year. But it is very hard to avoid and I read some great books from Americans.
• Canada came next with 38 authors so those numbers are pretty close.
• England was third with 24, then Ireland with 12. Other nations include Egypt, the Caribbean, Russia, Cambodia, Pakistan, Belgium, Hungary, Lebanon, Mexico, the Netherlands, Italy, Nigeria, Germany, France, Australia, China, India, Norway, and Japan.
• I read 15 translated works in 2025 which was actually 5 more than my goal of 10 and I’m really proud of that. I kept a list throughout the year and tried to read at least one per month and that seemed to work really well for me so I’ll try that again in 2026.
• My other goal was to read 25 books that had been on my TBR since before 2024 and I hit that goal of 25. I read 2 books that had been on my TBR since 2013! My current TBR now at the end of 2025 is 129.

And here is the complete list of What I Read in 2025, with links to those books that I reviewed:

1. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This – Omar El Akkad (McClelland & Stewart, 2025)
2. Writers & Lovers – Lily King (Harper Collins Publishers, Ltd, 2020)
3. Your House Will Pay – Steph Cha (Ecco, 2019)
4. Lucy – Jamaica Kincaid (Plume, 1991)
5. The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Harper Collins Audio, 2020)
6. Foster – Claire Keegan (High Bridge Audio, 2010)
7. A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle
8. Shark Heart – Emily Habeck (Simon & Schuster Audio, 2023)
9. As For Me and my House – Sinclair Ross
10. Sing to It – Amy Hempel
11. North Woods – Daniel Mason
12. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club – Charles Dickens
13. The Ministry of Time – Kaliane Bradley
14. The Last Man in Paradise – Syed M. Masood
15. At a Loss for Words – Carol Off
16. Dearly Beloved – Dara Wall
17. Abigail – Magda Szabo
18. The Rattle Bag ed. by Seamus Heaney & Ted Hughes
19. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory – Tim Alberta
20. Tongueless – Lau Yee-Wa
21. Anne of the Island – L.M. Montgomery
22. Hard Copy – Fien Veldman
23. Wed Rabbit – Lissa Evans
24. Familial Hungers – Christine Wu
25. Lady MacBeth – Ava Reid
26. The Anxious Generation – Jonathan Haidt
27. I Hope This Finds You Well – Natalie Sue
28. To Have and Have More – Sanibel
29. Dream Count – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
30. Rental House – Weike Wang
31. A Year of Last Things – Michael Ondaatje
32. The Last Exiles – Ann Shin
33. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
34. River East, River West – Aube Rey Lescure
35. In the Shadow of my Heart – Ruth Dirks Klaasen
36. Present Tense Machine – Gunnhild Oyehaug
37. Follow me to Ground – Sue Rainsford
38. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J.K. Rowling
39. All the Other Mothers Hate Me – Sarah Harman
40. Show Don’t Tell – Curtis Sittenfeld
41. Sankofa – Chibundu Onuzo
42. Babe – Dick King-Smith
43. Valentine in Montreal – Heather O’Neill
44. She’s a Lamb! – Meredith Hambrock
45. Beowulf – trans. Seamus Heaney
46. Audition – Katie Kitamura
47. Peacocks of Instagram – Deepa Rajagopalan
48. The Collected Stories – William Trevor
49. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
50. A Way to be Happy – Caroline Adderson
51. Houses of Detention – Jean Ende
52. The Safekeep – Yael van der Wouden
53. The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street – Karina Yan Glaser
54. The Wren, the Wren – Anne Enright
55. The Ladies of Grace Adieu – Susanna Clarke
56. The Harder I Fight the More I Love You – Neko Case
57. Dept. of Speculation – Jenny Offill
58. Sunbirth – An Yu
59. Far to Go – Alison Pick
60. All the Little Monsters – David A. Robertson
61. The Pursuit of God – A.W. Tozer
62. The Red Chesterfield – Wayne Arthurson
63. Madwoman – Chelsea Bieker
64. The Passengers on the Hankyu Line – Hiro Arikawa
65. The Railway Children – E. Nesbit
66. Pearl – Sian Hughes
67. The Maid – Nita Prose
68. Sleep – Honor Jones
69. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self – Carl R. Trueman
70. Nightbitch – Rachel Yoder
71. Good Dirt – Charmaine Wilkerson
72. Honeydew – Edith Pearlman
73. Tenth of December – George Saunders
74. The Wedding People – Alison Espach
75. Room for Good Things to Run Wild – Josh Nadeau
76. 52 Ways to Reconcile – David A. Robertson
77. Dark Like Under – Alice Chadwick
78. Heart Lamp – Banu Mushtaq
79. Snap – Susin Nielsen
80. Shy – Max Porter
81. The Sea – John Banville
82. The Weekend – Charlotte Wood
83. The Riches of Your Grace – Julie Lane-Gay
84. Universality – Natasha Brown
85. Why I Write – George Orwell
86. Anne of Windy Poplars – L.M. Montgomery
87. Run Towards the Danger – Sarah Polley
88. A Guardian Angel Recalls – William Frederik Hermans
89. A Reluctant Mother – Dierdre Simon Dore
90. The Penderwicks at Point Mouette – Jeanne Birdsall
91. The Tiger and the Cosmonaut – Eddy Boudel Tan
92. The End of the Alphabet – C.S. Richardson
93. North of Normal – Cea Sunrise Person
94. Where Angels Fear to Tread – E. M. Forster
95. Horsefly – Mireille Gagnon
96. The Tale of Despereaux – Kate DiCamillo
97. The Hand that First Held Mine – Maggie O’Farrell
98. The Golden Age – Kenneth Grahame
99. The Accidental Favourite – Fran Littlewood
100. Divisadero – Michael Ondaatje
101. Heart the Lover – Lily King
102. All the Lights – Clemens Meyer
103. Exposure – Helen Dunmore
104. Emiko – Chieri Uegaki
105. Perfection – Vindenzo Latronico
106. Glorious Exploits – Ferdia Lennon
107. Other Worlds – Andre Alexis
108. The Names – Florence Knapp
109. Pick a Colour – Souvankham Thammavongsa
110. White Nights – Fyodor Dostoevsky
111. After Birth – Elisa Albert
112. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
113. Ripeness – Sarah Moss
114. The Bewitching – Silvia Moreno-Garcia
115. Consider Yourself Kissed – Jessica Stanley
116. What Your ADHD Child Wishes You Knew – Sharon Saline
117. Song of the Sun God – Shankar Chandran
118. How About Now – Kate Baer
119. Palace Walk – Naguib Mahfouz
120. Like Family – Erin O. White
121. The River has Roots – Amal El-Mohtar
122. Moon Tiger – Penelope Lively
123. Matrescence – Lucy Jones
124. The Slicks – Maggie Nelson
125. Little World – Josephine Row
126. The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien
127. The City Changes Its Face – Eimear McBride
128. Automatic Noodle – Annalee Newitz
129. Piglet – Lottie Hazell
130. How to be Eaten – Maria Adelmann
131. I Who Have Never Known Men – Jacqueline Harpman
132. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens