Russ Allbery: 2025 Book Reading in Review

In 2025, I finished and reviewed 32 books, not counting another five books
I’ve finished but not yet reviewed and which will therefore roll over to
2026.

This was not a great reading year, although not my worst reading year
since I started keeping track. I’m not entirely sure why, although part of
the explanation was that I hit a bad stretch of books in spring of 2025
and got into a bit of a reading slump. Mostly, though, I shifted a lot of
reading this year to short non-fiction (newsletters and doom-scrolling)
and spent rather more time than I intended watching YouTube videos, and
sadly each hour in the day can only be allocated one way.

This year felt a bit like a holding pattern. I have some hopes of being
more proactive and intentional in 2026. I’m still working on finding a
good balance between all of my hobbies and the enjoyment of mindless
entertainment.

The best book I read this year was also the last book I reviewed (and yes,
I snuck the review under the wire for that reason): Bethany Jacobs’s
This Brutal Moon,
the conclusion of the Kindom Trilogy that started with
These Burning Stars.
I thought the first two books of the series were interesting but flawed,
but the conclusion blew me away and improved the entire trilogy in
retrospect. Like all books I rate 10 out of 10, I’m sure a large part of
my reaction is idiosyncratic, but two friends of mine also loved the
conclusion so it’s not just me.

The stand-out non-fiction book of the year was Rory Stewart’s
Politics on the
Edge. I have a lot of disagreements with Stewart’s political positions
(the more I listen to him, the more disagreements I find), but he is an
excellent memoirist who skewers the banality, superficiality, and contempt
for competence that has become so prevailing in centrist and right-wing
politics. It’s hard not to read this book and despair of electoralism and
the current structures of governments, but it’s bracing to know that even
some people I disagree with believe in the value of expertise.

I also finished Suzanne Palmer’s excellent Finder Chronicles series,
reading The Scavenger
Door and Ghostdrift. This series is some of the best science fiction I’ve
read in a long time and I’m sad it is over (at least for now). Palmer has
a new, unrelated book coming in 2026 (Ode to the Half-Broken), and
I’m looking forward to reading that.

This year, I experimented with re-reading books I had already reviewed for
the first time since I started writing reviews. After my reading slump, I
felt like revisiting something I knew I liked, and therefore re-read C.J.
Cherryh’s Cyteen and
Regenesis.
Cyteen mostly held up, but Regenesis was worse than I had
remembered. I experimented with a way to add on to my previous reviews,
but I didn’t like the results and the whole process of re-reading and
re-reviewing annoyed me. I’m counting this as a failed experiment, which
means I’ve still not solved the problem of how to revisit series that I
read long enough ago that I want to re-read them before picking up the new
book. (You may have noticed that I’ve not read the new Jacqueline Carey
Kushiel novel, for example.)

You may have also noticed that I didn’t start a new series re-read, or
continue my semi-in-progress re-reads of Mercedes Lackey or David Eddings.
I have tentative plans to kick off a new series re-read in 2026, but I’m
not ready to commit to that yet.

As always, I have no firm numeric goals for the next year, but I hope to
avoid another reading slump and drag my reading attention back from
lower-quality and mostly-depressing material in 2026.

The full analysis includes some
additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.