My Year in Books 2025

 by Sybil Johnson

It’s time for my annual reading wrap-up. January to December, just to make it clear. I say this because I once again participated in shepherd.com’s My 3 Favorite Reads. Their year runs from end of September 2024 to October 2025. 

Let’s start with Shepherd’s. Those books were: 

• All Systems Red by Martha Wells
• Bell, Book and Corpses by T.C. LoTempio 
• A Murder Most French by Colleen Cambridge 

I won’t go into details here. You can read my comments at https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025/f/sybil-johnson (BTW, shepherd.com is in the process of changing over to BookDNA.com. The old shepherd.com links are still supposed to work afterwards.)

Number of books I “consumed” (audio plus print/ebook) in 2025: 85. Last year it was 105. I blame cataract surgeries and jury duty for the decline. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. 

Around 30% non-fiction (same as last year), 54% crime (middle-grade books, cozies, audiobooks, historicals, thrillers and traditional.) The other 16% were science fiction/fantasy and horror. I listened to 3 audiobooks this past year. One was an AI generated voice. Not bad listening, but I definitely prefer human narrators. The others were multi-actor Audible originals. See below. 

I didn’t set a reading goal for last year. I’ve decided to try for 100 books in 2026. Got to get it back up there! 

I continued reading the old Nancy Drew books from the 60s/70s. I’m getting pretty close to the end. I could have finished this long ago, but I like to stretch it out.

Cozy/traditional highlights: 

• Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood (I started reading this after watching the PBS series of the first book. Enjoyed the book a lot.) 
• MacDeath by Cindy Brown. This is the first book in the Ivy Meadows series. I’ve had a lot of the series on my Kindle for quite awhile now. Finally, started to read it. Glad I did.
• Mistletoe Murders Audible originals: This is an audiobook series that isn’t available in book form. Really enjoyed these stories. Similar to the Hallmark “Mistletoe Murders” series, which is based on the audiobooks, but not exactly the same.Highly recommend it.
  

Non-fiction highlights:

• The Alaskan Blonde by James T. Bartlett. A true crime story that I was unfamiliar with before I picked up this book. Well-written, well-researched and an interesting read.
  
• Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials by Marion Gibson.
• The Kerry Girls: Emigration and the Earl Grey Scheme by Kay Moloney Caball. I had no idea about this scheme until I read this book. It was a program of the British government from 1848-1850 where over 4,000 young, orphaned Irish workhouse girls were sent to Australia to address workhouse overcrowding and a severe shortage of women in the colonies. The aim was for them to become domestic servants and wives. 

Historical Mystery highlights

• The Gilded Newport Mysteries by Alyssa Maxwell. I continue to enjoy this series.
• The American in Paris series by Colleen Cambridge. I continue to enjoy this series. 

Science Fiction and Horror highlights:

• I discovered the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells this year. I loved it so much I read them all, one right after the other. I also watched the Apple TV series based on the books. I thought it was good as well. Highly, highly recommend these.
• Dracula by Bram Stoker. Okay, I’d read this one a long, long time ago. I decided to reread it after watching the new Nosferatu film and rewatching the old silent Nosferatu film (this one’s much better in my opinion.) I’d forgotten that it is written as a series of letters, diary entries, etc. If it were written now it would probably include texts and emails.

That’s my reading summary. There were a lot of other good books I read over the year. These are just the highlights.

How was your reading year? Anything you particularly liked that you want to give a shout out to? 

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Words of the year for 2025. I wrote a post on these at the end of November. Not all of the woty were in then. Here are the ones that were selected after that post: 

Merriam-Webster and American Dialect Society both chose slop which is defined as “content (posts, videos, articles) deliberately provocative or offensive to generate anger, clicks and traffic.” May or may not be generated by AI.

Oxford English Dictionary chose rage bait, which is online content designed to provoke anger.