That Was The Year That Was (In Books): 2025 Edition

Well I may not have written any books this year, but I did read a few, and as it always does, Goodreads compiled a list of them, making a nice little ― or not so little ― tapestry of covers, along with a few details. You can check out the list at Goodreads here, or look at the screen shots below. The advantage of visiting the list at Goodreads is that you can interactively click on individual books to see their entries; the advantage of viewing the screen shots is you get to go make a nice hot cup of tea while waiting for them all to finish loading. Let’s review a few notes about this year’s list!

• This year’s longest book, Thieves’ World Volume One (★★★), was relatively short for a longest book, at least by my standards, clocking in at only 776 pages ― just a bit over half as long as last year’s train wreck of a longest book, The Reality Dysfunction (★). It’s also not really a novel; it’s an omnibus of three novels, which are not themselves really novels either but are in fact shared-world story collections. Am I splitting hairs? Probably. But hey, that’s what I’m here for.
• This year’s shortest book was “The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End and Further Still” (★★★), by Catherynne M. Valente, which is also not a book; it’s a short story. But all Goodreads has is a hammer, so everything looks like a nail.
• My least popular book this year was Major Karnage (★★), by Gord Zajac. I don’t remember exactly what this was about, but I do remember that you shouldn’t talk to Major Karnage about The War. Which war? Shhhh! We don’t talk about it!
• My most popular book was Sharp Objects (★★★★) by Gillian Flynn, which, as usual for a Gillian Flynn novel, is about women behaving very badly.
• This year’s page count was down a bit, only 18,391 pages across 52 books. Maybe I needed to DNF a few longer books instead of all those short ones. More on that momentarily.
• The book I read this year that was most highly-rated by the Goodreads community was Caliban’s War (★★★★★), the second installment of “The Expanse”, by James S.A. Corey, which has an average Goodreads rating of 4.39. I read the first one way back in 2019, not long after getting out of the hospital, so I really felt for the poor captain when he woke up in sick bay that time with a tube coming out of a let’s call it “rather private” body part. I also felt bad about his ship’s coffee maker getting destroyed during the climactic battle. I don’t remember if he got a new coffee maker in Caliban’s War but he definitely had the tube out by then. (The third book in the series, Abaddon’s Gate, had a few minor pacing problems and got ★★★★ from me.)
• My average rating for this year came in at 2.8 stars, a rating which was brought way down by the lengthy run of ★ DNF stinkers I encountered near the end of the year, which I alluded to above.
• This year, my ★★★★★-rated books were The Guns Above, Ancillary Justice, Gideon the Ninth, and the aforementioned Caliban’s War. Of those, Gideon the Ninth was easily my favorite.

Here’s the complete breakdown of my ratings at Goodreads this year:

And now, without further ado, here is the Year In Books That Was for 2025:

Next up, we have stats from The StoryGraph, an alternative to Goodreads that, among other things, actually still lets people look at it without requiring them to make an account (a restriction adopted by both Goodreads and Last.fm in the last several years, possibly to stop their data from being scraped by bots, or possibly just to be dickish). This makes The StoryGraph much easier to use for sharing book information, and, as another benefit, the StoryGraph also supports fractional star ratings in 0.25 increments, allowing the obsessive data collectors such as myself to leave much more accurate scores. The StoryGraph also provides a year-end wrap-up, which has a bunch of new features as opposed to last year, I think. And look! It has, as the name of the site would suggest, graphs! (For the online version, which includes the ability to drill down into categories if you are that manner of data nerd¹, click here.)

And that was the year in books for 2025! Stay tuned for the year in music, with stats provided by Last.fm, which—unlike some music services I could mention—provides the year-end statistics at the end of the year, where they belong.

1. And if you’ve gotten this far, you probably are. ↩︎
2. Possibly the issue is that I was reading Gideon the Ninth while waiting at the DMV, where normal rules of time and space cease to apply. ↩︎