Kia ora and apologies for lateness. But with lateness comes improved accuracy (an error in my spreadsheet meant one of my top 3 reads of the year wasn't featured in my Best of 2025 Instagram post).
2025 was unprecedented. Certainly in terms of the quantity I read. 149 books in total.
The year before I read 100 (which was a record). My target for 2025 was 100 again. See below all the graphs for my other targets.
(And see all my previous annual reading posts here: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017... 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, & 2010.)The main reason for overachieving was signing on to be a judge for the fiction category of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. This meant I had to read 52 books from late September to around New Years. It's not even accurate to call this a pile of reading. It was several piles of reading.
(And with the short-listing and eventual winner yet to be decided, I still have a fair amount of re-reading ahead of me, thus potentially messing with my 2026 reading stats...)
I've included these books in my overall stats, but when we get to the best reads, I've excluded all NZ books released in 2025 so as to retain confidentially/mystery/plausible deniability until the final awards announcement in May. But I should say that IF I had included these books in contention, six of these books would have been in my top 11 (there was a three-way tie for 9th). So there were definitely some good'uns!
Reading stats
A continual theme here will be how the Ockhams reading has skewed the stats. Starting with year of publication. It not unusual for my reading to be dominated by books published in the last 2 years. In 2024, it was 20 books released that year vs 25 in 2023. But in 2025, it was 78 (52%) from that year and only 19 from the previous (13%).
In terms of nationality, normally the top 3 is US, NZ and UK, with NZ sometimes on top by a slim margin... Not so slim in 2025:
In terms of the type of book (novel vs story collections vs non-fiction etc), novels normally come out on top. Last year 60% of books read were novels... this year, 60% were novels. Which is interesting. There were a bunch of story collections and a couple of novella collections in my judging reading... but the reason novels didn't dominate further is because while doing my Ockhams reading, I didn't/couldn't listen to fiction audiobooks while commuting or gardening or whenever I'd normally slip an audiobook on. So it upped the non-fiction quotient slightly and bought balance to the force.
Okay, that's enough graphs. One last thing to do before I re-reveal my top ten from the 97 non-Ockham eligible books I read in 2025... to check in on how I did against the reading targets I set for 2025 (long before I knew I'd be judging anything).
- Read 100 books - TICK
- Read at least 10 single-author poetry collections - TICK (read 15)
- Read at least 20 physical books - TICK
- Read at least 10 non-fiction books by female authors - TICK (read 12)
- Non-white + translated > 40 - FAIL (27 read)
- Non-white + translated > 40
- Read at least three fat classics that around at least 100 years old
Top Ten Books I Read in 2025*
A little late to the revival, or maybe I'm the start of the 3rd wave, but v v v v v good.
Hadn't read this before. If you've only read Geoff's poetry, this novel is pretty much what you'd imagine his novel would be like. Alcoholism. Attention to life at the level of the sentence, the word, the syllable. And the sex scene - the chutzpah!
on the Booker Longlist [it subsequently won]... this one hit for me. V v v v v good.
Still thinking about Rejection (lol). Tony Tulathimutte really went there!
A Good Winter by Gigi Fenster (2021)
I missed this off my Jan-Feb post for some reason, but said this on BlueSky:
A creepy tour de force of narrator voice. Everyone will know an Olga (but this Olga out Olgas them!). So, so good. I can't believe it's 4 years since it came out already (blame the COVID years). Highly recommended.
The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe (2024)
All I said about this in my August post was, "Good", which is kind of rude. I've been a fan of Coe's since I read The Rotters Club and his biography of B.S. Johnson. Proof has Coe's signature trickfulness (as opposed to trickiness) on display. Could even be a good place to start, if you've never read him before.
Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabhattin Ali (1943)
Didn't say anything about this in my December post, but it was interesting on first listen, and doubly so after the foreword, which was put at the end of the audiobook, and provides some historical and biographical context that was illuminating. Reading a lot of physical books again this year made me realise how much I like the guff around the main text (dedications, acknowledgements etc), and you miss a lot of that with audiobooks. Having a reflection / appraisal of the work at the end of the audiobook is great. Like the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. I think I just want to go back to being an English Lit undergrad...
It's Only Drowning by David Litt (2025)
The first non-fiction book on the list. Again, I didn't say anything about it in December, when I was prepping for a long weekend trying to surf at Riverton. Litt's account of learning to surf, and surf alongside his MAGA-or-worse brother-in-law, is frequently hilarious.
Show Don't Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (2025)
What I said about it in October:
Will Sittenfeld get in the top ten next year for the threepeat? Time will tell!Kinda hated that a story made me empathise with Jeff Bezos. But: goooood stories
This is For Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee: the inventor of the World Wide Web (2025)
the rare book where the author gets the subtitle rather than the title. Made me feel a bit less dark on the future by showing how the internet could have been ruined multiple times over the last four decades so maybe there's hope yet.
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