2025: My Year in Reading—A Retrospect

Happy New Year! After tracking my progress via Goodreads, today, for the sixth year in a row, I’m sharing a retrospect on the books I read in the last 12 months. 

Just like in 2024, in 2025 I read 50 books, maintaining an average pace of 50 pages a day. My ratio of fiction to non-fiction was 42 to 8, while women writers continued to dominate (I read 38 books by women, 11 by men, and 1 by a writer who identifies as non-binary). 

The first 20 books I read in 2025

Around half (24) of the books I read this year were historical fiction, but I was less focused on the nineteenth century than usual, diving into periods/setting such as 1500s France (Allegra Goodman’s 2025 Isola), plague era England (Geraldine Brooks’s 2001 Year of Wonders), 11th-century Scotland (Joel H. Morris’s 2024 All Our Yesterdays), and more. 

I reviewed 7 books as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series (check out my blog posts on Allison Epstein’s 2025 Fagin the Thief, Louis Bayard’s 2024 The Wildes, James McBride’s 2013 The Good Lord Bird, Kate MacIntosh’s 2024 The Champagne Letters, Virginia Feito’s 2025 Victorian Psycho, Laura McNeal’s 2024 The Swan’s Nest, and Lizzie Pook’s 2022 Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter). 

My top-three fiction reads (in no particular order) were All Our Yesterdays, Liz Moore’s 2024 The God of the Woods, and Tana French’s 2020 The Searcher. As always, it was a joy to read books written by writers known to me personally. Congratulations again to Hope C. Tarr on the publication of Stardust and Kelsey James on the publication of The Colony of Lost Souls, both in 2025.

The next 15 books I read in 2025

On the non-fiction side, I read about everything from the legal history of fashion (Richard Ford Thompson’s 2021 Dress Codes) to life in the slums of Mumbai (Katherine Boo’s 2012 Behind the Beautiful Forevers) to sociopathy (Patric Gagne’s 2024 Sociopath: A Memoir). My favorite was Arthur Brand’s 2020 Hitler Horses, which traces the real history of lost Nazi sculptures. My day job also informed my reading, with Olivia Fox Cabone’s 2012 The Charisma Myth and Amy C. Edmondson’s 2018 The Fearless Organization influencing my day to day. 

Things I enjoyed this year included reading books I found on Brooklyn stoops (this was true of 6 of the books I read this year), books I received as gifts (true of 4 books), and library books (shoutout to New York Public Library). In 2026 my goal will remain 50 books—I look forward to seeing what new reads the new year brings me.

The last 15 books I read in 2025

What books did you enjoy reading in 2025 that I could consider adding to my 2026 list? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. 

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Neo-Victorian Voices: The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts, Louis Bayard (2024)

Welcome back to my Neo-Victorian Voices series, focused on books set in the nineteenth century, but written in the twenty-first. Today, I’m blogging about Louis Bayard’s 2024 novel, The Wildes, which delves into celebrated Victorian writer Oscar Wilde’s conviction for “gross indecency” for his romantic relationship with a man, Lord Alfred Douglas, and the impact of the scandal on his wife and children.

The novel is structured in five acts of uneven length. The first, longest, and, for me, the most compelling act charts the breakdown of the Wildes’ marriage as Oscar’s wife, Constance, becomes aware of the nature of his relationship with Lord Alfred during a family trip to the Norfolk countryside. In the second act, Constance and her young sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, are in Italy, escaping the press attention surrounding Oscar’s trial and subsequent imprisonment. By the third act (which is very different in tone from the rest of the book), Cyril is fighting in World War One. In the fourth, Vyvyan, now grown, encounters Lord Alfred in London. And in the fifth, Vyvyan imagines an alternate reality where his parents’ marriage survived Oscar’s infidelity and Constance accepts her husband’s relationship with Lord Alfred.

Looking at the novel’s reviews, the fifth act has been the most divisive, but for me it worked well as the fantasy of a child still impacted by the breakup of his parents’ relationship, even after he is grown. The whole novel seemed like an examination of how a specific event/moment can become a shared family trauma. In the world of the Wildes, as presented in this novel, “Norfolk” becomes almost a code word for everything that followed, and exact details of the trip, which would have otherwise seemed inconsequential, are seared into their collective memories. 

This isn’t the book I’d recommend if you are looking to learn about the Wilde scandal for the first time, but if you know the history and are interested in diving deeper, there’s a lot to enjoy. Just be warned: if your own family has dealt with divorce, incarceration, or another episode of extreme upheaval, this one may hit close to home.

Which novel should I read next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Instagram, on Facebook, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want monthly updates on my blog and writing? Sign up for my email newsletter here.