Books read in 2025

📚 My reading year of 2025.

The year is coming to an end again, and it is time for another summary of the books I’ve read. This year was strange. My reading time and motivation were way down, with the one exception of reading the Mother of Learning series. I still struggle with reading nonfiction. It just takes a lot of energy, and energy is something I don’t have much of these days (especially when working way too much for three quarters of a year).

I thought about my reading goals for next year, and I decided I won’t set any goals for 2026. I will find books to read (my TBR stack of physical books is at least 40 cm high), and there are always interesting new books to discover. But I don’t want to put any pressure on myself to reach a goal.

So I hope for an interesting book year next year.

The best books (I read) of 2025

In the fiction category, I have one recommendation

I got this series recommended by a friend and could not stop reading it once I started. Thanks, Marco ;-). This series is the perfect combination of what I like in fiction books: a nice magic system and a main protagonist finding all the loopholes in it.

Mother of Learning 1-4 by nobody103

On the nonfiction side, there is also one

I got interested in biology this year, so it is not surprising that I liked this book. This book answered quite a few of the questions I had about how cells work and how life itself works.

How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology by Philip Ball

Reading statistics

I set out this year with the plan to read 24 books—one fiction and one nonfiction per month. I managed to read 17 books, but only four of them were nonfiction. As I wrote in the introduction, it was a hard year for reading, as I worked a lot and had a lot of other things on my plate. There just was not enough energy for reading.

Plans for next year

No fixed plan for next year. One book a month is what I can realistically expect to be reading right now.

List of all books in 2025

• Anders nicht falsch by Maria Zimmermann
• Carags Verwandlung by Katja Brandis
• Liberation 2053-2054 by Lee Schneider
• This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman
• The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
• Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind through Connected Notes by Jorge Arango
• This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman
• Careless People: The explosive memoir that Meta doesn’t want you to read by Sarah Wynn-Williams
• Not Till We Are Lost by Dennis E. Taylor
• Mother of Learning: ARC 1 by nobody103
• Mother of Learning: ARC 2 by nobody103
• Mother of Learning: ARC 3 by nobody103
• Mother of Learning: ARC 4 by nobody103
• Guild of Tokens by Jon Auerbach
• The Cat And The Warlock by Serg Koren
• How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology by Philip Ball
• Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Still reading right now

None

Authors

• Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Dennis E. Taylor
• Jon Auerbach
• Jorge Arango
• Katja Brandis
• Lee Schneider
• Maria Zimmermann
• Matt Dinniman
• Micaiah Johnson
• nobody103
• Philip Ball
• Sarah Wynn-Williams
• Serg Koren
• Tahereh Mafi

• /books-read