I have been doing annual reading challenges since joining Goodreads in 2015 and, 10 years later, this is the first time I have finished a challenge without reading a single 5-star book 😭😭😭😭😭 To make matters worse, I also read four 1-star books, yet in 2024 I did not read a single one 😫 (but also, see what I did there 😎)
2025 was the second worst year of my life. Second only to 2018, after my mum died on December 13, 2017, and I had to find a way to exist in a world without the person whose womb was the very first place I called home. So, I say this as a joke but it is also not a joke; for me to go the entire year without reading a single 5-star book, something that has never, ever, ever *Taylor Swift voice* happened before, should tell you just how dogshit 2025 was.
Sheer disappointment aside, I read 9/38 Young Adult novels, 8/38 Romance ones, and 8/38 Mystery/Thrillers. Those are my top three genres and they contributed to approximately 66% of my total reads. Romance is my favourite genre, as I am the biggest HEA girlie to ever exist, so I am not mad at reading eight Romance books last year. Young Adult used to be my second favourite genre, but over the last few years I have read some mediocre AF YA books 😫 In 2025 I read two really bad ones – To All the Boys I Loved Before (⭐⭐) and Anna and the French Kiss (my fourth 1-star read of the year 😒), and it was the former that officially convinced me to switch out Young Adult for Mystery/Thriller as I get older and move away from being… well, a young adult. I turn 40!!!! on August 3, 1987, and so I no longer resonate with YA the way I did even a decade ago. Do not get me wrong, there are some fantastic YA books out there (All the Bright Places was my favourite book of 2025 and They Both Die at the End was easily in my top five) that I will probably love even when I am old and grey. But there are those with storylines and characters that are just wayyy too immature for my liking 😮💨
Of the 8/38 Mystery/Thriller novels I read, only half of them (The Man Who Died Twice, Windmills of the Gods, Gone Girl and Arsenic and Adobo) were good enough to write home about. Hide and Seek was a subpar start to the year (in retrospect, I can see how telling that was) and the fact that The Good Girl (my first 1-star read of the year) is classified as a Mystery/Thriller novel is an insult to the genre.
Speaking of 1-star reads, the four I read last year were:
- The Good Girl
- Beautiful World, Where Are You? (and with that I have officially given up on Sally Rooney, which is sad as I would have liked to read Conversation With Friends, but at this point I am better off watching the TV adaptation 😮💨)
- Mrs. Dalloway (serves me right as The Hours was also a 1-star read 😒)
- Anna and the French Kiss
Fingers crossed for more enjoyable, satisfying, memorable reads in 2026 🤞🤞🤞
Lwile the Leo 