Even though I don’t post here anymore, I’ve talked about my reading challenges in past years so I’m going to do a wrap-up of 2025 and lay down what I’m planning for 2026 in a second post. The library didn’t have a reading challenge this year, much to my disappointment, but I set my Goodreads goal to 120 books, which I hit out of the park (I’m at 138 when I wrote this, so I’ll surpass 140). Like last year, a lot of those books were graphic novels, but I also read plenty of full-size novels and even some chonky fiction and nonfiction. According to StoryGraph, I’ve read over 41,000 pages so far this year (as opposed to 34k all last year in 130 books). One thing I’ve done in the last couple months is start listening to audiobooks basically any time I’m not sitting at my computer. I’ll play one even for a 10-minute drive or just loading the dishwasher in addition to the longer time blocks like cooking a meal. That adds up. For the second time in a row, I did also manage to complete the Read Harder challenge, which was fun and did take my reading to different places it doesn’t normally go (which is the point). Here are the 2025 categories and books I read:

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang - a 2025 release by a BIPOC author

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton - a childhood favorite book

The Best Bad Things by Katrina Carrasco - a queer mystery

Misery by Stephen King - a book about obsession

How Migration Really Works by Hein de Haas - Read a book about immigration or refugees

Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White - Read a standalone fantasy book

Buffy to Batgirl edited by Julie M. Still and Zara T. Wilkinson - a book about a piece of media you love (a TV show, a movie, a band, etc)

James by Percival Everett - literary fiction by a BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and/or disabled author

Whose Names are Unknown by Sanora Babb a book based solely on its setting

Heartland by Sarina Bowen - a romance book that doesn’t have an illustrated cover

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - a work of weird horror

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein - a staff pick from an indie bookstore (Preferably, from your local indie bookstore.)

Climate Change Is Racist by Jeremy Williams - a nonfiction book about nature or the environment

The Walking Cat by Tomo Kitaoka - a comic in translation

The Color Purple by Alice Walker - a banned book and complete a task on Book Riot’s How to Fight Book Bans guides (regarding the second requirement, one method was requesting queer books to be purchased by your local library, which I did when I asked them to purchase The Art of Being Ugly books, which they did)

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers - a genre-blending book

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson - a book about little-known history

Mango, Mambo, and Murder by Raquel V. Reyes -  a “cozy” book by a BIPOC author

The House on the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune - a queernorm book

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo - the first book in a completed young adult or middle grade duology

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay - a book about a moral panic

Holidating by Sarina Bowen - a holiday romance that isn’t Christmas

Love: The Fox by Frédéric Brrémaud and Federico Bertolucci - a wordless comic

Warriors: Graphic Novel #2 by Erin Hunter and others - a 2015 Read Harder Challenge task to complete (a graphic novel, a graphic memoir or a collection of comics of any kind)

My favorite books on this list are James, The Warmth of Other Suns, Love: The Fox, The Walking Cat, and Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.