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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2024: My Year in Reading—A Retrospect

Happy New Year! After tracking my progress via Goodreads, today, for the fifth year in a row, I’m sharing a retrospect on the books I read in the last year. (Here are the links to check out the 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020 editions if you’d like to travel back in time!)

In 2024, as in 2023, I read 50 books, an average pace of approximately 50 pages a day. 

My preference for fiction over non-fiction remains clear, with 41 vs. 9 books read. But my non-fiction reading covered topics of particular interest to me, such as art (All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley, and The Art Thief, Michael Finkel), ballet (Turning Pointe, Chloe Angyal), and the nineteenth century (Stranger in the Shogun’s City, Amy Stanley, reviewed here, and The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, Margalit Fox), and expanded into less expected areas (e.g., memoirs by Flea, Esmeralda Santiago, and Patricia E. Beattie, and the story of an eighteenth-century naval mutiny, in David Grann’s The Wager).

When it comes to fiction, for the first time in one of these reviews, one contemporary author dominates—I read six (!) novels by Tana French in 2024 and continue to love her work. 

I reviewed three novels as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, covering books set in the nineteenth century, but written in the twenty-first: Edward Carey’s Edith Holler, Ami McKay’s The Witches of New York, and Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music. And I also read and blogged about two pieces of nineteenth-century French fiction in translation: Three Tales, Gustave Flaubert, and The Animal, Rachilde. 

My interest in my own genre, historical fiction, remains strong, accounting for 20% of books I read last year. Other strong themes for the year in fiction included witches (The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, Melinda Taub, The Manningtree Witches, A.K. Blakemore, The Witches of New York, Ami McKay, and Weyward, Emilia Hart), ballet (Tiny Pretty Things, Dhonielle Clayton and Sona Charaipotra, and The Dance of the Dolls, Lucy Ashe), and, as ever, books by friends/acquaintances (Marvelous, Molly Greeley, The Last Star Standing, C.G. Twiles, and What's Eating Jackie Oh?, Patricia Park). 

Thirty-five books I read this year were by women, and 15 by men, which is slightly more gender-balanced than in 2023. 

In 2025, I’ll again be aiming to read 50 books. My reading resolutions? Continue to embrace the unexpected (one of my favorite 2024 reads was Chelsea G. Summers’s A Certain Hunger, a book about a female cannibal!), prioritize joy in reading, and continue to support writer friends. 

What books did you enjoy reading in 2024 that I should continue adding to my list? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want to stay in touch? Sign up to my monthly email newsletter here.