Books of 2025
What did I read?
In 2025, for the first time since reading challenges on Goodreads became a thing, I did not set myself an annual reading challenge. I was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the level of self-surveillance that I was doing, and that modern culture encourages us to do—steps, calories, hours of sleep, books read, minutes spent looking at a phone. Putting numbers to these things never resulted in me feeling better about anything, so I decided to stop tracking so much. Therefore I don’t know exactly how many books I read this year, and I don’t care! I did read a few bangers, though, and I’ll share more about them below.
Reading Plans for 2026
I don’t plan to set a goal for 2026 either. Not only am I happier not having tracked every moment of my year, but I feel like the whole culture of reading challenges, reading journals, book hauls, etc etc has devolved into a performance that has nothing to do with what books are actually for.
I do have a reading project in mind for 2026 though: reading all the books currently on my TBR list. Some of them have been there for years. Every December, I go through and remove everything that no longer sparks my interest, but this year there were very few I could remove. So I’m going to actually have to start reading them.
I moved them all to a new shelf on Goodreads (aside: I looked into switching to Storygraph, and decided that I am too old to start over with a new system, sorry). There are 62 books—non-fiction, literary fiction, fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and thrillers. Rather than do what I have traditionally done, which is scroll through my TBR list looking for something that strikes my fancy and then not reading any of them, I’m going to let someone else dictate what book I read when: namely, my dice. I’m going to roll 2 d10s and let that choose my next read for me (with anything over 62 being a re-roll.)
I hope that by not waiting until I’m “in the mood” to read something, I will actually read more. I also want to use the library more in 2026, so I’ll be requesting most of these through my local branch, and will only buy a copy if I love it enough to give it room on my shelf.
I’ve also joined the Hardcore Literature Book Club, experimentally. I’ve been craving intellectual stimulation lately, and having lectures to go along with my reading sounds like just the ticket. I’m not holding myself to continue with that, though, if I don’t get enough enjoyment out of it.
Best Books I read in 2025
If We Were Villains
M. L. Rio
The Secret History is one of those books that has grown into a weird meta-phenomenon online—either you’re obsessed with it, or you hate that everyone else is obsessed with it. I read it in 2022 (I had to look it up, it honestly feels like I read it last year but that’s the story of the 2020s I guess) and I really liked it. If I’d read it in 1992, when it came out, I would have probably made it my entire personality (I was 15 in 1992).
But this year I read If We Were Villains, which is in many ways the same story as The Secret History, and I liked it better! Having been an English major and theater-hanger-on, I think that a group of kids obsessed with Shakespeare was more relatable to me than kids obsessed with Greek poets or whatever it was in TSH. But at any rate, these characters felt more real than Tartt’s, and I absolutely loved this book.
Here One Moment
Lianne Moriarity
Moriarty has an uncanny talent for getting into character’s heads, and she’s in top form in Here One Moment, a book with, like, six different point of view characters, all of whom feel completely distinct from each other. It’s a book about loss, grief, joy, fate, and letting go—all things that have felt especially relevant to me this year.
The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland
Rachael Herron
Billed as Practical Magic meets The Parent Trap, this is the sort of fun, engrossing, and moving book that you want to read in one sitting. A middle-aged woman discovers her family and a heritage of magic, falls in love, makes mistakes, saves the day. It also features a teenage trans girl that I want to adopt.
The Witchstone
Harry H. Neff
Lazlo is a ne’er-do-well Prince of Hell stuck in a dead-end job in Hell’s endless beaurocracy, which suits him just fine until his new boss actually expects him to do work, and his dad won’t bail him out anymore. He has one chance to save himself from being melted down into primordial ooze, which means involving himself with the family of witches whose curse he’s nominally responsible for. The book is a fun caper with one of my favorite character archetypes, the rogue who isn’t really as bad a guy as he’d like to believe.
