2025 : My year in books

One nice thing about Goodreads is it makes your reading history easily accessible and it helps to continue reading with challenges and so on. It is a bit like Strava for readers. One nice feature is the setting of your yearly reading challenge and then a recap of the year in books read. I have a modest yearly reading challenge of 15 books which I manage to reach or exceed on most years. I never have a plan for what to read in a year beyond the reaching the target of 15 books read over the whole year. I tend to pick one and then once I finished it decide on the next one. Sometimes a reference in the book I just read will guide me to the next book but often I just let the mood of the day and whatever catches my eye on my bookshelves decide what to read next. Looking back visually at 2025 it looks like it was heavy on physics, especially cosmology, quantum mechanics and biographies. I even managed to read a novel after many years. I am a fan of Willem Frederik Hermans and am buying his collected works. The publishing of his work is a massive enterprise and it consists of 24 volumes in total. So far I only managed to read 3 of the 24 volumes so I decided it was time to start on the next book, which is actually volume 3 as they did not appear according to the volume numbering. My favourite book of 2025 remains the biography of Lise Meitner. This book was referenced in the bibliography of another biography of Lise Meitner which I read in 2023. After I bought it I didn’t start reading it immediately as it felt like a bit of overkill to read the 2 biographies back to back. But early 2025 I took it from the shelf to read it, not one day too soon. Truly a biography of exceptional quality.