Non Hughes

(Title appropriated from Hwang Bo-Reum’s essay collection Every Day I Read, which I’m currently wandering through!)

How’s it almost the end of January already!! Last year was the year of falling back in love with reading, and we’re fast approaching the time when it’s no longer appropriate for me to talk about it.

This time last year, as I was facing down the double prospect of querying literary agents with a completed novel and starting work on my next, I had the horrible feeling that I just… didn’t see the point. Again. What’s so good about books anyway? Why should I go to all this effort to read or write them? Who would even buy them? Nobody reads anymore!

I needed desperately to remind myself why I love books so much, why I want to become a published author. Hence: reading! And not just books I thought would make good comps for my next novel, but any book of any genre I wanted to read!

Thanks to StoryGraph (awesome app for tracking your reading habits, by the way, far better than GoodReads), I have stats, so here we go…

In 2025, I read 59 books! I started off reading lots of Fantasy and Middle-Grade (and Middle-Grade Fantasy), but slowly transitioned to Magical Realism, Mystery and Literary novels through the year, especially those by Japanese and Korean authors.

I read everything from Brandon Sanderson’s Wind and Truth to Malin Klingenberg’s The Secret Life of Farts, but my habits skewed towards slimmer volumes. Over half the books I read had 300 pages or less, while only 2% had more than 500 pages. They also skewed lighthearted and hopeful, with very few darker themes.

Dunno if that can be safely generalised, but from what I’ve read on PubTips, Publishers Marketplace and Jericho, books have been trending shorter at least, so I guess it’s not just me wandering around bookshops, my eyes skimming past thicker volumes in search of little gems I can read in an afternoon or two.

I don’t rate or review books on StoryGraph, but I do privately score every novel out of 20 as soon as I finish reading it, so let’s see what my favs of the year were!

Joint in first place, we have:

• The Line they Drew Through Us by Hiba Noor Khan, a Middle-Grade historical novel set during the partition of India. I ugly cried several times, and have never felt so attached to a family that wasn’t my own before.
• How to Solve your own Murder by Kristen Perrin, an Adult Mystery with a lot of characters and branches to keep track of, but which all twist really nicely into a single knot at the end. I had no idea who the culprit was until it was revealed.

After that, in no particular order:

• Wolf Siren by Beth O’Brien, a Middle-Grade feminist retelling of Little Red Riding Hood with a partially sighted protagonist, lots of depth and magical trees.
• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, a Historical novel following the generational effects of the slave trade on two branches of a family.
• Impossible Creatures: The Poisoned King by Katherine Rundell, a Middle-Grade fantasy sequel, which I was worried about reading because I loved the first so much, but which was awesome and magical!
• Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, a Slice of Life novel that came to me just as I needed it, and pulled me along with its intimate realness and a cast of characters hiding a lot from each other, yet seeing one another so clearly…
• We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida, a Magical Realism novel and a ‘cat book’, which I understand is a genre unto itself in Japan. It’s made up of many short stories, kind of like What You Are Looking For Is In The Library, which was my favourite novel of 2023, but the reader’s understanding of the mysterious cat clinic slowly grows in a really intriguing way.
• The Vanishing Cherry Blossom Bookshop by Takuya Asakura, another Magical Realism cat book, which I rated highly mostly because of a touching sub-plot about an elderly gentleman with dementia.
• Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie, a Murder Mystery. Not one of the more popular Poirot novels, but it went right to the top for me because I had all the clues but didn’t see the big picture until Poirot did his reveal. I haven’t been that angry since Brando killed off my favourite character, and I immediately gave the book 17/20.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the books I enjoyed enough to finish, but didn’t rate very highly:

• The Long Shoe by Bob Mortimer, a Mystery novel that wasn’t particularly mysterious. I really like the author and his narrative voice, but I read his third book hoping he might have learnt how to write a compelling plot or protagonist by now. Sadly not.
• When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Sola, a Literary novel I picked up at the wrong time, when I really wasn’t in the mood. I would probably have rated it higher if I’d read it a month later.
• Return to the DallerGut Dream Department Store by Miye Lee, a Magical Realism sequel in which absolutely nothing happens.

Lastly, I read non-fiction for the first time in at least a decade! The highlights were:

• Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green.
• Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado-Perez.
• Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken.

I can confidently say after all that reading, my love of books has been rekindled! My fire to write has been stoked, too. I hope to keep reading this year, and that’s definitely the case so far, as I’ve managed a book every week through January.

That’s all for now, peace out!