Bizarrely, I began 2025 intending to write an essay titled “A Year with Cormac” having finished my 2024 reading project, which was to read everything Cormac McCarthy ever published. Yet, 2025 proved to be the year without Cormac; I didn’t read a single title from McCarthy this year, and skipped my annual reread of The Road.
A few of my favorites—
My top-three most-read authors
Ratings
I tended to be positive for most books I read (3 stars is good!), and maybe I rate some books a little too highly:
But did I have fun?
I started this little library site because I was accused of never reading “fun” books. But I like the books I read! Here are some of the ‘funnest’ books I read this year according to my devised scoring system…
Read more: What constitutes a fun book?
- The Bright Sword fun score — 5.00
- A Prayer for the Crown-Shy fun score — 4
- Authority fun score — 3.67
- A Psalm for the Wild-Built fun score — 3.67
- Doctor Sleep fun score — 3.33
Showing top 5.
The Books
2026
For 2026, I want to read fewer titles, but ultimately more pages. I’d like to finish up Caro’s Master of the Senate and maybe The Passage of Power. I’ll also need to re-read The Illiad and The Odyssey (the Wildon translations) in preparation for Nolan’s The Odyssey.
I plan to finish reading everything that Annie Ernaux has published to this point, as well as to start on some Russian literature, particularly Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground and The Brothers Karamazov. Two other long titles I hope to read next year? Richard Rhodes follow up to The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, and one of my last remaining Stephen King mountain climbs: The Stand.