There’s not a doubt in my mind that 2025 has been an incredible year for reading. With a few weeks left to go in the year, the numbers aren’t quite finalized, but I was able to read 80+ books, about 50 volumes of manga, and 80+ short stories, all together adding up to somewhere over 35,000 pages of reading.
This year also marked the first year that, looking back on it, I read as widely as I’ve always dreamed of. Fantasy still comprises the majority of my reading, but it’s been mixed well with thrillers and suspense, poetry, classics, philosophy, and more straight fiction and literature. I moved away from some of the major sci-fi and fantasy magazines and toward indie anthologies and shorts, which has been a good change for me.
But everybody loves a good list, and so today I’m going to do a countdown of 5 of my favorite reads this year.
5-Bolted to the Bone by Bart Carroll
I’ll confess that when I first opened this story, I wasn’t quite sure what I’d gotten myself into. Bolted to the Bone has one of the most unique story worlds I’ve stepped foot in, and it took me a minute to get my bearings. Once past that initial plunge, though, I picked up speed quickly, and the more I read the more I found myself enthralled.
While I’ve probably written the most about the worldbuilding, the reason this story has lingered in my mind for the back third of the year is the character arcs. I hate to say more for fear of spoiling the story, but one character’s journey in particular has sat with me ever since I closed the last page. If you’re looking for a unique world and a compelling story, I’d highly recommend this.
4-The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan
I debated for a long time whether or not to add this to the list, because it wasn’t among my personal favorite books of the year. Instead, it was a family favorite and I felt it was worth writing about.
Every night we tuck our girl into bed, I turn on a little red light, and I read a chapter of a book to her. We’ve gone through a fair number of stories over the years, but this year we tackled Percy Jackson. I’d never read them before, and my daughter really enjoyed the fact we were reading them together for the first time, and we’d often talk about what we’d just read and what we thought was going to happen.
As an adult, I’m not sure most of the series really worked for me. They were fine, but I prefer my POVs a little older and I got a bit tired of the heroes being saved by coincidence time and time again.
All that being said, had the books been around when I was about 8 or so, I would have devoured them, probably multiple times.
That’s certainly been true for my daughter, and of all the series, the conclusion, The Last Olympian is the strongest entry. My daughter has learned so much about mythology (and even I’ve learned some things), and it’s a series filled with heart, monsters, adventure, and wit. We basically rush to bed these days so we can read our chapters, and that’s been something special.
3-The Penitent by Robyn Abbott
This was a book that caught me at just the right time. Abbott is an incredibly talented writer, confident enough in her craft and her story to allow for subtlety and nuance. If the immaturity of Percy Jackson bothered me (which is fine, btw, I’m not the intended audience!), the maturity of Abbott’s characters soothed my spirit.
This is a witch-hunt in reverse, focused on soldiers coming back from a long campaign to a village that has largely learned to live without them. The book builds tension slowly and quietly, a bowstring gradually pulled further and further back, until it snaps in an explosion of action and difficult decisions.
2-Lancelot by Giles Kristian
Had I read Lancelot in almost any other year, it would have been my book of the year, hands down. Even this year I’m tempted to call it number one and make it a tie, but I can’t bring myself to resort to such trickery.
Friends, I’ve read a lot of Arthurian tales. I even took a university seminar in which I traveled to England and visited Arthurian sites such as Tintagel. I thought I’d read enough, but I was wrong. Lancelot is a stunning retelling of the Arthurian legend from Lancelot’s perspective, gorgeously written and compelling from the first page to the last.
I read this book back in May, and I still get shivers down my spine when I remember the last lines of the book.
1-The Curse of the Mistwraith by Janny Wurts
Oh, Wars of Light and Shadow, what else can I say about you? After more Twitter recommendations than I could count, I finally purchased the first volume of Janny Wurts’s epic fantasy. After finishing it, I immediately went out and bought the next ten volumes.
WoLaS is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Deep, deep worldbuilding that holds its own and maybe even surpasses the genre’s very best. Breathtaking prose on every page. Richly fleshed-out characters.
I’ve made this observation before, but now that I’m four books into this series, it stands even more true. This is as epic as fantasies get, and yet its focus on its characters makes it feel almost intimate.
For the epic fantasy reader looking for one of the greatest fixes of all time, this is where you start.
And I think that’s it for me! Thanks for joining me this year on my reading adventures, and I very much look forward to what reading next year will bring.
Leave a Reply