Chris Bissette

2025 Reading List

A year ago, almost to the day - it was December 12th, whereas today is the 7th - I finished re-reading Lolita and decided that I was going to start a reading journal. This is something I'd enjoyed a lot in the past but hadn't done for over a decade. I grabbed a softcover Rhodiarama notebook I had lying around (absolutely my favourite notebooks to use, especially since I switched to exclusively using fountain pens) and that became my journal.

I didn't know how long the 160 pages in that notebook would last, and I'm very pleasantly surprised to find that it's almost enough to run for exactly a year. Now that 2024's is full it's time for me to start 2025's, so I've grabbed another Rhodiarama and I'm curious to see if this one will run me to December next year. I expect it will last longer, because I've read a lot this year and I don't know if I'll match it next year, but I'll be interested to see what happens.

That isn't the point of this post, though. In January of this year I dedicated a couple of pages in the journal to a provisional reading list of novels and novellas for the year. (I blogged about this list earlier this year). The plan was never for me to read all of those books. Instead, they serve two purposes. The first is that they act as a record of what I was interested in and excited to read at the start of the year. The second is that they're there to give me something to pick from when I can't decide what to read next. I've enjoyed having those lists in the book, even if I haven't got through them all, and so the first thing I decided to do with the journal for the coming year is to write another aspirational/provisional list.

The list I've written for 2025 is shorter than 2024's. This is partly because I know I likely won't read them all - I'm very much an impulsive reader and I stray from lists very quickly - but also because the lists in 2024's journal were simply too big to serve the purpose of helping me make decisions. I look at them and get option paralysis to the point that I had to build a spreadsheet dashboard to pick a book at random for me instead. This year's list is 15 novels and 20 novellas rather than the 40 novels and "as many novellas as Bluesky recommended to me" of last year. These go alongside my ongoing reading 'challenges', i.e. to finish reading all of the Discworld novels, and to begin reading every Booker and International Booker winner in chronological order.

One of my goals this year is to read more translated fiction, and so these lists reflect that. As well as lots of work in translation there is a mixture of new and old books, a mixture of genres, and a few books that have been carried over from last year's list because I didn't get around to them but am still interested in reading them. Unlike last year's list there's nothing on here that hasn't been released yet, purely because I completely forgot to ever go back and look at it and check for things coming out.

Here are my lists for 2025:

Novels

Novellas

#blog #dec24