Welcome to 2025! The beginning of the year is always a time of reflections and projections, and what more appropriate way to think about turning over a new leaf than by considering the leaves we plan to be turning in our books? Here are some of our aspirations for this year’s reading (and other book-related) habits!
Mariana Ruiz
I am hoping to read everything ever written by Stephen King, from his old novels to his most recent work and all of his short stories, and I am about 90% through, hopefully (perhaps all the short stories are like a whole new chapter in this resolution). I love that he keeps writing. I loved You Like It Darker as much as all the other classic books, although I still think that he was better before the internet.
Diverse voices in YA and comics, and books in translation, deserve a better corner in the American market, either by different authors from the US or authors abroad. I am glad indie publishing houses are now actively collaborating with GeekDad (Levine Querido, Lantana), and hope to meet many more! I still wish for a translation of a Bolivian children’s book for this year. We haven’t got a translation for the last 21 years and Bolivia is like a secret treasure hidden in plain sight. I am all for representation and cultural understanding: it enriches us in more ways than we can imagine. I am glad to say that a Bolivian author made it to the Time Best Reads of 2024: Liliana Colanzi with You Glow in the Dark, you rock, gal!
I think I’ve reviewed about 140 books—from board books and comics and novels—in English alone and I am a voracious reader in Spanish too, so I don’t really count the books anymore. I just live for the moment when a book sets fire to my soul and makes me grateful to be alive, something that happily happens a lot still.
Jenny Bristol
Since 2020, I’ve resolved to read at least the same number of books each year as the last two digits of the year. So far, I’ve managed to reach this goal. But 2025 breaks the barrier of the two-books-per-month level. Can I do it? Can I read 25 books this year? We have an extremely busy year ahead of my family with a lot of change happening, but some of that is compatible with audiobooks, so I’m determined to make it.
What books will I be reading? I have a few specific ones planned, including Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible, the books on which A Discovery of Witches was based, and the rest of the books in the series that starts with Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett. And maybe this will finally be the year that I re-read Atomic Habits. Huzzah!
Robin Brooks
As 2025 begins I find myself at a resolution impasse, with the horrible feeling I’m on the verge of a mid-life crisis. What do I want to get out of 2025? I’m 52 this year and whilst all my children still live at home, they need me far less than in the past. As a stay-at-home dad, this is beginning to feel a little like early retirement. As I mentioned in our resolution reflections last week, my 2024 reading aims mostly remain unresolved, but I don’t find myself wanting to carry them over. I guess, ultimately, it’s reading and reviewing books that bring me joy, so I’ll focus on that.
In 2025, my simple aim is to read as much as possible and write about as many of those books as I can. I have no plan for the types of books I want to read, though I’m always going to be predominantly an SFF reader. As somebody who buys more books than I read each year, I need to dig into the burgeoning piles of books that litter my bedroom floor. I enjoyed pulling a couple of older books off the pile during 2024, so a loose resolution is to try to do that at least once a month.
One other half-resolution pertains to book proofs. I often receive book proofs far ahead of publication but schedule reading time close to the publication date. I then fall behind and find myself reading book proofs AFTER the finished product is available in the shops. This year, I’m going to be more proactive with my proofs and put the “advance” into “Advanced Reader Copies.” I’m going to read them when they arrive, to see if I can be part of the “buzz” around book launches. I’ve no idea if this will make any difference to anybody but it will be fun to try to stay ahead of the curve!
Jonathan H. Liu
As I mentioned in our reflections last week, I’ve failed once again to clear out more of the floor space in my office, but I’d really like to make my office a space where I’d like to sit and read, rather than one that feels mostly like storage with a computer in the corner. It’s going to take a lot to tackle that, but a big part of that is going to be getting rid of books, which is always hard for me to do. I get sent a lot of unsolicited books and even though many of those go straight into the “not interested” pile, everything left on my shelves and in these boxes are ones that I thought sounded interesting, at least when they first arrived, and it’s difficult to get rid of a book that I haven’t read. What if that book I never cracked open could have been one of my favorite reads of the year?
I have a bookcase in my living room where a lot of the non-fiction titles live, and some of these have been sitting there for several years now. Even knowing that I don’t read nearly as much non-fiction, I still have three shelves on that bookcase of non-fiction books that “I’m sure I’ll get around to someday…” Right? But it’s probably high time to read or weed, as painful as that feels.
I could probably weed one book per day for an entire year and still not quite be done with this process, but that feels a little too daunting, so for now I’m going to set a resolution to weed one book per week. It’s not nearly enough, but maybe it will get the ball rolling for some bigger purges later in the year—we’ll see! I probably won’t be highlighting what books I’m removing from my shelf because it feels a little mean to authors to announce publicly that I’m giving up on reading their books, but I’ll report back at the end of the year whether I managed to keep this up. (So far so good—I’ve picked ONE book to get rid of already!)
In terms of actually reading, though, I think I’ll stick with my number of 150 books for the year—I just managed to pass that for 2024, so I feel like it’s a good benchmark, considering I still have a whole lot of graphic novels to read and those tend to go very quickly once I start them. I do have a few specific titles on my short list:
- Inkworld by Cornelia Funke, a sequel to a series that my wife and I really enjoyed
- City Spies: London Calling by James Ponti, book 6 in this kid-spy series
- Against Platforms by Mike Pepi, a manifesto about digital technologies
I’m hoping I’ll get the next few books in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman, since I enjoyed the first three recently. I also started May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans in the middle of 2024 but set it aside to get a few other books finished, so I want to go back and finish that one. Oh, and this year I’ll definitely finish the rest of the Spiderwick Chronicles series, too.
