I am usually not the type to make promises for new year – I know myself. I fail in achieving my goals in grand fashion and with incredible speed, so why fool myself?! XD

But this time… this time I said: you know, I have to make more of an effort to be present in the whole bookish blogging community again. I miss it. There are some fantastic bloggers out there that always check in on me and I owe them the same courtesy. So, for 2026, I will aim to:

*review the books I read, and *be more present in other bloggers’ doings.

I read more books in 2025 than I reviewed. It became very easy to just mark books as read and drop a rating (if even that) and move on to the next one. It was simply that hectic at times and honestly, stringing sentences together was reaaaaallly difficult for me last year. I even struggled with Uni papers – it was all around very steep uphill battle.

But, enough whining… let’s look at the stats.

I keep 2 book tracking platforms going simultaneously and in 2025 I was slightly more “serious” over at the StoryGraph. And so it happened, that SG has the most accurate numbers:

Of course, I started the year with a nonfiction required reading for University, and I finished it with a title that of course I had seen EVERYWHERE for the hype it got. If it wasn’t for the Estonian online Discord community where 7 of us decided to do the “traveling book”, I wouldn’t have picked The Song of Achilles to read at all. The idea of the traveling book is that you agree your own book, the people who are involved, and everyone picks a colour. Then you read each book, write your comments IN THE BOOK with the colour you have chosen and send it on to the next, until your own title returns home to you – filled with everyone’s comments and reactions.

Moving on… books and pages read throughout 2025:

All of th4e dips in the graphic are down to Uni. May was particularly crappy on the reading front as you can see! But, all in all, I read more than I hoped to read, way above my expectation in fact!

Now… I thought I wasn’t going to post this graphic because what is this shit, even… but in the name of transparency, I must be honest with you. Check out the first place on this graph, y’all!

Romance and contemporary… Romance, folks. Yes. And the cliché holds true – you just read and read and read, you read a book of romance in a day or 2 and enjoy it and your brain takes a rest and then you can’t remember sweet shag all about it. I needed the easy-reads. I really did. I also put the high number down to trying to meet the Kindle backlog challenge of Free or 99c books that have been gathering over the years for the “tired brain occasion”.

My longest and shortest of 2025:

Septology is part of the 100 Best Books of the New York Times (which you may recall I am attempting to read through… it’s a slow progress!), and Bjarndur and the Marsh Monster is a poetic adventure with a feel of proper lore and legends.

Next up… The average length of the books I read was 311 pages and on average it took me 9 days to finish a book.

Clift’s The Last One at the Party – I finished within a day – it’s a post-apocalyptic survival tale which I ended up scoring a 3. It was okay, but I mean, there isn’t much one can do with a virus apocalypse that will be surprising, or authentic, or mind-blowingly fresh. My StoryGraph review can be found here.

Baturin’s Karu süda, however… mm-mm-mmmm. The title translates to “Bear’s heart” or “Heart of the bear” and it’s a very close to nature, nature to mouth sort of indigenous way of living in the taiga (or boreal forest). It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made my heart ache and it was just soooo… It ended up one of the favourites.

In total for 2025…

And the coolest statistic of 2025 was undoubtedly this:

2025 celebrated 500 years of the Estonian Book so I partook in an alphabet challenge throughout the year to read literature by Estonian authors. There were some incredible titles, some not so… good. But I am pleased I went for it, because the incredible titles were really amazing.

So, let’s dive into the challenges…

As you can see I completed 2 of the challenges (sort of, a caveat here for LaLa in the Library Annual Challenge – I’ll explain in a minute), and I got to 71% for the Estonian online book club Bingo and The Sound of Madness Reading Challenge.

For the Estonian alphabet challenge, I ended up reading 22/12 books. I read 2 books against each months’ letter except 2. Overachiever… not. A completionist would have found those 2 missing books too.

The LaLa in the Library Annual Challenge is a tweaked version of LaLa’s own personal challenge. You can see all of LaLa’s challenge related stats here!

Now… because I wasn’t able to figure out how to better track the challenge on StoryGraph, it’s not reaaaallly 100%. I took 6 prompts from LaLa and tracked those as follows, with final results included:

So, in total I should have to read 21 books for this challenge, and I ended up with a total of 19 – meaning challenge only 90% completed!

I must say, I am most proud of the classics prompt. I must crank that number up! XD

That’s it! Here’s to a whole heap of great reading in 2026 to you, everyone, and me! I cannot wait! 🙂