Happy New Year, everyone! As we tumble ahead into this season, I wanted to share the Goodreads “My Year in Books” infographic. I still track my reading in an Excel sheet, but I am no longer fascinated by a month-by-month self-reflection about my reading year. Here, I’ve scooped some images from Goodreads and will add a few reflections to follow. You can see the interactive online infographic here, where you can click on each book and see my ratings or reviews. I hope you have a beautiful year of reading!

I met my personal challenge of 120 books for 2025–123 books, actually, when all is said and done.

Unfortunately, no one is sending me to the Mariana Trench to check this fact. Still, my decade of tracking reading shows some consistencies between my yearly book count (on the left) and page count (on the right). 2019 was the year of my PhD viva voce, so lots of reading. In 2023, I was ill and burnt out, and I used reading as a balm. When I could no longer read screens in the fall of 2023, I soaked in paperbacks, which tumbled into 2024. 2025 was closer to what I would call “normal,” except that I read fewer books by audio (which isn’t shown here).

As I have been hoping for a decade now, Goodreads is secretly playing with some of its infographic features. Some of this is quite sweet, like a 5-star gallery, the most popular books I’ve read, and top genres.

But what happens when the badges become a kind of competition? I highly doubt I am in the top 5% of readers, though I quite like the first infographic below. It could be that I have written many reviews. I would rather know what reviews have been helpful to others, honestly.

As I will confess in a review that drops on Thursday, I’m quite okay with turning reading into a game. I don’t find it creepy and evil, like when Grammarly sends me an email saying that I am “lapping the competition.” What competition? I mean, it’s a spelling app. I’ll be watching these infographics to see if they move into the competition zone.

What I would love, though, is a seasonal or even monthly reading review. I began 2026 partway into Ursula K. Le Guin‘s Earthsea chronicles (for a brilliant BA Honours thesis) and Harry Potter. I was also well into rereading Terry Pratchett as the year began. I started 2025 with the full-colour edition of The Last Hero (#27) and finished in December with Snuff (#39)–the antepenultimate Discworld novel. I have just begun Raising Steam (#40), so I’ll finish this Winter. Last year, I finished Andrew Peterson’s brilliant Wingfeather Tales, Stephen King‘s Bachman books and most of the Castle Rock stories, Asimov’s original Foundations trilogy (didn’t love it), John Wyndham’s four major novels (I love Midwich Cuckoos best), Jane Austen‘s major works (still reading through her manuscripts, slowly), and Wodehouse’s humorous Blandings Castle tales. I continued working through R.F. Kuang–whom I admire but struggle with–and returned to some Octavia Butler material.

Jeepers, as I look at 2025, it is mostly fantasy fiction–about half of which are rereads. There are a few other features, though.

Last year, I began my Podcasting course and have continued teaching in communication and leadership, so I typically had one of these books on my desk in ’25. As part of a chapter that is now somewhere in the land of copy editing, I did a good amount of J.R.R. Tolkien scholarship reading (and am about halfway through his poems). Throughout the year, I was consistently working on C.S. Lewis and L.M. Montgomery–though I was not typically reading whole books. I also picked up my Shakespeare-of-the-month challenge and finished the History Cycle in early 2026.

I would love to do a write-up of my favourite 2025 discoveries, but I’ll list them here: Mark Sampson’s local horror, Lowfield, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, and Diana Glyer’s The Major and the Missionary: The Letters of Warren Hamilton Lewis and Blanche Biggs (which I read along with Warren’s journal and some of Tolkien’s letters).

And then there are badges! I love badges–though I wish Goodreads would tell me when and how I won them. Besides getting monthly badges, I also received badges for Memorable Memoirs, Spine Tinglers, Century-old Classics, and for reading Black authors. I’m curious where the badge for reading indie writers is. Or Canadian writers. Or poetry.

It has been another good read of reading for me. I appreciate the badges, but I am richer for having read. I leaned on books I loved and finished off series in a year where I am slowly awakening to what I hope is new health. Best to all of you, dear readers, in the literary year to come! Feel free to share your list in the comments.

Here is the full infographic: