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: Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter, Lizzie Pook (2022)

Welcome back to the Neo-Victorian Voices review series, covering novels set in the nineteenth century, but written in the twenty-first. Today I’m blogging for the first time about a book set in 1800s Australia! The closest I’ve gotten previously was 1800s New Zealand, when reviewing Eleanor Catton’s 2013 The Luminaries back in 2018. 

It’s 1896 in Western Australia when Eliza’s father, the owner of a prominent pearling business, goes missing at sea. She and her family arrived from England ten years previously and have suffered more than their fair share of tragedy since. Now, the tomboyish Eliza is on a mission to find and save her father, as she couldn’t the family members she lost before. 

Pook deftly introduces us to the world of a remote (fictional) Australian town, peopled by diverse immigrants, corrupt authorities, and a mistreated aboriginal population. It’s a vibrant setting of inhospitable landscapes, teeming with fascinating, and dangerous, animal life, such as salties, sharks, and kleptomaniac cockatoos. 

If you read historical fiction to be transported to a different time and place and to learn about past events you might not have been aware of, there’s a lot to enjoy about Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter. I relished the insight into the pearl trade and the additional levels of agency possible for a nineteenth-century heroine in an Australian vs. a British, or even an American, setting. Eliza is also an appealing main character, likable without being flawless.

I wish the supporting characters had been a little more developed, especially Axel, Eliza’s will they/won’t they potential love interest, Min, her friend, and the antagonist Parker, who is irredeemably evil. No spoilers here but the revelation of the reason behind the father’s disappearance was also a little underwhelming.

All in, this is an original contribution to the genre and a novel I’d recommend to readers looking to broaden their horizons and follow a nineteenth-century heroine far beyond the drawing room.

What novels should I consider reviewing next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want monthly updates about my blogging/writing? Sign up for my email newsletter here.