2025: Some Reading Stats

It’s time for some reading stats! Always such a fun post to put together, and I love reading other people’s – do pop a link in the comments if you’ve done something similar. As usual, I’ll be comparing to last year’s stats – and hopefully you’ve already spotted my 10 favourite books from last year’s reading.

Number of books read
I read 216 books last year, which might be an all-time-high? The next stat will explain why it is so high – a rather surprising 27 books up on the previous year. I know we always say it’s about quality rather than quantity, and I don’t think it was the best year ever for memorable reads, though I did read a good 20 or so that I think are superlative. Any year with at least one wow-this-is-so-good book is a good year.

Number of audiobooks
This is where the numbers ramped up. I listened to 94 audiobooks last year, up from 71 last year. Which means my print total (122) is very similar to my print total the previous year (118). I wonder if this number will go down now, since I have cancelled my Audible subscription – but also have discovered the bounty of BorrowBox and Libby.

Male/female writers
I read 145 books by women, 68 books by men, and three books by men and women. That means it was 67% books by women – I’m always surprised by how consistently I read around two-thirds books by women, since I don’t set any targets or intentions around that. (The previous two years have been 64% and 69% female writers.)

Fiction/Non-fiction
My fiction number barely changed since 2024 – up to 142 from 138. The book jump was in non-fiction – up to 74 from 51. Which means 34% of my reads were non-fiction, whereas it usually hovers around the 25% mark. One of the reasons is because I tend to prefer non-fiction audiobooks (or very plotty fiction), so the audio binge bumped up the number. Usually I read more non-fiction by men, but women won 44 vs 30.

Books in translation
11 books, one up on 2024. They were from Italian, German, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, Polish, Hebrew, and Persian.

Re-reads
Matching 2024’s all-time-high of 18 re-reads. I even read Mrs Dalloway twice in 2025 – both via the exceptional audiobook that I have evangelised about a lot. As always, a lot of rereading was for podcast, British Library Women Writers, or book club, but I did listen to a lot of Jane Austen too.

New-to-me authors
Half of my favourite books from 2025 were by authors I hadn’t read before – and, across the year, 91 books were by new-to-me authors. That’s 42%, extremely similar to the previous year’s 41%. Again, I didn’t set any targets, but I do like the idea of meeting new authors.

Persephones
My ambling-along attempts to read more from my Persephone shelves never seems to actually happen in any significant way. This year, it was just one – Crooked Cross by Sally Carson. (And 75% of another that isn’t very good, but I suspect I’ll finish eventually.)

Most surprisingly good book
I was delighted to fall for two books by authors I’ve read quite a lot of before – Catherine Carter by Pamela Hansford Johnson and Treasure Hunt by Molly Keane. Hansford Johnson and Keane were both on my list of ‘enjoyable but not exceptional authors’, and these books were both head and shoulders above the others I’ve read by them. I also never expected to enjoy Paul Auster as much as I did.

Most disappointing book
I hadn’t realised that This Little World by Stella Benson was travel writing rather than fiction, and she was so much less fun and quirky than usual. And I had hoped to love Ariel by Sylvia Plath – you’ll have to listen to the Tea or Books? episode on that for our controversial takes on Plath’s poetry.

Best title
There is something about Snow Road Station by Elizabeth Hay that (accurately) made me sure that I would enjoy it. People To Be Loved by Preston Sprinkle has the bonus of a good title and a truly excellent author name.

Worst title
No Mama No by Verity Bargate is a very good novella about a young mother struggling in the most off-kilter way – but that title makes it sound like those dreadful misery memoirs that cluttered up charity shops in the early 2000s. (The other novella I read by her this year, Tit For Tat, was also very good – but when you realise what the title is referring to, it feels rather too much on the nose.) Honorary mention for Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro, which was my favourite book of the year but has a title that sounds like fridge-magnet philosophy.

Most misleading title
Trial By Terror by Paul Gallico sounded like a schlocky horror novel, but was actually a politically interesting look at journalism, war, integrity and a good dollop of adventure thrown in.

Was this book written for me?
It is lovely to read a book that feels so purposefully created for my tastes. This year, that was Recommended! by Nicola Wilson, about the Book Society. Thankfully it was also done extremely well.

Animals in book titles
I had an all-time-low of only three last year. This year… seven:  Proust and the Squid, Rabbit Foot Bill, The Swan in the Evening, The Snake Has All The Lines, My Good Bright Wolf, The Blind Owl, Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear.

Strange things that happened in books this year
A girl tasted emotions, a murder was solved from purgatory, a woman obeyed her diary, people got lost inside a rubbish dump, ex-lovers went back in time, a man restarted his day multiple times to fix his mistakes, children spontaneously combusted, a plague killed all but one woman, an apocalypse killed all but one household, a man levitated in his sleep, a fortune teller fooled herself, a gameshow sent contestants to parallel universes, and Georgiana Darcy travelled through time to solved a murder on the set of Sense and Sensibility.