I’ve seen a number of posts come across my screen about the books people have read over the last year. Now, I haven’t done any reading challenges or set goals. I don’t even use Goodreads.
I do log my reading though. It’s just a simple system of recording the title and author in a little notebook. I did make a brief attempt this year of writing my thoughts about each book in another notebook as I finished them. But that habit didn’t stick well. I was always too eager to move on to the next thing to stop and write.
I read approximately 43 books this year. The thing about a notebook is that you have to count by hand instead of getting a nice badge like an app will give you. You don’t get all the other detailed statistics either. C’est la vie. I could do more thorough (ac)counting, or I could spend that time reading.
It turns out that hitting impressive numbers like that is easy if you read a lot of books of poetry like I did. Sixteen of those books were thin books of poems by various authors. I have gotten in the habit of simple grabbing a random chapbook from the poetry section of the library every time I’m in there. It’s a nice way to expose yourself to a wide array of stuff, though there are drawbacks. I’m not counting two books—Emily Wilson’s translations of the Iliad and Odyssey—because they are more substantial and read more like novels simply due to their scale.
Of the other fiction I read, most of it was fantasy, with some science fiction sprinkled in. I leaned toward older, “classic” authors more than modern ones. I did not take much advantage of my Clarkesworld subscription, but at least I have that as a backlog of reading material.
I started off with a few of Stanislaw Lem’s stories. I haven’t thought much about them since the beginning of the year so my memory is a little hazy. They’re the thoughtful kind of science fiction that realizes the really interesting things are not how big of a special effects budget the movie adaptation of your book can justify. That the questions of how you solve the problems of space travel are not nearly as important as the questions of what you do when that travel brings you to places and things you do not, cannot, understand.
At the other end of the year, the books I read most recently were the first three of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series. These books were interesting, but they just haven’t had much time to digest in my brain. But they’re interesting fantasy that don’t have any magic swords—I didn’t know that was allowed! /s.
I also read a bunch of Lord Dunsany’s stories. I think I’ll need to write a whole post on him at some point. Suffice to say, I’m a fan, and am having to savor books while there are still new ones to read.
In terms of more trendy fantasy, a friend recommended Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes to me. It’s the epicenter of “cozy fantasy” and it delivers on that. It’s a bit fluffier than the books I’ve talked about above, but that’s okay. There is very much a place on my shelf for books that are just fun to unwind with. I read a chapter or two at a time in bed before I went to sleep and that was very nice.
I don’t tend to read a whole lot of non-fiction. Maybe that is a goal I should make for next year. If only to satisfy my pride in having omnivorous tastes in books.
The books I read tended to be English class adjacent, about reading and writing. I do like a good book on bibliophily, my gold standard for which is Anne Fadiman’s collection of essays Ex Libris. I didn’t read any books about books that were that good.
I also read some history, Eckhart Frahm’s book Assyria. It was reasonably approachable to my layman’s eye. It is longer than what I usually get from the library, but owing to a technology “incident,” the usual due dates were not in effect for a good while, which made a 400 page volume like this a lot more doable.
On that note, I want to mention that the majority of the books I read came from the library. I make space in my budget specifically for books, but it would not cover nearly this many. Public libraries are such a wonderful resource.
I could give the full list, but I’ll be honest: I’m too lazy to type it all out tonight. But, what I will give you are some of the other book posts I’ve been reading.
Here’s to a 2025 full of good reading!
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