This has been, to say the absolute least, an interesting year for me. The downside has been a lot of unexpected free time, the upside of which has obviously been the ability to read a lot more than usual. In between the myriad home projects I completed, I managed to read a record amount in 2025 while also knocking out perhaps a high point for the book that sat the longest on my TBR pile. I’ll pause for applause while loading up the complete list of this year’s reads:

–Everyone Who is Gone is Here by Jonathan Blitzer
–Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
–Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
–Practice for Becoming a Ghost by Patrick Thomas Henry
–Us Against You by Fredrik Backman
–Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
–The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
–The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
–Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
–Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
–The Winners by Fredrik Backman
–The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley
–Dune by Frank Herbert
–Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
–Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore by Laurence Roth
–A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith
–Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
–Original Sins by Eve Ewing
–The Blessing Way by Tony Hillerman
–Table for Two by Amor Towles
–The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
–Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
–Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
–A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
–Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

For those who don’t want to count it all up, that’s 25 total books, four more than my previous high. The group also included indulging in some longer reads, helping to boost my total pages and average pages far past the annual average since I started keeping track in 2008.

Longest: The Winners (671). Shortest: Things Fall Apart (209). Fastest read: A Walk in the Woods (2 days). Slowest: Demon Copperhead (40 days).

The top of the pile in no particular order: The Winners, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Original Sins, Demon Copperhead, Dune.

Ones I would have skipped: Slaughterhouse Five, Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

Important reads that will make you mad: Everyone Who is Gone is Here, Original Sins.

The Winners was the only book that made me cry on an Amtrak train to Philly. Dune Messiah was the most providential. With only a few pages left in Dune, I was within sight of a used bookstore, and on a cart outside, on the top shelf, I found the second book in the series with a whopping price tag of $0.25.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics was the most creative in its style and approach, one that turned me off for the first 30 pages or so until I got into the rhythm of what was happening. From there on though, I loved the weirdness of it and the author’s ability to carry it through to the end.

Freedom had been sitting on my shelf for more than 10 years, likely because in some way I assumed its length would mean it would take over a large percentage of my reading year. Couple in the fact that I read a previous Franzen novel (The Corrections), which I really thought was 200 pages too long, and Freedom sat for a few extra years. But this year, with its extra time, turned out to be just the right one for Freedom and I enjoyed it roughly 2,000 times more than The Corrections.

Project Hail Mary was fine, though most of the time I thought that while I’m sure it will in fact make an entertaining movie, perhaps I would have enjoyed the story more in its theatrical version. The book made me nostalgic for the depth of Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore brought the unique experience of letting me hear the audio book while reading the print version. The author was my first literature professor in college, and thus I attended enough lectures to have his voice carrying the story inside my head.

Here’s to another great year of books in 2026, and also completing my side quest of visiting every library in my county (I hit about half of them this year). Happy reading!