My round up for the year is later than I had hoped for but I still think that it is worth doing.
For 2025 I bought a new notebook in which to record my reading – I am still not inclined to change what is now a 26 year habit and go electronic. I splashed out and bought a lovely A5 notebook in WH Smith with a delightful pattern on the cover of bright birds in trees taken from wallpaper at the Victoria and Albert museum. Some of it has touches of gold foil so it sparkles when the light catches it. The end papers are a similar design and the edges of the pages are coloured a lovely rose pink. It seemed a crime to write in it but I have used it faithfully over the past year and recorded the details of all 355 books I have read. There’s room for another year as well so I shall be using it in 2026.
355 is the most books that I have read in a year since 2020 but most of the past few years have been within twenty of that total. Obviously, I have only been able to read so many books because I am a retired person with few responsibilities or many other hobbies. I also read quickly and I do, irrespective of what some people think, retain quite a lot of what I read – my head is filled with stories !
Of the 355, crime fiction made up 51% of what I read overall which is much the same as 2024. You can see here what my favourite crime books were. Do remember that I use this category to describe thrillers, crime, mystery, adventure and spy stories. The rest of what I read was fantasy and science fiction, contemporary novels, romances, classics, literary fiction and a few historical novels. My favourite fiction of the year is here.
Fiction made up 80% of what I read with 20% being non-fiction (see my non-fiction books of the year here). Most of these were history and biography/memoir with some travel and true crime as well. I usually aim for 25% of my books read in a year to be non-fiction but I obviously fell short this year and it is less than 2024.
76% of the books I read were in paper form which is more than last year. I am trying to get rid of the huge number of books that I own but which are unread and I have set myself a few challenges along the way to do that – I have found them so useful that I am planning the same for 2026. The large number of paper books that I own is completely due to my charity shop addiction and I am sad to say that I bought more than I read last year which won’t help the problem with the to-be-read piles in any way. I only listened to 15 books in total on audio (see my favourite audio books of the year here) and the rest were on my Kindle.
I started but abandoned 20 books which is two more than last year and the percentage of books read which were written by a woman was 56% which is quite a big drop from 2024’s total of 63%. I also fell heavily behind with my reviewing so I shall be talking about 2025’s books for a while to come.
The first book that I finished in the year was The Parliament House by Edward Marston which is one of his historical crime novels set in Restoration England. I have read a few in this series (see here for a review) and they are enjoyable enough with good plotting, although often stilted dialogue. I have a few more of these on my to-be-read piles.
The last book I read in the year was also a crime story – A Dedicated Man by Peter Robinson. This was one of his series of detective stories featuring Alan Banks which I am reading from time to time. This is an early one of these (no mobile phones) but I enjoyed it a lot. You can see my review of one of this series here.
I read a lot of good books in 2025 and I have a lot of good books sitting in piles waiting for me to get to them. I foresee some excellent reading times ahead of me. I hope that it is the same for you whether you read one book in the year or 500. The key thing is to keep reading !!
Anne Is Reading 