The Books I Read in 2025

Mon Feb 02 2026

Introduction

Covers of the books I read this year

It is very late to be doing a review of anything 2025 related, but I've been having a bit of a blogging block, shall I say, so I thought I'd give myself a relatively simple post to start the new year off with.

Unlike in 2024, I did not challenge myself to read outside of my comfort zone genres or to read a certain number of books in 2025. The reason being that I knew I'd be having a challenging enough time doing my master's and I'd be reading lots in my studies anyway. Thus, I let myself read whatever felt right and would help me to chill out.

First of all, kudos to the ever popular Lessons in Chemistry (opens new window) for keeping me reading at the beginning of the year. From the cover alone, I never thought that this was the type of book for me, but after I'd watched the series, I gave it a try. The main character, Elizabeth Zott, is wonderfully likeable and ambitious (aspirationally-so) and the dog is hilarious.

Outside of my usual, I read two children's books this year, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (opens new window) and Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy (opens new window). I wanted to vet them before giving them to my nephew, but they turned out to be fun reads for myself. I might turn to their sequels if I'm in reading funk in the future.

While in previous years, I read a lot of queer fiction, I only read four books in this category in 2025. I read the young adult books, They Both Die at the End (opens new window) and The First to Die at the End (opens new window), both by Adam Silvera. They weren't as morbid as their titles make them sound and were enjoyable, easy reads.

Make Sure You Die Screaming by Zee Carlstrom (opens new window) was unhinged, but enjoyable. I wouldn't mind reading more books in the road trip sub-genre.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (opens new window) felt like a must-read, because of its critical acclaim. But it's literary fiction and I suck at getting through literary fiction. It often feels like its just a bunch of sentences with no storyline. But after hearing the author speak on The Interview (opens new window) podcast, I gave it a try. It still felt like a bunch of sentences with only a touch of a storyline, but this time, there sentences were, shall I say, pretty?

I read five memoirs - one of my favourite genres. I can't decide which of these were my favourite. For the sake of wide appeal, I'd say Born A Crime by Trevor Noah (opens new window), but for the sake of my own interest, I liked all three of Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (opens new window), Wavewalker by Suzanne Heywood (opens new window), and The Last Secret Agent: My Life as a Spy Behind Nazi Lines by Pippa Latour and Jude Dobson (opens new window) (the braveness of this woman!) equally.

The other memoir I read was Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams (opens new window). I don't feel like Careless People fits in quite neatly in the memoir category, because it is more about the company Sarah worked at (Facebook) and the people she worked with than about her personal life per se. The book is far from perfect, to speak diplomatically, but it does contain a lot of content that lets you understand the kind of [irresponsible, reckless, selfish] motivations of the people that run Facebook.

I read one Afrikaans book, Oos by Marion Erskine (opens new window), to tick off that box for the year and it was actually not bad at all. It is fiction, but it reads like a memoir about an Afrikaans guy that goes to work in Taiwan and it's about all the new things he experiences there and the friendships he makes.

Lastly, my favourite book of the year was...

...Butter by Asako Yusuki (opens new window)! I saw mentions of it online before, but when I saw the copy in a book store, something just drew me to it. When I read the backcover and saw that it mentioned food and a journalist getting to know an alleged criminal, along with the funny quote of "There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine," I was in!

There's a lot I loved about this book. Its obsession with food, for one. It inspired me to eat much too much Japanese short grain rice with butter and soy sauce.

Butter is strange, unique, feminist-but-not-in-a-preachy-way, introspective, full of twists and turns, funny, brutally honest about the human condition, and apparently also classified as literary fiction even though it very much has a storyline.

All in all, a great year of reading for pleasure.