Here’s where I look back on everything I read in the past year and see how well I did, based on entirely arbitrary and often vague goals I have set myself.
Goal one: Read 100 books
Result: 172 books read. ✓
Normally I set my goal at 100, and if I hit it early enough I’ll increase it. But last January I forgot entirely and aimed for 150 straight away.
Goal two: Read more new books than re-reads
Result: 132 new books and 40 re-reads ✓
I love re-reading books (and this it’s a totally valid thing to do) but re-reading is the safe and easy option, and I can easily do loads of re-reading and not get around to picking up anything new. Hence the goal.
My rereads were mostly from Blyton, Jodi Taylor, Sue Grafton and Charlaine Harris as I revisited some of my favourite series.
Goal three: Read new authors
Result: 43 new authors ✓
OK so this was less than the 50 new authors from last year but what can I say? I love a good series and when I discover an author I really like I will read everything I can get by hands on by them.
Some famous authors I tried for the first time were Daphne Du Maurier, Val McDermid, Kristin Hannah and John Buchan. (As usual I am late to the party.)
Goal four: read some books I’ve always meant to
Result: Four. ✓
I like to try for an adult classic each year. This year I read Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier which I really enjoyed and The 39 Steps by John Buchan which I found a bit silly and unbelievable.
I also read Holes by Louis Sachar and The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster – these are both modern YA/children’s classics and both have been on my mental list of things I should get around to reading for ages.
Last year I specifically made a goal of reading more of my favourite kind of book – ones about bookshops and libraries (aka BABALs) but this year I actually tried to limit these as I was starting to feel like I needed more variety.
I read 28 BABALs, 2 about writing/publishing and one about the hunt for an old book. So actually not bad for me – though I “only” read 32 last year when I was trying to read more of them!
Goal five: Find a good balance between books for children and books for grown ups
Result: 141 adult books, 27 for children and 4 for teens. ✓
I love children’s books and think there’s no shame in reading them as an adult. Saying that, I can find it too easy to read a bunch of children’s books instead of challenging myself with something more grown up.
I feel I could have been more lenient on myself this year and picked up a few more children’s books.
Goal six: Read more non-fiction
Result: 15 non fiction books. ✓
I seem to read non-fiction in fits and starts. More in fits, to be honest. 15 is more than I expected it to be and in fact is one more than last year. However as I read even more fiction the chasm is still massive.
I managed to read a few which you could classify as feminist – Unlikeable Female Characters by Anna Bogutskaya, Women in White Coats, A History of Britain in 21 Women by Jenni Murray and probably even Girl Sleuth by Melanie Rehak.
I also really enjoyed This Is Going to Hurt by Adam Kaye, Forensics by Val McDermid and Wildings by Duff Hart-Davis.
New goal for 2025: Read things I already have instead of borrowing them from the library
Result: 7 read from my to-read pile, 56 borrowed from the library ❌
This was pretty much an abject failure. Four of the ones I did read were on my Kindle so only 3 were from my shelves. I just can’t resist new books. Thank god I borrow them and not buy them, though!
My to-read-already-owned list on Goodreads now stands at 67 books but to be fair some of were random free books which have been on my Kindle for years and I should probably just delete them instead of having them sitting there never being read.
Other reading stats
Bookmory gives other stats so here are some of them.
Top author: Val McDermid (which I’m sure will come as no surprise to anyone who’s read any of my monthly round ups).
Right at the end of 2024 I decided to give Val McDermid a go, and I finished a book of her short stories in January 2025. I then proceeded to read 24 more of her books – often reading an entire book in a single day – through the rest of the year. (I’ve already read two more in 2026, so am on track to run out of her books by the end of this year. It’s annoying how much longer it takes to write a book than it does to read it.)
Following on from Val, were Charlaine Harris (12), Sue Grafton (8) and Steffanie Holmes (6). And Blyton, of course!
Total authors read: 86
Total pages read: 49, 209*
Average page count: 286
Longest book: The Secret of Secrets – Dan Brown (677)
Shortest book: Pages to Fill – Travis Baldree (33)
Bookmory also records whether each was a physical book, ebook and audiobook (though I kept my own record anyway!). This is just out of interest as they’re all equal in my mind. I think this year the audiobook number is going to be quite high.
