As part of my 25 in 2025 challenges I wanted to challenge myself to read 25 books this year.

In the past I was a voracious reader and would often read 2 or more books a week, but as I’ve gotten older, had a child and the responsibilities of life have increased my dedication to reading has dropped, and in 2024 I found I had hardly read any books at all.

So this year I wanted to change that but not to over face myself. Curiosity and life long learning is one of my core values and what better way to learn and get curious than to read? 25 books over the course of a year equals just over 2 books a month so it was challenging for me but not too challenging that I would give up.

By prioritising reading, keeping a record of how much and what I’d read and utilising audio books as well as physical texts I was really pleased to have completed reading 25 books by the beginning of June 2025! Since completing the challenge I have continued to slowly progress and have read over 30 books so far.

Here is a list of the 25 books I read during the 25 in 2025 challenge:

1. Meditations for mortals by Oliver Burkeman
2. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins 
3. The crow road by Ian banks 
4. Self care for autistic people by Dr Anna Neff
5. Love death and baboons by Robert Sapolsky 
6. I want to die but i still want to eat tteokbokki by Baek Sehee 
7. Deep work by Cal Newport
8. Gideon the ninth Tamsin muir 
9. Our wives under the sea Julia Armfield 
10. Liberated mind by Stephen Hayes 
11. Lost in the garden by Adam S Leslie 
12. Parable of the sower by Octavia E. Butler 
13. You like it darker by Stephen King 
14. Parable of the talents by Octavia E.Butler 
15. Slow productivity by Cal Newport
16. Want by Gillian Anderson 
17. Feel good productivity by Ali Abdaal 
18. Wild Thing: a life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux 
19. Natural causes by dr Richard Shepherd 
20. The Autists by Clara Törnvall
21. Small mercies Dennis Lehane 
22. Sociopath a memoir by Patric Gagne 
23. Slade house David Mitchell 
24. The pattern seekers by Simon Baron-Cohen 
25. Discipline Ryan holiday 

During my reading challenge I decided to re-read some non-fiction books that I felt had had a big impact on the way I live my life. Instead of just consuming more and more knowledge I wanted to start ensuring that I was implementing some of the wisdom I’d read in these texts. To do this I started the process of slowly re-reading some of these texts and also annotating them- taking detailed notes, highlighting key passages and really taking in some of the lessons held within.

Some of the books I undertook this re-reading and annotation process on were the books by Cal Newport, “Deep Work” and “Slow productivity“.

I have read a mixture of books this year, some non fiction and some fiction. I also challenged myself to read some books that I wouldn’t normally choose to read. For example the book “Love, death and baboons” by Robert Sapolsky was recommended to me by a friend and is not something that I would ever have picked up without that recommendation. I ended up really enjoying this book. It was fascinating, sad and engrossing in a way I just didn’t expect.

As for fiction I really enjoyed reading “The Parable of the talents” and “The parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler.

Octavia E. Butler is a new author to me, she came up when I was searching for Dystopian novels to read. I am a big fan of apocalyptic, dystopian literature like “Handmaids Tale” by Margaret Attwood and was looking for something along those lines and this series did not disappoint.

Let me know of any books you’ve enjoyed reading this year and maybe I’ll put them on my reading list for 2026!