Review of Books Read This Year – 2025

My reading in 2025 was an eclectic mix of fact and fiction, myth and history, learning and loving.

I started the year reading George Eliot’s biography prompted by my 2024 rediscovery of Thomas Hardy when we visited Dorchester (or should I say Casterbridge!) I work in Nuneaton and the famous novelist is referenced everywhere but I had no idea how she lived her life including her ‘unconventional’ long-term relationship and the struggles she had with her own confidence in her writing. It resonated with my own feelings about my fiction. The biography made me a fly-on-the-wall for intimate moments that became legendary stories in literary history now shared with millions of novel lovers like me! These included her correspondence with Dickens, her friendship with Henry James, the decision to reveal her identify following the challenge to her authorship of Adam Bede, and her tense relationship with publisher William Blackwood.

The Shadow of the Wind started as a book to share with my teenage daughter as a car boot ‘three for £1’ buy but she quickly lost interest and as I read on I realised that was a blessing with some of the sexual descriptions! A gothic mystery thriller exploring love and loss, family and friendship. It was a novel I also couldn’t leave behind as I read about another woman sharing it with her older daughter as she documents her own grief in Song for Jenny. This is a story of the best and worst of our capital city and it made me sob both in the reading and in the retelling to others. Truly courageous to write and share.

Courage and corruption flows through the rhythmic read of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing as it similarly lays bare the best and worst of us. The style was very poetic following a James Joyce stream of consciousness and reminded us of the vulnerability of girls especially during their teenage years. A big shift to Stephen Fry’s retelling of Homer’s Odyssey (ready for the Christopher Nolan film in 2025!) reminding me of the epic Greek myths and legends that began my love of reading many years ago.

As Spring began, I took to learning and quickly consumed Big Data during the working week. It’s a must read for everyone to raise our data literacy and comprehension of the world we live in. Less is More prompted a greater depth to my thinking about the growth we pursue and the damage it does. How do we create a world that really is better for everyone? I didn’t agree with every thing in the author’s ideology but, as always, it’s good to read opinions that differ from my own. If I felt dwarfed by the challenge of redefining world economics, Mrs Hinch kindly brought me back to what I can do in my own small part of this world to make it a haven for myself and my family.

A few days in Scotland saw me reading Bedtime Stories for Stressed Out Adults helping me to decompress from the busyness of life and also to spark my passion for my own writing by remembering how much we love stories and that the world can never have too many. The Book of Friendship was a holiday read in a caravan in Weymouth having received it as a gift for Christmas from my best friend. I was reminded of the layered complexity of our friendships juxtaposed with the sweet simplicity we feel when we have found the right ones.

Summer reads included The Outcast, The Long Song, and Burmese Diaries – all stories where happy endings were hinted at but never really given. Orwell remains the master and even though I have read him before I was still totally suckered into believing his tease of an unexpected happy ending before he snatched it away.

Unhappy conclusions continued with Raven Black which is the first in the ‘Shetland’ series from Ann Cleeves. I have seen all ten seasons of the TV series of the same name based on her murder mysteries and I really enjoyed contrasting that interpretation with the original. So much so I did the same with Red Bones.

As Autumn turned to Winter I turned to Dickens. Bleak House is another novel I had read before but under significant pressure during the first week of my first term into an English Literature degree at Oxford so it was nice to turn to it with plenty of time. He gives us some sad moments but ultimately good people are rewarded with the happy endings they deserve. Well maybe. Dickens depiction of the legal system also resonated with me as I watched a loved one having a difficult time with the family courts. I love reading Dickens when you have the time to really enjoy it in the instalment style it was meant to be consumed in. I will definitely pick up another again next year.

History rounded off the year with The Ottomans following the four centuries of rule under the greatest Empire we don’t learn about at school in the UK. I read The Silk Road in 2024 which prompted me to seek out a greater understanding of the alternative narratives of history and how they have shaped the world I now live in. A fascinating read I couldn’t put down despite struggling near the end with the rapid pace of deposing and killing Sultans and their families (a theme all the way through but the last years of the Empire seem to really step it up!) and wanting to keep referring to appropriate maps of the time to understand where in the world we were as well as the century we were in. Like The Silk Road, maybe one to pick up again and again to really digest.