2025 Reading Reflections + Favorite Books
Celebrating my favorite reading experiences and top books of 2025
Hi, book friends.
Happy (almost) new year! I didn’t really mean to leave this newsletter for the very last day of 2025, but between all the holiday chaos and a few bouts of illness — including a sinus infection that still hasn’t quite gone away — December really kicked my butt. I’m extra glad I took this liminal week off from work to rest and reset.
And even though my brain was still a little resistant to the idea of sitting down to write today, I’m so glad I did. Every year I get so much value out of reflecting back on what I read, how it went, and how I’m changing as a reader.
But my reading life is not something separate from the rest of my life, and this year was a dynamic one. I went from having a 6-month-old to having an 18-month-old, which is so much more fun and so much more exhausting than I ever could have understood. My body, too, went from being 6 months postpartum to 18 months postpartum. The daycare illnesses were relentless. I trained for a half marathon that I didn’t get to run (but will next year, mark my words!). I fell back in love with crochet and taught myself to knit, and I made four Christmas stockings, seven baby blankets, a tree skirt, and a few other odds and ends. I also went from having one direct report at work to four, and the pace of things there changed dramatically.
It was a year full of so many highs, but also one that took so much energy. Thank God for audiobooks, which kept me reading through all of it.
Speaking of which, let’s get into it. Below I’ve got 2025 by the numbers, a list of my favorite reading experiences from the year, and, of course, my favorite books!
2025 by the numbers
Number of books read:
100 (or I will have, once I finish Midnight’s Children tonight!)
Average length:
366 pages. So even though 18 of those books were >500 pages, I read plenty of little guys, too.
Number of books read that were not published by the big 5 publishers:
29. That’s so many! I’m really proud of this.
Genre breakdown:
34 literary fiction, 22 nonfiction, and 44 fantasy/sci-fi books. One of my intentions for the year was to resist frontlist litfic FOMO, so this is a win! I still have some refining to do, because looking back, I still felt “meh” about a lot of the litfic I read. I’ll talk more about that in a different post about my hopes for 2026 next week, but ultimately I’m happy with how this shook out.
New releases vs backlist:
58 new releases (published in 2025), 42 backlist. A win here too!
Rereads:
9, which is actually less than I expected! Probably because all of them happened in the second half of the year and I enjoyed them so much. More on this below.
My favorite reading experiences of 2025
H/t to Sara Hildreth for inspiring this section when she wrote about her favorite literary endeavors of the year back in November. Thinking about the different initiatives I undertook has proven to be a very fun and rewarding way to reflect. My favorites were:
Experiencing The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon: I still cannot believe how much I loved this series. Fantasy readers will know what I mean when I say it gave me that feeling that we’ve all been chasing since we were teenagers — the feeling of being swept up, swept away, wanting to get to the end but praying we never will. Reading one TBS book per month stretched the joy out across the whole first half of the year and had the added benefit, I believe, of helping me remember the details better as time has passed. I can’t wait for the next one! In the meantime, I will be forcing even more people to pick them up.
Reading The Silmarillion for the first time — and then following it up with a Lord of the Rings reread: I loosely read along with Breanne Rodgers of Many Meetings, which was a true delight and helped me get so much more out of the experience. I also unabashedly relied on Spark Notes to help me make sure I’d caught all the important events and themes in The Silmarillion, which helped a lot! And wow was it fun to read LOTR with all that lore so fresh in my mind. Also, if you’re considering a reread and haven’t done the Andy Serkis audiobooks, please allow me to influence you to listen to them.
Smaller TBRs: About halfway through the year, I switched from setting myself a full 10-book TBR every month (a system that I have used for literally years and years) to only picking 3–5 “definites” and following my nose after that. Sure, I usually had a relatively good idea about where my nose would lead me, but there was something about not committing to it in writing (or in my official TBR) that helped me feel freer to change directions if I wanted.
IRL book club: It’s a long story, but in February, Bookstgram and my Booker of the Month book club led me to meet a new friend who lives right up my street! She is one of the most socially and locally connected people I’ve ever known, and meeting her felt like doubling my ties to my community overnight. That includes the monthly IRL book club she hosts at her house filled with other women our age who live nearby. I gained so many new friends so quickly, and we read so many great books, and it was truly a highlight of my year. Thank you, Elana!!
Rereads: Like I mentioned above, I really leaned into rereads in the second half of this year. Some of that was planned (LOTR, The Hunger Games, A Christmas Carol) and some was unplanned (Braiding Sweetgrass on a whim, Hamnet to prep for the film adaptation, the second Percy Jackson book to prep for season 2 of the Disney+ adaptation, The Everlasting because I was so obsessed with it). Every time I reread a book I’m reminded of how much joy and value the experience brings. Here’s to more rereads in 2026 — including, at least, the rest of the Hunger Games trilogy!
My top books of 2025
If you’ve been following me for any length of time, my favorite book of 2025 will not surprise you. Some years it’s hard to pick just one; this year, there was no contest.
It’s The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow.
It’s been so, so long since I book grabbed me like this one did. Since I was legitimately angry that I had to go to bed and stop reading. Since I squealed out loud at a perfect last line of a chapter. Since I literally read the book twice in five months and then still almost started it over again for a third time. If you take one recommendation from me this year, let this be it.
Beyond that, this year I decided to pick five runner-up favorites from each of my three main genres for you. (I excluded rereads from consideration — if I read a book twice, you can safely assume I loved it.) Here they are, in the order I read them. Click each title for my full review!
Fantasy & sci-fi
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
The Dark Mirror (The Bone Season, #5) by Samantha Shannon
The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1) by Robert Jackson Bennett
Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell
Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang
Fiction
We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
Black Woods Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey
Playground by Richard Powers
Telephone by Percival Everett (I fully credit the fact that I read this with my IRL book club for making me love it this much!)
A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar
Nonfiction
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara
Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic
The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters
By the way — I got to go back on the Books with Betsy podcast’s best of the year episode to talk about The Everlasting, Telephone, and Searches!
And if you’d like to see a list of everything I read this year, check out my list on The StoryGraph.
That’s all I’ve got for you, I think! Thank you all so much for sharing your inbox with me this year. I truly love writing this newsletter, and it means a lot to me that there are 1,100 of you here — and many of you are regular readers. If there’s anything you’d like to see more (or less) of in 2026, please tell me! I’d love to hear how your 2025 went in the comments, too. ❤️
And as always, if you like this newsletter, please send a few friends my way.
Happy new year, book friends.
— Deedi (she/her)
Happy 2026!
The Everlasting was one of my final reads of the year and I adored it!