Hello, friends and enemies. Another year of reading is in the books! n 2025, I read 48 books. It was a bit of a light year for reading for me, and this was the least I’ve read since 2021 if you count by number of books (44), or 2016 if you go by page count (16,413). That’s okay! I share these stats not out of self-flagellation but simply because I find it interesting to track the ebb and flow of my reading habits. I spent a lot of reading time this year on Don Quijote, which was not very easy for me to read in Spanish. I also felt like this was another year of having a hard time finding books that really grab my attention. Perhaps the answer is just to read anyway and give less credit to my fickle whims. That said, here are some statistics about my reading in 2025.
Reading Stats
- Books finished: 48.
- Pages read: 16,490.
- Longest book: Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, 1,216 pages.
- Shortest book: The Lover by Marguerite Duras, 128 pages.
- Library use: I read 31 library books this year and 17 books from my own collection (plus one book that I borrowed from a friend, if anyone is wondering about that math).
- First book: Shoestring Theory by Marina Costa.
- Last book: All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now by Ruby Tandoh.
- Fiction and non-fiction: I read 20 non-fiction books and 28 fiction books.
- Most-read authors: The author I read the most books by was Deborah Harkness; I read all five of the books currently in her All Souls series. Otherwise, I didn’t have a lot of repeat authors. I read three books by Davinia Evans and two by Alexandra Rowland.
- Gender gap: I read 34 books by women, 11 by men, 1 by a non-binary person, and one anthology with text from both men and women.
- Other languages: I read two books in Spanish, which doesn’t sound like a lot but one was Don Quijote! The other was La nostalgia de la Mujer Anfibio, which I finished way back in January.
Here are some of my favorites from the year.
The Books of 2025
Here is the full list of this year’s books! If you want to see what I read in previous years, you can click the books of the year tag to see all my past annual book posts.
| Title | Author |
| Shoestring Theory | Mariana Costa |
| La nostalgia de la Mujer Anfibio | Cristina Sánchez-Andrade |
| Beans: A History | Ken Albala |
| The Crescent Moon Tearoom | Stacy Sivinski |
| The Notorious Sorcerer | Davina Evans |
| Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care | Kelly Hayes, Mariame Kaba |
| A Memory Called Empire | Arkady Martine |
| Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956 | Anne Applebaum |
| A Desolation Called Peace | Arkady Martine |
| Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution | Shiri Eisner |
| The Coin | Yasmin Zaher |
| The Ghost Bride | Yangsze Choo |
| Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age | Kathleen Sheppard |
| Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit | Jeanette Winterson |
| A Conspiracy of Truths | Alexandra Rowland |
| Space Opera | Catherynne Valente |
| Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One | Kristen Arnett |
| Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation | Alexei Yurchak |
| Living in Your Light | Abdellah Taïa |
| Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day | Peter Ackroyd |
| Space Oddity | Catherynne Valente |
| A Choir of Lies | Alexandra Rowland |
| Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia | Kate Manne |
| Claiming the B in LGBT: Illuminating the Bisexual Narrative | Kate Harrad |
| The Lover | Marguerite Duras |
| There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America | Brian Goldstone |
| Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America | Jane Borden |
| Intuitive Eating for Diabetes: The No Shame, No Blame, Non-Diet Approach to Managing Your Blood Sugar | Janice Dada |
| Disco Witches of Fire Island | Blair Fell |
| Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection | John Green |
| Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream | Megan Greenwell |
| Foundation | Isaac Asimov |
| All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship | Jennifer Natalya Fink |
| One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This | Omar El Akkad |
| Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America | Bridget Read |
| Shadow Baron | Davinia Evans |
| Pink-pilled: Women and the far right | Lois Shearing |
| A Discovery of Witches | Deborah Harkness |
| Rebel Blade | Davinia Evans |
| The Bruising of Qilwa | Naseem Jamnia |
| Shadow of Night | Deborah Harkness |
| The Book of Life | Deborah Harkness |
| The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth | Andreas Malm |
| Time’s Convert | Deborah Harkness |
| Don Quijote de la Mancha | Miguel de Cervantes |
| The Black Bird Oracle | Deborah Harkness |
| All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now | Ruby Tandoh |
