As in 2023 and 2024, here’s a relatively extensive book blog in review 2025. There’s a table of contents if you just want to skip around to certain parts of my annual blog recap. I wanted to post this last month, but I couldn’t squeeze in time to finish it without compromising on other things. But here it is at last!

Bookish Goals for 2025 Wrap-Up

• Read 52 Books: I smashed this goal and read 122 books.
• Read Throne of Glass: I didn’t complete this series, but I read half of the books.
• Read Arthurian Books: I completely failed at this. I started THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING and got maybe 50 pages in? Unfortunately, I can’t quite remember because it’s been so long since I picked it up.
• Track My Reading: This was a success! I decided not to track my spending, though, because it’s not as easy to keep all those receipts in line.
• Track My Spending: Ha, as I just said above, I didn’t track my spending. So, I failed here, but that’s ok.
• Spend Less: It’s hard to definitively say this without tracking my spending, but I think I spent less in 2025 than in 2024. I made a conscious effort to only preorder books that looked very promising to me. Basically, I had my book subscriptions, a more or less set cost, and a few preorders sprinkled in.
• #BeatTheBacklog: Lisa at Owl Be Sat Reading started the hashtag #BeatTheBacklog in 2022 to rally those who want to make a dent in their TBR list. I use this as a way to motivate myself to read my physical books. I think I did pretty well in 2025, especially compared to previous years. There were definitely months where I read a handful from my backlog.
• Series Completion Challenge: I didn’t try to update this, so I’ll call it a fail. You can check out the Series Completion Challenge here.
• Request Less ARCs: Success, I think.
• Increase Blog Followers: My followers didn’t increase from 200 to 275, but they got pretty close. I think I closed out 2025 somewhere around 268 or something like that.
• Update SEO for Old Posts: I did some of this, but I still have plenty of posts I need to update.

Blog Blog Statistics for 2025

Summary Statistics

These summary statistics are from the Jetpack plugin for WordPress. I like to show these numbers to bring expectations into perspective, not as a humble brag. Keep in mind that I have had this blog for nearly five years (in March), so my statistics might look different than a blog that’s only a year old. Also, none of this matters, but I think it’s interesting to look at.

I implemented search engine optimization (SEO) in the last quarter of 2022. (Learn more about SEO.) In 2025 I continued to use SEO and that kept me relatively stable. My views and visitors declined a little bit relative to 2024. My hunch is that the Google Core update in early December affected my viewership. As I commented in my December 2025 Book Blog Wrap-Up, I was down ~3,000 views that month, which is roughly the number of views I needed to hit even with 2024’s total views. There were also several other Google Core updates throughout 2025, all of which likely affected search engine traffic to my blog

What I like is that I didn’t post as often relative to 2022-2023, yet SEO kept folks visiting. This is great because a) I don’t have as much bandwidth to post 5x/week and b) I like having more time to read rather than blog. I have to finish books to be able to blog about them!

Statistic	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025
Total Posts	73	196	184	155	151
Total Views	1,005	8,836	35,842	91,104	87,900
Visitors	400	3,398	22,768	70,325	67,844
Likes	116	1,426	2,416	2,201	2,448
Comments	26	468	1,297	1,323	1,593

Traffic Sources

Like last year, SEO continued to make a huge difference in the discoverability of my content. While not in this table, there is a relatively small set of users who use ecosia.org (a search engine) to find my site. That search engine provided 206 views. I also left Twitter and switched exclusively to Bluesky, hence the lack of major hits from Twitter. However, I’ve become jaded by Bluesky and am currently on a hiatus from that site. As you can see, it’s harder to reach folks on Bluesky than it was on Twitter, though my reach on Twitter was declining anyway.

Traffic Source	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025
Search Engines	30	417	18,183	66,939	60,850
Twitter	269	1,800	2,748	1,683	—
Bluesky	—	—	—	—	644
WordPress.com Reader	63	1,099	1,596	1,196	1,493
talesfromabsurdia.com	—	—	614	558	97
WordPress Android app	—	6	311	479	307

Most Read Posts

In 2025 my top five most-read posts, according to WP stats, are:

1. Arthurian Retellings Reading List: 6,455 views
2. Book Review: Gild by Raven Kennedy: 5,215 views
3. STEMinist Romance Books: 4,130 views
4. Book Review: Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Maehrer: 2,918 views
5. Book Review: The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake: 2,386 views

It’s nice to see that three of my top five most-viewed posts are book reviews. My Arthurian retellings reading list is still a crowd pleaser, which makes me happy.

Reading Statistics for 2025

While I use The Storygraph to track my reading on an app, I also really like Reader Voracious’s Ultimate Book Blogger / Reader Spreadsheet Template. Last year I decided to stick mostly with the charts from the Reader Voracious’s spreadsheet and will continue to do so.

Ratings

My average rating in 2025 was 3.86, which is about the same as last year (3.90). I again doled out 4-star ratings the most, which is consistent with the last couple of years. I gave out more 3.75 and 3.5-star ratings in 2025, which I guess isn’t terribly surprising since I had one 5-star read (the pie slice at the top that you can barely see).

Five-Star Reads

I only had one five-star read in 2025. I guess I’ve either gotten more stingy with that coveted rating or I didn’t love as many books in 2025 compared to 2024. The sole five-star honor goes to THE MILLICENT QUIBB SCHOOL OF ETIQUETTE FOR YOUNG LADIES OF MAD SCIENCE by Kate McKinnon.

Reading Format and Book Length

I read about double the amount of audiobooks this year (40%) compared to 2024. That and reducing my number of ARCs seemed to eat into the number of ebooks I read. I’m honestly shocked at how much of my reading was audiobooks!! I ended 2025 with 18% hardcover, ~15% paperback, and ~26% ebook reads.

Reading by Genre

To no one’s surprise, most of my reads were fantasy (42.2%). Nonfiction came in second (21.1%) and romance came in third (11.9%). All other genres clocked in at less than 10% each.

Reading by Release Date

Most of the books I read were published prior to 2025 and thus make up 59.7% of my total reads. Not all of the backlist books are from my own pile, or I’d have made even better progress on the stacks of books in my house! ARCs made up 15.1% of my reads, which I think reflects that I took on even less ARCs than in 2024.

Publisher Type

Again, it’s not a surprise that most of my reads are from Big 5 Publishers. I finished up a SFINCS judging round early in 2025, which accounts for probably most of the self-published books on here.

Reading by Identity

I divided reading by identity into three main categories: racial identities, gender, and whether there is an LGBTQ+ component. The latter doesn’t take into account whether the author identifies as part of the LGBTQ+ community. I modified these categories from Kal’s original spreadsheet. The dark blue sliver in “Reading by Author Identity” is for “Hispanic.”

I wanted to incorporate more LGBTQ+ reads, but barely moved the needle (21.1% to 23.5%) on that in 2025. Reading more diversely is still something I need to work on.

And that’s that for my book blog in review 2025. Feel free to share yours in the comments!