Last year started really badly – our family were dealing with all sorts of misery and I was still wading through Long Covid relapses. Thankfully, from the end of August onwards, things have been steadily improving. One of the good things was my reading year. I read 212 books overall, of which 5 were rereads or relistens.
As you can see – not a print book in sight. I simply don’t read them these days. The largest slice is audiobooks – I listened to 95 books during the year. They are a joy – I’ve always loved being read to and the quality of narration is by and large excellent.
The 43 ebooks I’ve read are a mix of newly bought, or ones already on our shelves. I don’t log if a book is newly bought or on my backlog, because I don’t want to know. Yes, I’ve bought more books than I could probably read in two lifetimes. And no – I don’t care. Reading is my main hobby and these days, it’s also a major lifeline when the wheels fall off my life. I read and reviewed 74 Netgalley arcs. I keep telling myself that I’m going to cut back on requesting Netgalley arcs, but I don’t. The benefits are that I find new authors that I really like through Netgalley and I keep in touch with new releases, reading and reviewing books I certainly couldn’t afford to read any other way. In 2025, I read 38 books by authors new to me and most of those were through Netgalley, or recommendations by other book bloggers.
During the year, I DNF’d 5 books, with one of those being abandoned because of the atrocious formatting. So I’m very satisfied with my ongoing system for sifting out books I don’t like – 4 clunkers out of 212 books shows it’s working well. Especially as I quickly abandon a book I don’t actively like. Life is too short to trudge through anything that is simply ‘meh’ when there are hundreds of marvellous reads out there waiting to fire up my brain and seep into my imagination.
In the past, I’ve made a conscious effort to read books by women authors, as they used to be under-represented within the SFF genre, particularly within Science Fiction. These days, I simply read a book I like without taking into account the gender of the author. So I was interested to note that in 2025 I read 155 by women compared to 65 written by men. And the sharp-eyed among you will quickly realise that the numbers don’t add up to 212 – this is because 8 books were co-written.
In 2025 I read 31 science fiction books, a wopping 117 fantasy books, 28 crime adventures, 3 non-fiction books and 4 children’s books. Science fiction includes sub-genres such as space opera, colony adventures, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic, time travel, alternate history, military, futuristic crime, literary and steampunk. Fantasy includes sub-genres such as epic, urban, swords and sorcery, musket and magic, sand and sorcery, underworld, historical, grimdark and coming of age.
Once again, fantasy still is my most popular genre by a long country mile, followed by sci fi. This year I didn’t read any historical adventures without a fantasy or sci fi twist, or wasn’t the setting for a crime. While I have tried to increase my science fiction reading – it’s a genre that tends to be darker than fantasy and right now, I’m not up for anything too bleak.
This year, a significant number of my books had a strong humorous thread or included romance, which tends to ensure that the ending is reasonably upbeat. I thoroughly enjoyed the non-fiction books I read and I’d like to expand that genre in the coming year. As for the children’s books, it’s dropped right away, as I’m not so in touch with books for younger readers these days.
One of my goals for 2025 was to get my penchant for reading parts of series under some sort of control – last year I only completed a measly 19 series after reading 195 books that were part of a series. This year, I read 80 books continuing in a series and completed or completely caught up with 27 series. I achieved this by targeting series I particularly wanted to finish and prioritising them over other books. I look forward to doing the same in the coming year and hopefully completing more.
A statistic I’m very pleased about – 75 books I read this year were by indie authors. This is a much better number than the previous year and reflects my ongoing effort to ensure I support fellow authors going it alone. And I’m giving myself an extra pat on the back because the huge majority of Netgalley arcs are traditionally published, so very few of the arcs I’ve read are from indie authors.
My goals for next year? Continue to concentrate on following up and completing series I enjoy, continue to read more independent authors and review their work – even if it’s only a mini-review. And to continue to thoroughly enjoy the gift of being able to choose from thousands of books. I feel so blessed to have such a choice. When I think of how much books have enriched my life – and literally saved my sanity when things have been tough – I feel humbly grateful.
Wishing you all a very happy 2026 reading year!
Brainfluff 