I seem to be on track on posting every two years. I continuing to use 35 as my annual reading goal which isn’t difficult for me to hit. Let’s look at the books I read in 2025.
I continue to read mostly eBooks, most from the local library. Goodreads does have some gamification happening, but I’ve been mostly ignoring this, still it’s pretty neat to see that I was a very consistent reader this past year. I read 35 books (just) for a total of 12719 pages. My average rating was 3 stars.
The shortest book I read, The City Inside, was only 244 pages. The longest book, Apocalypse of the Dead, was 503 pages. Both of these I rated at 2 stars, so I wouldn’t recommend you spend time on either. On average my books were 363 pages in length.
Lock In, the first book I read in 2025, was the most shelved on goodreads. This is no surprise as John Scalzi is a well known author and writes fantastic stuff (I rated this a 4 star). The least shelved was Crescent written by Homer Hickam (3 star) this was part of a series (Helium-3) and for whatever reason I only read 2 of the series. I suspect my library didn’t have a copy of the 3rd book
Let’s touch on highs and lows. 8 books got 2 stars from me. 9 were given 4 stars, with the remainder being 3 stars. Overall a pretty good spread. A 3 star book is worth the read, but didn’t really grab me. A 4 star (or above) would be a recommended read.
My 4 star books:
- Lock In – Anything by John Scalzi is a good read IMO.
- Terminal Alliance – First in a series, the rest were ok.
- The Prom Goer’s Interstellar Excursion – A fun, light, read.
- Nobody – Ever feel invisible?
- Learning to Swear in America – I really enjoyed this.
- Finder / Driving the Deep – Two books, both excellent.
- Rubicon – Cyberpunk / Military / AI.
- Hammajang Luck – Amazing debut novel.
I continue to read regularly, and I would recommend you try to do the same. It’s a good way to bring in information that is longer form than the internet which has become all click-bait headlines, and short form video. If you can’t read, try an audio book – I did listen to Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography (not counted in my reading challenge), it was excellent another one I would recommend. Also, consider trying to expose yourself to new points of view with the content you consume – I leave a lot of what I read up to chance, but I have been intentionally trying to keep my authors diverse – selecting more female authors, or biasing my choice towards someone from another culture.