Now that the year has ended, we look back at our reading resolutions for this year and reflect on the past year.
Mariana Ruiz
I moved home to a new state this year and left behind many boxes of books. Despite that, I managed to read and review more than a hundred books, both for this site and in Spanish for different venues. I also continued writing my books as well (I am writing a long essay about human extinction and have read some tremendous books for that one). I call that a win despite missing my full-to-top-capacity shelves.
I have to confess I’ve been cheating on my Stephen King with Lee Child. Call them blockbusters, but those Reacher novels are pure adrenaline. I am on the tenth by order of appearance and have to commend Tripwire, Without Fail, and The Hard Way. Child knows his dialogues, his geography, and some interesting tidbits about the vast machinery that is the US Army.
As for diverse voices, I am resolutely including a wider range of works in translation and diverse authors in our Stack Overflow. I got my wish in 2025 and got to include a review of a Bolivian children’s book in the US market! The best book in translation I reviewed was My Presentation Today Is About the Anaconda by Bibi Dumon Tak. Pilgrim Codex was a close second.
Jenny Bristol
I made my 25-book goal!
But I didn’t read any of the books I anticipated reading in 2025. I did start The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, but it didn’t at all grab me like his other books usually do, so I’m still not done with it. I do plan to finish it, but other books have seemed more shiny this year. I still haven’t re-read Atomic Habits, partly because I only just found the box it was packed in since we moved last summer.
Most of the books I’ve read in 2025 have been in audiobook form, as it has been easier to consume books that way when I’m driving or crocheting or folding laundry. Any physical or ebooks take longer for me to read, but I still always seem to end up with at least one of each type of book going at the same time. A couple of them I’ve been working on for a year or longer, so maybe I need to buckle down and finish them.
In 2025, I read a bunch of different genres of books, most of which were quite enjoyable. I mentioned my favorites in our recent Favorite Books of 2025 post, but some others that I enjoyed were the memoirs Say Everything: A Memoir by Ione Skye (I learned a ton about her, wow) and The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne (a fascinating look into specific circles during a specific time); a fun time-travel/romance book Remember Me Tomorrow by Farah Heron; leading the “weird” category The You You Are: A Spiritual Biography of You, which is connected to the show Severance and is so strange but very on-brand for its “author”; and the fascinating slice-of-life book Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson, author of the Moomin books and materials. It was a look at a portion of her life, living with her partner on a deserted island for many summers.
Though my year of reading books ended up very different from what I had planned, I do like having intentions and lists about books I want to read, in case I can’t think of anything or need some inspiration. But, since my ultimate goal is just to keep reading, and hit the same number of books as the last two digits of the current year, I don’t beat myself up about taking an unexpected turn and reading other random books, whatever strikes my fancy. I cherish the freedom to just read whatever I want to read! I haven’t been in college for three decades, so I usually just read for pleasure now. And following my curiosity keeps life fresh.
Robin Brooks
My resolutions last year were very arm-wavy. Formed from a nagging sense that I needed to read more. I did try to do that, but going into 2026, I still have the same feeling, so perhaps I didn’t succeed. I have found I need more sleep these days, and this has massively cut into my reading time.
I completely failed to read advance review copies on time. Well, I think I managed it for the first month before breaking down. Reading review copies almost completely derailed my love of books this year. The need to keep up with books I’d been sent made reading suddenly feel like a chore. I have read some great books this year, but as the summer finished, I felt like I was reading out of obligation, when there were other books I’d much rather be jumping into.
In the end, I took a break from reviewing new books and have been rummaging through the big piles of books I have lying around. Some of these did include books I’ve had sitting around for a few years, so I did go some way to fulfilling my pledge to read some of my older, unread titles.
During my reviewing break, I reassessed what I like to read and why I like to review – some of this will lead into my forthcoming 2026 resolutions. One side-effect of this was exploring more general articles and reviews about books, seeking out other creators and reading the books they enjoyed. The upshot of this has led to even more titles being added to my virtual reading list. I now have a digital list of titles that stretches to 100 books. When added to my physical pile of books, it’s clear I have an unsustainable wish-list!
Jonathan H. Liu
The first part of my reading resolutions for 2025 were actually about not reading: in an attempt to reclaim some floor space in my office and make it a place where I’d actually like to sit and read, I resolved to get rid of at least one book each week that I hadn’t read yet. This was pretty tough, but I did manage to keep up with it. I set myself a weekly reminder alarm, and most weeks I managed to choose at least two or three books to weed, so over the course of the year I think I probably removed somewhere close to 200 books. Given that I added about 285 books to my “to read” pile this year (but then did get rid of many of those after finishing them), I think maybe I managed to break even this year in terms of accumulation. Baby steps!
(If you compare the photo at the top of this post with the photo from the beginning of 2024, you can see that there is more floor space now … just not a lot.)
Of the specific books I had listed to read, I did write up the Inkworld series by Cornelia Funke (after re-reading the whole series), and I read City Spies: London Calling by James Ponti in July. As for Against Platforms by Mike Pepi, I gave it a shot but despite the fact that it was a slim book, it was a little too academic for me and I’ll admit my brain just was just not digesting it. I did agree with a lot of the parts I did read, though there were bits here and there that I wasn’t entirely on board with.
I did manage to read four more books in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series (Books 4, 5, 6, 7) by Matt Dinniman, which continue to get progressively thicker. I’m excited that there will be some tabletop games based on the series coming next year—hopefully I’ll get to try one of those!—and I also backed a crowdfunding campaign for a comic book following one of the side characters so I’m looking forward to that.
I didn’t manage to return to May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans, but I’m hanging onto that one because it still feels quite relevant. (I may need to restart at this point.) And I did finally finish reading The Spiderwick Chronicles.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased that I managed to stick to most of my reading resolutions for the year!
