I posted my list of the best books I read in 2025 on my Medium blog – you can find it here. This post is just a few stats about the books I read during 2025.

I read a total of 170 books in 2025, of which 15% were rereads of books read in earlier years – well, decades, and many of which I’d read before I began recording the dates on which I completed books.

Obviously, since the bulk of my book collection is still in storage, I had to buy replacements for these rereads. From Fantastikbokhandeln, my local secondhand sf bookshop, and other bookshops in town, or at the conventions I attended during the year: Fantasticon in Copenhagen, Norcon in Oslo, Archipelacon 2 in Mariehamn and Swecon in Lund. In total, I bought 166 books in 2025, 22% of which were for rereading, and 9% were copies of books that went into storage before I had the chance to read them. (I also sold four books back to Fantastikbokhandeln once I’d read them.)

Returning to the books read, the bulk were science fiction at just over 50%. Then mainstream (17%), fantasy (13%) and crime (10%), plus a handful of other genres. Gender-wise, 48% were by male writers and 43% by female writers. The remaining were multi-author books, non-fiction, graphic novels and the single anthology I read in 2025.

Geographically, the preponderance of science fiction means it’s no real surprise most of the books I read were from the US (44%), closely followed by the UK (38%). The next highest were France and Sweden, with around a half a dozen books each. I also read books from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, India, Iraq, Ireland, New Zealand, South Korea and Spain.

Given I reread a number of books in 2025, the decades in which the books I read were originally published are a bit all over the place, although the 2020s came top with 29% (although only five were published in 2025), followed by 17% in the 2010s, and 12% in both the 1990s and 1980s. But I did read books published in every decade of last century except the first two, and in the last decade of the century preceding that (HG Wells, natch).

The 170 books were by 127 different authors. Top of that list is Patricia Cornwell, with nine books; followed by L Timmel Duchamp and Cynthia Ward, with four each; and then three books each by Terry Pratchett, Anne McCaffrey, Aliette de Bodard, Samuel R Delany, Clive Cussler, Doris Lessing and TH White. Some of those, of course, were rereads.

And the high numbers are because some of the books I read were in series: Scarpetta (9), the Adventures of the Blood-thirsty Agent (4), Discworld (3), Millennium (3), the Adventures of Dirk Pitt (3), the Dragonriders of Pern (3), and Canopus in Argos: Archives (3). The Blood-thirsty Agents were a quartet, so they’re done (I recommend them). I have two books left in Canopus in Argos: Archives. I’ll not bother reading any further Pern books. But I still have a way to go for the other series (except Millennium, with one more promised, but perhaps more after that).

Here’s to 2026. I’ve not set any reading resolutions yet, and may not even bother. But I definitely have some quite weighty novels on my bookshelf, real and electronic, and I’d like to tackle a few of them some time over the next twelve months. On the other hand, I want to start writing seriously again, so perhaps that will impact my reading. We shall see…