October through December novel-reading, and 2025 novel-reading roundup

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I continue to pretty much only use this blog for these posts, but I'm glad I have a place to make these posts. In 2025 I read 38 books, including the 12 detailed below; this is (just like last year was) my lowest number since 2016, which is maybe not surprising given this year's trials and distractions (chiefly, being painfully bedridden and being happily invested in other kinds of stories, including especially collaborative ones with my friends). As usual, I'll immediately make a comment below with the whole year's list, and then follow it up later with another comment full of enthusiastically but not entirely reliably tabulated numbers.

October

Martha Wells - Fugitive Telemetry (reread)
T. Kingfisher - Hemlock and Silver
Premee Mohamed - The Butcher of the Forest

November

Martha Wells - System Collapse (reread)
Emily Tesh - The Incandescent
Nghi Vo - The Brides of High Hill
Christine Love - Star Sword Nemesis
Robert Jackson Bennett - The Tainted Cup

December

Elia Barcelo - Natural Consequences
Megan Giddings - Meet Me at the Crossroads
Elizabeth Knox - The Absolute Book (reread)
Hache Pueyo - But Not Too Bold

Comments

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Full 2025 novel list:

January

Hisashi Kashiwai - The Kamogawa Food Detectives
Shelley Jay Shore - Rules for Ghosting
August Clarke - Metal From Heaven

February

Samuel R. Delany - The Atheist in the Attic
Nghi Vo - The City in Glass
Anne de Marcken - It Lasts Forever and then It's Over

March

A. J. Demas - The House of the Red Balconies
Justinian Huang - The Emperor and the Endless Palace

April

Amal El-Mohtar - The River Has Roots
Susanna Clarke - The Wood at Midwinter
Julia Armfield - Private Rites
Martha Wells - All Systems Red (reread)

May

Kerstin Hall - Asunder
Martha Wells - Artificial Condition (reread)
Isaac Fellman - Notes From A Regicide

June

KJ Charles - Subtle Blood
Martha Wells - Rogue Protocol (reread)
Izzy Wasserstein - These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart
Martha Wells - Exit Strategy (reread)

July

Juliet Marillier - Heart's Blood
Kaliane Bradley - The Ministry of Time
Martha Wells - Network Effect (reread)
Olivia Waite - Murder By Memory

August

Katherine Addison - The Tomb of Dragons

September

C. J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher - Alliance Unbound
Solvej Balle - On the Calculation of Volume I

October

Martha Wells - Fugitive Telemetry (reread)
T. Kingfisher - Hemlock and Silver
Premee Mohamed - The Butcher of the Forest

November

Martha Wells - System Collapse (reread)
Emily Tesh - The Incandescent
Nghi Vo - The Brides of High Hill
Christine Love - Star Sword Nemesis
Robert Jackson Bennett - The Tainted Cup

December

Elia Barcelo - Natural Consequences
Megan Giddings - Meet Me at the Crossroads
Elizabeth Knox - The Absolute Book (reread)
Hache Pueyo - But Not Too Bold

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Okay, hi. It's statistics and demographics time!

With the standard caveats that my information is incomplete, my math is uncertain, categories are heuristics, and these numbers are about charting trends in my reading rather than pinning anyone with certainty to the wall of any particular identity, 5 of the books I read this year were by men, including 2 by white men and 3 by men of colour; 32 were by 26 women, including 25 by 20 white women (seven by Martha Wells and 0.5 each by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher) and 7 by 6 women of colour (two by Nghi Vo); and one by a nonbinary author, who is white. Of the authors I've counted as women or men, I am aware that three are trans, including two white women and a white man. All in all, that's 28 books by 23 white authors and 10 by 9 authors of colour.

My reading continued to skew to recent releases, with 10 books published in 2025 and 15 more published in 2024; by contrast, I only read one book, 1993's Natural Consequences, older than the current century, and none at all published before my own birth. On the novelty-to-familiarity axis, 12 were by authors whose work was new to me, while five were sequels to or otherwise in series with other things I'd read, and 8 were outright rereads.

According to my capricious perceptions of genre in the moments I made my records, I read 34 SFF books, four litfic (two of which overlapped with the SFF list), and four genre romance (two of which overlapped with the SFF list; the other two were both historical).

What else do I have? 22 were ebooks, which means that 16 were physical books. 22, though not the same 22, were read through the Ottawa Public Library or one of the libraries with whom they have e-lending treaties, including one interlibrary loan. Two were read aloud to my partner. Four were translations from languages other than English. And 16 were novellas or shorter, so if I treat each of those as half a book, my overall number is 30. Is that still higher than 2016? A glance at my 2016 list identifies three novellas, which would bring that number down to 31.5, so by this metric I guess not! The real test would be to compare the number of pages, which I say in lieu of having any intention to actually do so unless my having typed this sentence turns out to itch too much for me to resist it. Regardless, let's post this comment now.

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There is one book overlap between the two I read out loud and the seven I read for Murderbot book club, and the eight books in that Venn diagram are also my eight rereads for the year, which means that every book I reread I was reading (in one way or another) with someone else who was reading it too.