Looking Back on Read 2025

This post contains affiliate links.

A year ago, I set out to read more in 2025. I had read 8 books in 2024 and it seemed like 2025 would be a good year to intentionally reinvest in one of my previous favorite activities. I’ve been a member of Sharon MacMahon’s Governerds Insider book club for several years and thought that 2025 could be the year that I expanded my reading beyond book club.

I set a private goal to read 12 books this year. My end of the year total was 25 books, audio and paper. I am really impressed with myself for reading that many books. I also learned a lot about myself and reading this year:

The Storygraph is a fantastic app. I had a great time tracking my reading throughout the year and watching my stats change with each completed book. You can follow me here.
I wasn’t always successful in remembering to bring a book everywhere I went, but I certainly increased the frequency with which I did so. I even took myself out to dinner with a book once, which was a delightful experience that I’d love to repeat.
Having an “upstairs book” and a “downstairs book” doesn’t really work for me. I’m happiest with one paper book and one audiobook at a time.

Audiobooks are great. Prior to this year, I didn’t really listen to audiobooks but I decided to give it a try. In the end, over 50% of my reading was audiobooks. This dramatically decreased my podcast listening but didn’t really miss it. I started my year listening on Spotify Premium because I liked being able to instantly get whatever title I wanted immediately but soon ran into issues with their 15 hour monthly limit and switched to Libby which has worked great and supports my local library, even if it takes a bit more planning.
I don’t like rating books. There’s too many components that I can’t decide how to weight. Below are some of favorite titles from the year but they don’t completely align with my highest ratings from the year because looking back I have more positive recollections of some of the books that I actually rated less highly.
Also great: fiction. I had long been saying that I wasn’t a fiction person – not when there’s so much great non-fiction and so much bad fiction. But several of my favorite reads from the year were fiction picks and, apparently, now I’m a person who enjoys fiction.
Books can bring us together. It has been a delight to discuss reading with my family, friends and even strangers in my neighborhood. I’ll also be eternally grateful for the folks in my Governerd book club offshoot chat for being avid readers with constant suggestions to share.

I’ll be continuing to read in 2025 and sharing my monthly progress on Storygraph and Instagram. I’m also anticipating receiving an e-reader, which will be an interesting variable to add to the mix.