2025 year in review | Bookshelf Fantasies

It’s the last day of 2025, and before it strikes midnight, it’s time to look back on my reading and blogging stats for the year. Overall, my sense is that it was a good reading year! I definitely read lots of book that I loved… but let’s see what the numbers reveal!

First, according to Goodreads:

*Not sure why this says 160 books read — my challenge and all other stats say 159, which is correct!*

Ha! I forgot that I reread Twilight this year after a visit to Forks over the summer!

I completed my 2025 Reading Challenge… but keep in mind my total includes graphic novels and children’s books as well as novels and big “serious” books.

I’m planning to lower my goal for 2026 by a lot. I’m aiming for 100 books in 2026. I want to give myself plenty of breathing room and allow space for books that take more time and concentration.

I really like the Goodreads graphics that I received in a wrap-up email last week:

Over on Storygraph, different sets of stats and views are available. From my challenge page, here’s where I stand as of December 31, 2025:

*I really like that audiobooks are tracked by hours, rather than pages. Makes sense!*

For my year in review:

*Yup, same books as on Goodreads… although the page count is slightly different, presumably due to accidentally selecting different editions on StoryGraph vs Goodreads*

*Kelley Armstrong doesn’t surprise me at all, but I was really puzzled by Alice Hoffman… until I remembered that I listened to several audiobooks of her short fiction while on a trip last spring!*

*I’m actually surprised that my average rating is pretty closely aligned with the stats from Goodreads, since StoryGraph allows fragments of stars and Goodreads only allows full stars*.

*I gave 5 stars to 30 books in 2025! That’s a pretty awesome feeling!*

This little tidbit made me laugh:

*So clearly not correct! But I guess what I learn from this is that I’ve missed out on marking books as owned on StoryGraph. Note to self: Do better in 2026!*

*More than three, actually — but for the handful of books that I put down within the first chapter or so, I didn’t even bother marking them as DNFs.*

I participated in three private challenges on StoryGraph as well:

Series Progress Challenge: I set myself a goal to read at least five books from series on my TBR — either by starting with the first book or reading at least one more from an already started series. And I did it! I’m planning to do something similar in 2026.
20th Century Decades Challenge: I decided to challenge myself to read one book from each decade of the 20th century. I did pretty well! I still need to read books from the 1920s and 1960s… and since this challenge is just for me — and because I do want to see it through — I’ve extended the end date by three months to give myself more time. My challenge, my rules!
Ideal Bookshelf 2025 Calendar: This was a fun one! As a holiday gift last year, I bought the 2025 Ideal Bookshelf calendar for my daughter, and then treated myself to one as well. My brilliant daughter decided it would be fun to create a challenge for the two of us, with the goal of reading one book from each month on the calendar. And I did it! Since two months were cooking/baking-themed, she made those bonuses. In the end, I read one per month of all the rest, plus one bonus book. We didn’t get the calendars for 2026, so this was a one-time challenge. I loved it!

In terms of blogging stats, I think I had a decent year!

Most of my referrers were search engines and WordPress reader. I had a few very odd days with 1000+ views — which is NOT my norm — and there was no particular reason for it. Chalk it up to a visit from the bots!

According to WordPress, these were my most-viewed posts from 2025:

I’m not sure how real any of this is. It’s not like the most-viewed book review posts got a significant number of comments relative to other book review posts — so again, I’m guessing a lot of this is bot-driven. I will note, however, that my small number of TV-related posts tend to get high numbers of reviews and comments… which is a bit weird for me, since most of my focus is books, not TV. (Sad commentary on today’s society? Or just another weird fluke of search engines and bots?)

Well… that was fun! I tend not to follow stats too closely during the year, but it’s interesting to see all the graphs and trends at year end.

Onward to 2026! Wishing one and all a year full of great books and happy reading hours!