At the start of the year, I open a new note in my phone’s app, ready to begin a list of everything I’ll read over the next 12 months. It’s a little tradition that I’ve stuck to since 2018; while some readers prefer sites like Goodreads or apps like Storygraph, I enjoy the organised chaos of my slightly unwieldy inventories.
In 2025, I managed to read 95 books, starting off with Nathan Hill’s Wellness and ending with Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin. That’s a new record for me – scrolling back through the archives shows that I’ve previously tended to get through around 70 titles annually. This also makes me something of an anomaly. According to research from YouGov released last year, the average Brit read or listened to just three books over a 12-month period. 40 per cent of the respondents hadn’t read a single one in the past year. And we’re not exactly raising a new generation of readers, either. In 2025, children’s reading enjoyment fell to the lowest recorded level in the UK.
