New Year's Post

Happy New Year to you all!  I hope everyone’s holiday season was filled with positive vibes.

The Sunday Post is a news meme created by Caffeinated Reviewer. I'm also be linking up with Sunday Salon at ReaderBuzz. I will be posting on the first Sunday of each month and I hope you'll join me. Today’s post is a recap of 2025 and my upcoming plans for 2026.

My month of December contained very little reading so I don't really have anything to share on the final month of 2025. Instead, I'm going to jump right into my yearly recap.

2025

In 2025 I gave myself two challenges: My Good Reads Challenge was to read at least 12 books, and my second challenge was to participate in the Pick Your Poison Challenge (a challenge that was discontinued this year) by reading at least 13 books off the list of subjects. (the list of books I read for the challenge can be found here). I wasn’t sure I could read more than twelve books, but not only did I achieve the 13 books required for PYPC, I managed to read 20 books this year.

My first book of the year was Zodiac Unmasked by Robert Graysmith, it was also my first true crime novel, and my last book of the year was The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. The longest book I read was The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith at 908 pages and my shortest read in 2025 was Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury with only 249 pages. Altogether, I read 8,638 pages.

This year I was introduced to something called a ‘Book bracket’ which is a kind of nifty way of competing books against each other by pairing them up and deciding which one you liked best of the pair, so on and so forth until you’re left with only one. So after comparing my books to each other I decided the winner is The Wager by David Grann; it was the best book I read in 2025 and I seriously recommend reading it.

And I can't forget this clever pie chart I made to illustrate my genre-reading habits. Fantasy came in first place at 32%.

2026

This year I’m going to do my regular scheduled GoodReads Challenge, but instead of challenging myself to my usual 12, I’m increasing the number of books I’ll read to 15. I do 12 every year, and three years in a row I’ve surpassed it, so I feel like 15 is a fair amount.

I’m also joining Book’d Out’s inaugural Speccy Fiction Challenge, a challenge all about reading speculative fiction from 12 categories. The subject is one I was going to read anyways so it sounded like a lot of fun to join up with others who are enjoying the same.

And for the third year in a row, I’m going to be participating in April’s A-Z Blogging Challenge, where bloggers blog from A-Z during the month of April. The last two years I posted A-Z Book Reviews but this year I want to mix it up… So I’ll be posting A-Z Bookish Discussions.

No major changes are coming to the blog. My book reviews will continue to be posted on Mondays (I have a lot of books already lined up for this year). I'll still continue to participate in Top Ten Tuesday, Friday Book Blog Hop, Book Beginnings on Fridays, and The Sunday Post.

I'm starting off the New Year with Alchemised by SenLinYu, a book I'm super excited about so I hope it lives up to expectation. I'm undecided if I'm going to be able to finish Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak; the book started strong but the characters aren't all that likeable so I'm stuck at the 42% mark.

And I think that covers it for my New Year's Post.

What do you feel was your biggest accomplishment in 2025 (can be bookish or not)? What are your New Year plans? Did you make any resolutions?