In the grand tradition of the new year, let’s do some tidying, list making, and wrapping up the previous year.
Number Of Books I Read in 2025: A respectable 66 new books. My goal for the past few years has been 80, so we’re creeping up little by little to that goal. I don’t want to startle it. We’re sneaking up on it slowly.
Number of Re-Reads: at least 80 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and probably more. Surrounded by horrors as we have been this year, my coping strategy has been predictable books and familiar, dopamine producing plotlines. Anything to obtain that ounce of serotonin and my will to go on living.
Genre I Read The Most From in 2025: Sci-Fi Romance.
Honey Phillips continues to be my auto-buy author, and gods bless her for it. Zoey Draven really stepped it up with her groveling plots this year. The Brides of the Kylorr series really did a lot of heavy lifting, keeping my heart light.
Best Books I Read In 2025:
Obviously Honey Phillips wrote everything I wanted to read in 2025. Her Alien Wolf Tales series has been a delightful twist on all the fairy tales you know, but with alien wolf shifters. But her found family blending in the Treasured by the Alien series is still going strong at 14 books now and they are also a lovely, light read.
Layla Fae’s Arranged Monster Mates series was also a fun find for me in 2025. Multiple different authors contribute, but I vibe with Layla the best so her books are the ones I own and re-read. Monster-lovers will really enjoy this whole series, I think.And of course Kati Wilde can do no wrong. She released Only One Bed in early 2025 and it was a five star read for me. Full of tropes, you can tell by the title, but I love everything she writes and she did this one with her usual fantastic emotional flair.
Book that stomped all over every emotion ever:
Craving in his Blood by Zoey Draven. Quiet and a bit slower than some other Zoey Draven books, this one is crammed full of angst, drama, and all of the emotions. Millie and Kythel have a lot of obstacles in the way of their blood bond, and most of them are created by Kythel. Which he acknowledges, in the end, after a very satisfying ‘ooohhh-shit-I-fucked-up’ moment followed by much groveling. Chef’s kiss.
My OTP of 2025:
Thea and Khorrek from The Orc’s Captive Bride by Honey Phillips.
The finale of Honey Phillips excellent Five Kingdoms romantasy series, this one gives me a great ending. Plots are wrapped up, the Big Bad is taken down, and the happy ending is truly happy. Khorrek was something of a morally grey character in the first books of the series, and he has to contend with his choices in this book. Thea is his perfect character complement. Strong, smart, and she believes so truly in his redemption that he ends up believing in it, too.
Book(s) that I wanted to throw against the wall the hardest:
One of the true benefits to all the re-reading I’ve been doing is avoiding books that make me want to throw them. I’m curating my book list carefully, and reading things that make me happy. No downside here!
I realize the judgy posts tearing apart a book are one of the fun parts of being a bookworm, though. So if you’d still like to read me being seriously disgruntled with some books you can check out my 2019 reading wrap-up where I tear into old school Eloisa James and Mary Balogh historical romance. They leaned too hard into the tropes of the time and let’s just say I was actually rooting for the heroine to die in childbirth just to get away from that complete douche of a hero. Or, if you’d like to find out which SciFi romance book I tried and absolutely hated, you can read my 2020 reading wrap-up to see why Octavia Kore is on my no-go list forevermore.