Emily's Hobbies

πŸ“š My Reading List For 2025

My big goal for 2025 is to make a dent into my book collection for books I haven't read yet. I'd like to make it a habit to reach for a book rather than to scroll social media or spend too much time watching garbage on youtube, and at the same time, I have a handful of books I'd bought and haven't gotten to yet. Looking over my bookshelf, however, I realized there were some I wasn't really looking forward to the way I'd been when I'd picked them up. So

At the moment, I'm reading Circle of the Moon by Barbara Hambly and Fiber Fueled by Dr. will Bulsiewicz, almost done with the latter. I usually have multiple books going at once so I can pick up whatever I feel like at the moment. My favorite genre, as I think I've said before, is fantasy - primarily stories with dragons - though I also for whatever reason can't stop myself from picking up "self-help" type books.

The Collection

Looking at the full collection here, I'm not making it my goal to read everything on this list. But I decided to list them all because I'll likely be choosing arbitrarily and by what I feel like going with at the moment.

The books I'm most excited for

These are the books I"m probably going to focus this year. If I can widdle these down, then I'd be okay with buying some new books later on.

Books I'm not excited for, but still interested

Some of these came from a mystery box I'd ordered, some were impulse buys that I lost interest in after they sat on my shelf.

Book I'm not confident I'll get through

These are ones I picked up similar to the previous section, but no longer are interested in. I'd like to give them their fair shake but if they don't catch my interest, I may donate them.

These ones I might have impulse bought, or received as a gift, or something. But they've been on my shelf for a noteworthy amount of time and I'm not as excited to tackle them. Maybe they'll be great! But they're not at the top of my list.

Update: Books I bought in 2025 (when I said I wouldn't)

These are late additions to the list that I "shouldn't" have bought, but well, here we are. πŸ™‚

Book Reviews

When I started the blog, I wasn't really sure if I'd leave book reviews here or not. I've been primarily using my Goodreads account for that for a long time, and wasn't sure it was necessary to pivot from posting there to here. I'd kind of settled on the idea that I could post some reviews here, and maybe give more in-depth thoughts here; but didn't see the need to abandon Goodreads entirely, since I do like the site (even though it's crappy at this point) because I can make some connections and get recommendations here and there. I don't expect anyone on the site to read my reviews, but I write them because I want to remember what I'd thought of the book the last time around. Sometimes I see a book and can't remember how I felt about it, so being able to look up my thoughts is useful to me. I'd also started a bookwyrm.world account, but the site feels very empty (which, to be fair, it is a small instance of the bookwyrm software, and maybe I'd be happier on a larger one) so I still largely use Goodreads.

Recently I'd stumbled on some youtube videos about books (booktube, I guess it's called) and someone mentioned how ancient the site is compared to competitors like Storygraph. I have no intention of using Storygraph, though I'm sure it's fine, but the video made some good points on how un-maintained Goodreads is. It makes me question if one day Amazon will just pull the plug on it, or leave it in a state of complete disrepair, and my reviews would vanish along with it. I have no idea how much money Amazon makes with the site, but considering they don't care to update the interface at all, I wonder if it's purely maintenance. Or maybe they're working on a new site behind the scenes? If that's the case, they're long past due on it. Either way, perhaps it's better if I prioritize my reviews being on my own blog after all.

So I'm considering back-porting my reviews to here. It'll be a few here and there as I have time, and I have some things to consider about it, but it's something that may happen. I don't review every book I read, and I may not want to bring over every review, but at least going forward I'll try to make sure this is my main review spot.

#2024 #books