A Celebration of 2025's Reading

    Hi everyone.  Happy Thursday to you. Today my post is for book lovers who like to read about books, or probably even more for me because I love to geek out and analyse what my reading was like for the previous year. Lucky for you I only get to do this once a year (😉 Smirk). But if you're a book post fan, as I am, then you may enjoy my  look back.

    FYI- This is a long post.

    First, here's my reading stats:

    TOTAL BOOKS-102- if I break those down into rough categories

     a) Fiction books (not including mysteries)-26 books

     b) Mysteries and thrillers- 52 books (my obvious favorite)

     c) Non-fiction books: 24 total:

         science/natural history: 10 books

         biographies: 6 books

         travel/living some place unique: 4 books

         other non-fiction titles: 4 books

         please note: Some of these non-fiction titles overlapped areas, so I placed them in these categories  based on what  the overall book theme was.       

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    I always have  fun looking back and grouping titles a bit. These topics don't always match up to my stats, but are based  more on where books fit. Some books may be put into more than one category below because many good books blend in several areas and therefore fit in several groupings.

1- I read some excellent  books last year.   Here's my most memorable or favorites,  including a couple of books that I didn't expect to like as much as I did. I'll get to mysteries in another list, so you won't see them in this list.   These books are in no particular order. It was hard to pick favorites this year, so there's a few books I left off this list that could have gone here, but  I'll mention those later in the post.

    These first 3 books are all nonfiction. The first is about this author's huge book collection, the second about how amazing plants are and how ignorant people have been about them,  and finally about finding English history under the ground.

         

     Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid has gotten on a lot of the best books of the year lists. It's a light read, but the depth of meaning to such a light read made it memorable to me. The Hanna Kent book was an interesting story not only about a teenage Australian girl going to live in Iceland, but also an interesting story about when Kent wrote her first novel.  I reread A Woman in White, and it's a well done Victorian classic.

 

   I love a good mystery, so I enjoyed reading about the genre in Lucy Worsley's book. Precipice is a historical thriller, not exactly a high adventure  thriller story but some fiction based on some actual people during the First World War in England. I haven't read any Mark Twain since college, but James by Percival Everett was a satisfying read and a interesting take on Twain's Huckleberry Finn. The Correspondent was one of those books that has grown on me and that I still think about.

      Monica Wood's How To Read a Book was a feel good story without being too gooey. You might remember the time it took me to get through Sarum, but it was worth sticking with it as it told a good story about Britain since the time the island formed. I finished the Century trilogy by Ken Follett with Edge of Eternity, and I love how the author took me through the period from the end of the second World War up into the 1980s.

  

     And finally, a couple of biographies and a long tale about the history of Hawaii. None of these were fast reads either, but I learned a lot about the end of the Egyptian pharaohs and Roman History in Cleopatra. Hawaii was fiction,  based on much of the islands history, and finally, a well written biography about Alexander Graham Bell as well as his wife Mabel.

2- My favorite genre is mysteries. I also enjoy a thriller or two also. Here are some of the most memorable or favorite reads OR series from last year.  I also read  a few different books by Peter Swanson, but they were not all series.  I'm only sharing one book per author   even if I read more than one by any of these  authors.  I also read a few other enjoyable mysteries that I didn't list here but that I'll list elsewhere in this post. 

   

   

  

  

  

  

3- I wanted to read more science/natural history/agricultural /nature books. Did I?   I read more than I thought I did. And before someone mentions it, I know some of these are not complete books on science/ natural history or even garden/farm books, but I included  everything that taught me something about the natural world, although it had to be at least more than a brief mention in the book*.

* This applies to the Olive Farm (which did have a few chapters about olive trees and growing them).  The Last Days of the Bus Club and Driving over Lemons (which in among the stories of living in Spain) did talk about farming quite a bit. However, each of these 3 books would probably be more listed as travel books. Just as I can say, the Oliver Sacks book, although really about genetic color-blindness, could also be listed as a travel book too.

4- Reading trends:  Every year I like to look at what types of books I read to see what I favored. This year I had a few reading trends.

a) LONG books-It was good to read a few books off my reading list and off my bookshelf. The three longest books I read were:

    

   I learned that I preferred to listen to most very long books. Sarum was the longest (a 54 hour listen), Hawaii was a 52 hour listen, and The Edge of Eternity was just under 37 hours. 

   I also read a couple other books that were on the longish side. I should mention that by long I mean over 20 hours of listening or reading. These included:

             

  just under 25 hours            just under 23 hours

b) vintage mysteries:   I enjoyed reading some golden age or other vintage mysteries.

       

I read 3 British Library vintage classics and also some other vintage mysteries,

 

 a few Agatha Christie's

 

 a classic Japanese mystery from the 1940's, the first in a series.

c) feel good stories: These books were all very enjoyable and not mushy. I even debated about adding Here One Moment  to my most memorable list. However I waited to mention it here.

       

d) Mysteries and  fiction set in COLD places:  Another reading trend I had was to read some books set in COLD places. This list included some Nordic mysteries.

  

Mysteries set above the Arctic circle in Sweden  

 

   

  

Fiction and mysteries set in Iceland

 A mystery set in Finland

  

 A couple of mysteries set in Greenland, and I'm even including this mystery set in the Shetland Islands since the White Nights title refers to the 24 hours of daylight in the summer which only happens in in far northern climes.

5- This past years classics: Besides the already mentioned Woman In White and the vintage mysteries , I also read 3 other classics. I don't think I could grade myself very high in this area of reading last year. 

