2025 Round Up

 

Well my intention to blog consistently during 2025 didn't quite work - life got away from me a bit at the end of the year and while I kept reading I did become something of a hermit.

In book terms 2025 was a good year for me - somehow I managed to read a staggering 301 books, which I am almost embarrassed about. I think that the total is so high because I fell in love with the Penguin Archive books that were published for their 90th anniversary, and many of these are shorter reads. I've by no means read all 90 books but I've read and loved a lot of them. I've also liked how many new authors from all over the world that they've introduced me to.

I think that some of my increased reading total can be put down to some of the new reading habits I've started. These include no social media/doom scrolling/internet browsing when I go to bed in the evening - only physical or books on my kindle, and reading the books I get from NetGalley in order of publication and trying to read them just before they are published so that if any really appeal to me I can talk about them straight away without having to wait months for publication. Let's see if I can keep this up for 2026!

After realising that in 2024 while 8% of my reading was in translation I was shocked when I realised how few countries I was actually reading from so made it my goal to read from a lot more countries in 2025 with a reward map to keep me enthused.

On 1st January it looked like this:

By 1st January 2026 I can say that it looks significantly different as I have managed to read books from 90 countries around the world:

So before we get to my top books of the year here are my reading stats for 2025:

• 65% of books read were by women (33% were by men and 2% were by dual authors)
• 63% of books were fiction, including short stories & KidLit
• 37% of books were non fiction
• 28% of my reads have been in translation

Narrowing down to just 10 books from the 301 will be too hard so this year we have 25 for 25!

My top 10 fiction reads of the year are:

• The Wager and the Bear by John Ironmonger
• The Eights by Joanna Miller
• Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah
• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
• Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
• I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven
• The Country of Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
• Voting Day by Clare O'Dea
• Atmosphere by Taylor Reid Jenkins
• Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine West

My top 10 translated books of the year are:

• Small Memories by Jose Saramago (tr. Margaret Jull Costa)
• My Pen is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women (tr. various)
• When the Cranes Fly South by Liza Ridzen (tr. Alice Menzies)
• Just a Little Dinner by Cecile Tlili (tr. Katherine Gregor)
• How I Came to Know Fish by Oto Pavel (tr. Jindriska Badal & Robert McDowell)
• On the Calculation of Volume (books 1,2 &3) by Solvej Balle (tr. Barbara J Haveland, Sophia Hersi Smith, & Jennifer Russell)
• Barbara Isn't Dying Yet by Alina Bronsky (tr. Tim Mohr)
• Lowest Common Denominator by Pirkko Saisio (tr. Mia Spangenberg)
• Notes from the Ginzo Shihoda Stationert Shop by Kenji Ueda (tr. Emily Balistrieri)
• Space Invaders by Nona Fernandez (tr. Natasha Wimmer)

My top 5 non fictions reads of the year are:

• Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid
• That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America by Amanda Jones
• Mythica: A New History of Homer's World, Through The Women Written Out Of It by Emily Hauser
• Always Home, Always Homesick: A Love Letter to Iceland by Hannah Kent
• Burnt Eucalyptus Wood: On Origins, Language and Identity by Ennatu Domingo