First Post of 2026: Wrapping Up Blogmas, Christmas Books, and 2025 Goodreads Stats

Hello! Welcome to 2026! I hope the new year is treating you kindly thus far. And I hope 2025 didn’t give you one last kick on its way out the door. Here at my house, 2025 said goodbye and good riddance by flooding our basement. Yeah, same to you, pal! 😝

Advent Calendar Wrap-Up

Anyway, Christmas was nice. I got lots of books! I’ll talk about those in a minute, but first I thought I’d wrap up my 2025 Advent calendar. I never posted a pic of the last 2 puzzle squares, so here they are:

Cute pictures again, but this isn’t a type of Advent calendar I’ll ever get again. I very much prefer the ones with a full mini puzzle every day, rather than chunks of what’s supposed to be a bigger puzzle. And I probably won’t be buying puzzles from Amazon again either. This was 100% pre-used, and I wasn’t informed of that.

Christmas Book Haul

The above was the sight that greeted my eyes on Christmas morning! I love that stocking. 😁 The gift on the chair was a calendar, but inside the stocking…

BOOKSSSSSSSS!!! 😍

I’d requested all of these, including Bunny by Mona Awad, which is one of my favourite books but I didn’t own it physically. I read The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke on Christmas day, which was the absolute perfect time to read it. As for the rest, they’re all classics, which is going to help me keep my resolution to read more classics this year! Here’s the list:

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (I’m interested to get into Orwell’s nonfiction)
Candide by Voltaire (I’ve read this several times before but never owned it)
The Vinland Sagas (hoping to read this for my World LiteraTour project this year)
Zadig and Other Stories by Voltaire (I’ve read a couple of these in the original French, but this is an English edition)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (I’ve read it twice but never owned it)
The Decameron: Selected Tales by Giovanni Boccaccio (always wanted to read this!)
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (never heard of it before, but I want to read everything Orwell wrote)
The Arabian Nights (hoping to read this for my World LiteraTour project soon)

So excited about all of these!

2025 Goodreads Stats

And now it’s that time of year when every Goodreads-aholic pores over their Goodreads ‘Year in Books’ stats. I read 152 books in 2025, which far surpassed my goal of 100 and actually set a new record for me! I have to admit, though, it wasn’t comfortable for me to read that much. I plan to scale back a bit in 2026. My goal for the year is still 100 books, which is totally doable for me, but I’ll try not to get carried away and overshoot it to the same degree. 😅

Here are some screenshots of my stats:

I read 46,782-ish pages, phew! That’s an average of 128 pages a day! For me, that works out to an average of 3 hours of reading per day.

Shortest and longest reads

My shortest book at 40 pages was Bud Finds Her Gift by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which is a children’s book. It was cute. I gave it 4 stars. My longest book at 709 pages was House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It’s kind of a cheat, because a lot of those pages are mostly blank, but it’s so densely written that it feels even longer. 🤣 Quite an experience. I gave it 4 stars.

My average book length was 307 pages. Yeah, that sounds right.

Most and least shelved reads

My most-shelved read was A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, yay! My favourite book of all time. 🥰 And my least-shelved read was African Folk Tales for the Young at Heart by Abubakar Yusuf Ibrahim, which is a shame, because it was really good. I gave it 4 stars. That was a NetGalley ARC, and I reviewed it here.

My average rating for the year was 3.9. I’m actually surprised it’s that high. It didn’t feel like a spectacular reading year, tbh. But I’ll talk about that more in another post.

Other stats

Apparently I’m in the top 5% of readers and reviewers on Goodreads, I read the most in August, and my top genres were Horror, Memoir/Biography, and Mystery/Thriller. That definitely tracks. Honestly, I’m feeling a little oversaturated with those genres and hope to branch out more in 2026. Like I said, those classics are a-callin’!

How did you do with your reading in 2025? Did you meet your goals? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.