The Number

The beginning and end of 2025

Around mid-December, a certain number begins popping up in the various places the literary world communicates today—Bookstagram, Good Reads, Substack, Book Tok, etc. This figure represents the number of books read over the course of the year coming to a close. The number is often accompanied by some variant of the list, such as the top ten best books of the year. I find the list uninteresting—I don’t know you, why would I care what books you liked—but the number catches my attention.

I have kept a reading log for many years, a list of each book I read, with author, date of completion, and thoughts. My number has varied widely from year to year in correlation with life events. It will shock no one to learn the early years of having children were my lowest years and my graduate school years were the highest.

On January 1, 2025, I set a goal of surpassing my number from 2024, which was eighty-three. I achieved my goal, barely, and mostly because I panicked in early December and read a pile of quick reads, which for me meant Golden Age mysteries and two very short Shirley Jackson books. I made it, closing 2025 with my eighty-fifth book.

Depending upon your perspective, this is either a great accomplishment or pathetic. If you don’t read much, eighty-five sounds dazzling. If you read one-hundred and fifty-seven books last year, it seems lazy. Putting aside the debate over whether reading one-hundred and fifty-seven paranormal firefighter romances which barely hit two-hundred pages calculates the same as reading five-hundred plus pages history tomes, eighty-five seems like nothing special to me. When I was young, footloose, and fancy free, I would have lapped my current reading self. The number is not the point though, except maybe in that small part of all of us which still dwells on the playground. I admit I took pleasure in beating my number from last year. I also endeavored not to feel smug when I saw the numbers of others that were below my own. But petty human foibles aside, of more import, to me at least, is the reading itself, and the books that underlie the number.

I began 2025 with The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss and ended it with A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel. The choices were not intentional. The Bookshop was a Christmas gift, so it was in my hands as 2024 came to a close, and seemed a logical way to start the new year. A History of Reading sat in my TBRR (to be reread) pile forever and demanded to be selected. Each, in its own way, could be classified as a paean to books. Which I guess is the point of all the counting, keeping of reading logs, and now, in the age of social media, sharing the number. We read books because we like to, we love to, we want to, or, as in my case, because we must.

Eighty-six seems daunting, but I am game. First up is Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds by Harold Bloom, a monstrous (eight-hundred and fourteen pages), dense tome. After that, I’ll see. Like all readers, my TBR pile is large, my TBRR pile is larger, and my wish list is long. My logical self knows that even if I never buy another book (zero chance), I may never see the bottom of the TBR pile. That is okay with me, because I think the sign of a true reader is that she is never done reading.

Here’s to reading, a lot, in 2026.