In fact I listened to more audiobooks (69) than I read physical books (59) this year! But if you add physical and ebooks together as “eye reading” then that comes comfortably ahead of “ear reading” (103 vs 69).
Two years ago I started recording how many books came from the library and last year I added sources for all my books.
Audible: 34 (2 less than last year, but still very good value I think)
Bought: 6 (also 3 less than last year. Well, I probably bought more than 6 but I read 6 that I bought last year)
Found in a holiday house: 3
Free online: 1
Gifts: 10 (5 more than last year, though I undoubtedly was gifted more books that I haven’t yet read)
Kindle Unlimited: 26 (4 less than last year – am starting to wonder if this is good value for money).
Library: 56 (21 MORE than last year – where I was supposed to not be borrowing so many books…)
Owned already: 36 (1 more than last year, but at least 7 were ones I hadn’t read before)
The library is the clear winner here!
I also kept a note of how much I spent on books…
Books bought: £42.96 (or at least that’s the cost of any books I read for the first time this year that I had bought myself).
Audible: £69.99
That’s £5.83 per audiobook based on the 12 credits I get. I read 33 new books from Audible, though. Some of them were in two books for one credit sales, others were from the Plus Catalogue that’s only accessible with a membership. So essentially I paid £2.05 per audiobook, and I often go back and re-listen to them so that brings the cost per listen down even further.
Kindle Unlimited: £9.49 a month/ £113.88 a year.
My 26 books worked out at £4.38 each. That’s not bad value, but I’ll have to have a think about whether to keep subscribing or not. Having added up the current ebook costs of the KU books I read it’s a bit less than what 12 months of subscription cost. Amazon doesn’t show you the purchase price when you’re looking through KU books though so you can’t tell if they’re on offer for 99p or they’re £2.99 or £5.99. Saying all that – if I’d had to click “buy” on all those books I simply wouldn’t have – even though I’d have ended up spending less. Strange how the (or at least my) mind works.
Total: £226.83 on 65 books last year. That works out at £3.49 per book – seems pretty reasonable, considering that the average paperback now costs over £10.
Something else I continued to log was days read, thanks to using Bookmory. Like last year I managed to read every single day, and usually more than one book each day. I was also able to set a goal to read 50 pages each day which also I managed to do!
The Blytons
Blyton was my most read author last year but not this year. I still did a lot better than many previous years, though.
In past years I’ve read:
2019 – 5
2020 – 5
2021 – 6
2022 – 6
2023 – 13
2024 – 26
2025 – 13
We started off the year strong but in the past few months Brodie has had a lot of other books he has wanted to read at bedtime.
Blyton adjacent titles were:
Wildings by Duff Hart-Davis (all about Eileen Soper’s home and garden as well as her illustration work.)
Five Go Adventuring Again, Five Run Away Together and Five Go to Smuggler’s Top Graphic Novels by Beja and Natale
Five and the Forgotten Treasure by Chris Smith
Cherry Ames Student Nurse and Cherry Ames Senior Nurse by Helen Wells (recommended by me if you like Blyton.)
Goals for 2026
I think I will stick to my usual goals for the most part.
I’ve already aimed for 150 books on Goodreads and Bookmory.
I’ll aim to try lots of new books and new authors, and be mindful of not reading too many children’s books (though I can definitely be more lenient than I was last year).
I’m already starting to think about what books are on my ‘always wanted to read’ list alongside which classic(s) I’ll try this year. I have Emma as an audiobook so maybe that, we’ll see.
Not strictly a goal but I’d like to see if I can read the rest of Val McDermid’s work this year, as I reckon I’ve only got 24 to go. Depends if I can get hold of them all as the library is letting me down a bit of some of them!
Did you set a reading goal for last year, if so, how did you get on? Have you set one for 2026?
*Bookmory counts the pages as it were a physical copy when you read an audiobook and I always made sure that the page count was a fair average based on physical copies available. Goodreads logs audiobook pages as number of hours (ie a ten hour audiobook has ten pages) so I thought my Goodreads page count would be a lot lower – my maths say it should have been about 29k, yet my end of year round up said 47,700 so they must have done some estimating of their own.
Fiona
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worldofblyton
World of Blyton 