  

7 -For the past few years I've been wanting to reread/read more of my Agatha Christie books that I've collected since high school. Besides the 3 actual Christie I listed above, here are 3 books that include Agatha Christie as a character or, in the Sophie Hannah books, include her detective Hercule Poiort. Plus I also read the Detection Club's first book in which Agatha Christie wrote a chapter.

    

     

8-Other rereads:  I actually reread several books this past year. One of my favorite mystery series has been Elly Griffith's Dr. Ruth Galloway series. There are 15 books in this series, and  I reread the first 5.  I also reread the Floating Admiral (see directly above), 2 of the 3 Agatha Christie mysteries (see above). The other reads on my list are books I originally read many years ago, except the Mill House Murders which I read 2 years ago.

   

And here's some classics I reread.

     

And finally, this book about cats and about starting a farm in the mountains of Spain.

 

9- Books I read a bit of and never finished: I'm not including false start books here. You know the books you read a little bit of and then decide it's not the right time to read them. There were 2 books that I read quite a bit of and then never continued. Both of these are titles I wouldn't mind getting back to.

  

10-Histories/biographies-non-fiction:  All of these books were very well done and interesting.

     

I mentioned the Alexander Graham Bell and the English Murder books above. The White House By The Sea is about the Kennedy family but through the eyes of the family summer home on Cape Cod.

   

Kingmaker was about Pamela Harriman who originally was married to Winston Churchill's only son. The other 2 are mentioned under my favorite books.I also mentioned The Accidental Tourist, which was not only about finding British history under the ground but also about discovering a new hobby. 

 11- historical and bibliographical fiction:

    

Glamorous Notions was about 1950's Hollywood, spies and bone records. I mentioned the other 2 above.

    

The Nightingale was an enjoyable World War 2 book about 2 sisters in France. I've mentioned Atmosphere above.  And I really enjoy Marie Benedict's books and this one about Hedy Lama didn't disappoint.

     

     City of Night Birds was a good book about being a ballerina in Russia.  Conclave was my first Robert Harris book and now I want to read more of his books.  The Ken Follett book was mentioned above.

    

   The Secret War of Julia Child took me a little bit to get into but I enjoyed it quite a bit once I did.  It was a fictional "maybe this happened" story about her  life during World War 2. I've mentioned Hawaii earlier in this post. The Vintage 1954 book was an interesting time travel fantasy set in Paris, and the Whatever Happened to Margo book was a fun  listen set in the late 1940's about one of the Durrell family running a boarding house.  I should mention both Hawaii and Whatever Happened to Margo are vintage fiction books too.

11- travel style non-fiction: I haven't seem to have read as much travel style fiction in the last couple of years as I used to. All of these books I've mentioned earlier in this post except Overland Before the Hippie Trail which was a fascinating account of a young couples world travels in the 1960s, rewritten from the author's journals that she kept at the time.

    

    

12- Fantasy books-   I'm not a huge Fantasy reader, although I don't mind a good  story. Fantasy seems to be trendy lately, but for some reason (?) I don't tend to read a lot of it.  This past year I read a few books that I would consider fantasy in some form or another.

     

     Japanese Ghost Stories is pretty self-explanatory. The Invisible Life of Addie Larue is an interesting story about trading your life for a different life with a Devil. And the Virgin Bride of Northcliffe Hall is a title that sounds like a romance but is not. It is about a fantasy writer and his connection to a ghost in the 1800's.

 

    I already mentioned the Vintage 1954, and the Labyrinth of Drakes is book 4  out of 5 in a fantasy series about a dragon scientist who gets herself into lots of "interesting" situations.

13- Literary Fiction that doesn't fit into any other category very well and that I haven't previously mentioned:

  

    Woman at 1,000 Degrees is an interesting read by an Icelandic writer, and finally Antelope Woman by Louise Erdich that has some rich Native American  "mythology" mixed with real life.

13- Most read authors  in 2025: Susan Hill (4), Agatha Christie(3) , Elly Griffiths (5) , Ragnar Jonasson(6)  and   Peter Swanson (4) . There were several authors I also read 2 books by: Asa Larson, Ann Cleeves, Sophie Hannah, Christoffer Petersen, Robert Harris, Marie Benedict, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Yukito Ayatsuji, and Chris Stewart.

14- Comparisons to last year:

                                            2024                                           2025

Total books                           113                                             102

Mysteries                                51                                               52

Fiction                                     32                                               26

non-fiction                              30                                               24

  biographies                            11                                                 6

  science/nat. history                  5                                               10

  histories                                   7                                                 not counted 

  travel                                       2                                                4

  other                                        5                                                4

15: What I want to read to 2026 and how I feel about last year's reading :

  2025 was a great reading year. You can tell I like a diversity of books, and one thing I'm usually not very good at is reading several books that are part of a series in a row.  In 2026 I hope to finish the one book I have left in Asa Larsson's Rebecka Martinsson mysteries and a few more books in Susan Hill's Simon Serrailler series. I also hope to read a few more Agatha Christies, more Robert Harris and Charlotte Gray books because I really enjoyed those 2 new to-me authors. Maybe I need to  diversify and read about places not quite so cold too, however I do enjoy those Nordic mysteries. Finally, I want to read more vintage mystery stories and other vintage books.

   I'll have to wait until next January to see how I do on any of these "goals". Usually what happens is I end up getting onto something completely different from what I think I want to read. 😏

   Whatever books you or I pick up, I hope our year is full of some good reading.