Books I read in 2025
I read 27 books for fun in 2025, eight less than last year. A lot of my reading time was relegated to my commute (thank goodness for audiobooks).
Bold = faves (doesn’t include rereads)
* = rereads
Graphic novels
- A Guest in the House (E.M. Carroll)
- Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (Marie Spénale
- Minuit Passé (Gaëlle Geniller)
Minuit Passé felt like it was written specifically for me, Robin. When I got to the last page, I immediately restarted it. The art is phenomenally gorgeous, and the story is a unique combination of creepy, comforting, and wholesome. As soon as the English translation comes out, I’m buying it for everyone I know. The cover art alone…!
Book club
- Book Lovers (Emily Henry)
- In Memoriam (Alice Winn)
- Isola (Allegra Goodman)
- James (Percival Everett)
- The Fury (Alex Michaelides)
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers)
- Yellowface (R.F. Kuang)
I devoured In Memoriam almost without taking a break. I switched from the audiobook to the ebook so I could consume it faster. I simply had to know what happened to the characters, two young men fresh out of school in WWI. The writing was immersive, and my heart broke and remade itself multiple times during the story.
The audiobook for The Fury is the best I’ve ever listened to. The voice actor, Alex Jennings, was a perfect fit for the book’s narrator. It sounded like I was listening to the words at the moment the narrator thought them.
Fantasy
- The Diviners series (Libba Bray)
- The Diviners
- Lair of Dreams
- Before the Devil Breaks You
- Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Heather Fawcett)
- The Bewitching (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)
- The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy (Brigitte Knightley)
- The Magician’s Nephew (C.S. Lewis)
- The Incandescent (Emily Tesh)
The Incandescent is in the “school for magic” subgenre of fantasy, but refreshingly, the story revolves around the teachers and administrators.
The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy has become a comfort read, something I pick up when I’m in need of something familiar, funny, and lovely. Sometimes I think of the line, “Self-defense,” and just that one phrase makes me laugh. I’m on tenterhooks waiting for the second half of the duology.
Literary fiction
- Bog Queen (Anna North)
- The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern)
- The Sequel (Jean Hanff Korelitz)
- The Sparsholt Affair (Alan Hollinghurst)
Being in a book club has been great, because it turns me on to authors I’d not have explored otherwise. The Sequel is, well, the sequel to The Plot, which we read last year and loved.
Bog Queen is written by the same author as Outlawed, and I think it’s overall more successful. It was honestly an irresistible premise: the three narrators are a contemporary forensic anthropologist, an Iron Age druid, and a colony of moss. Obviously, I needed to read it.
Romance
- Cover Story (Mhairi McFarlane)
- Great Big Beautiful Life (Emily Henry)
- If I Never Met You* (Mhairi McFarlane)
- Lights Out (Navessa Allen)
- Mad About You* (Mhairi McFarlane)
How can Lights Out, a very dark and stalkery romance, be so funny? The audiobook’s voice actors did an excellent job.
Previously: Books I read in 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.
Since I started keeping track, I’ve read 630+ books for fun.