After my extensive reflection on the reading goals of 2025, it’s now time to delve even deeper into the hard data. Not to force conclusions, but rather to see whether my feelings about the reading year 2025 are supported or contradicted by the data.

Unlike in previous years, this time I’m not throwing everything into one big pile. This post will focus primarily on the key figures, or what I called the reading journal trackers when I was still keeping a journal. So I’ll mainly reflect on how I read in 2025: what kind of books I picked up, in which formats, and which genres and target audiences dominated. Whether I’ll write a post about all the other data remains to be seen.

As always, this is purely for nerdy fun, without judgment or performance pressure. Just a glimpse into what my 2025 reading year looked like in numbers.

Star ratings

First, the most obvious and perhaps also the most discussed tracker: my rating of the books I’ve read.

When I look at the distribution of the stars, I see a familiar picture. As in most years, this graph neatly follows a sort of normal curve: few books at the extremes (1 star or 5 stars) and a clear concentration in the middle. The largest share of my read books in 2025 received 3 stars (33%), closely followed by 4 stars (31%).

I always enjoy seeing that same distribution visually, with the book covers included. Giving star-ratings remains a matter of the moment. No matter how hard I try to implement some kind of system – through CAWPILE, or my translated BALSPEL system – there are always books that I in hindsight would give a different rating. But generally speaking, I agree with this distribution. It feels fair and representative of how my reading year went.

Because I personally felt that 2025 was a weaker reading year than previous years, I wanted to compare the 2025 figures with those of previous years. And the data doesn’t really confirm this feeling.

When you compare the star rating distribution from 2020 to 2025, you mainly see a lot of stability. Three stars dominate every year, four stars fluctuate somewhat but remain strongly represented, and five-star books remain consistently rare. 2025 doesn’t stand out significantly in this respect.

The gradual increase in DNFs over the years, with 2025 as the current highest point (7%), is noticeable. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything negative about the quality of the books, but says more about me as a reader. Instead of stubbornly dragging myself through a book ‘because that’s just the way it should be’, I now dare to put a book down with a more peaceful mind if it doesn’t appeal to me and I accept that it might just not be for me.

Format

Besides what I read, I’ve also been tracking the format I read my books in for years. For 2025, I again distinguished three categories: physical books, e-books, and audiobooks.

Looking at this year’s distribution, one trend stands out: the share of audiobooks has continued to decline. In 2023, that percentage dropped below 40% for the first time, to 30%. In 2024, it remained more or less stable at around 33%, but in 2025, it fell further to 29%. This means that for the first time in years, I read less than a third of my books via audio.

On the other hand, there’s a clear increase in the number of physical books read. In 2025, almost half of all books (49%) were read on paper, a significant increase compared to previous years and the highest share in this entire series. E-books remain a sort of stable middle ground: less dominant than audio in my earlier years, but clearly a fixed component of my reading habits.

Now, I do have to make a small caveat here. The figures for 2025 aren’t entirely correct. I’m increasingly reading books in a hybrid way: I can start reading a book physically, but then listen to a few chapters in between while crafting, tidying the house, or doing something else where eyeball reading isn’t practical. That’s why, in my Excel spreadsheet, I’ve mainly recorded how I started reading a book, and not necessarily every format I used along the way. This makes this tracker slightly less accurate than, say, five years ago, when I usually stuck faithfully to one format per book.

That being said, the decline in audiobooks does feel like a genuine shift, not just a matter of registration. In the early years when I discovered audiobooks, they accounted for over 40% of my reading volume. These days, I’m much less inclined to automatically turn to audio. This is partly because I’m more consciously drawn to books from my own bookshelves, but also because my listening habits have changed. When I want to listen to something, I increasingly turn to music or a YouTube video instead of an audiobook.

My daily routine also plays a role. I still go to the gym, but I walk much less than I used to, while those walks were my primary audiobook moments for years.

Something else that’s inextricably linked to this for me is the declining number of books I’ve read. Audiobooks make it much easier to read more, as they fill the gaps when physical reading isn’t possible and ensure that reading literally blends into my daily routine. Now that I seem to be reaching for audiobooks less often, those “extra” reading moments are largely disappearing, and that seems to translate quite directly into fewer books per year.

I can’t say for sure whether these two trends are entirely causally linked. There’s probably something to it, but I also notice that I’m focusing more consciously and concentrated on physical books, and often on longer or more complex stories, which I find more difficult to consume in audiobook form. This may result in fewer titles read, but not necessarily in fewer pages read.

Target audience

Traditionally, I also include the distribution of target audiences in this overview: children’s books, young adult books, and adult books. But here the trend is clear and anything but surprising.

In 2025, the vast majority of my books were aimed at an adult audience. Specifically, 85% were adult books, while the remaining 15% fell under the heading of Young Adult. Children’s books weren’t read at all this year.

When I compare these figures with those of recent years, you see a clear and consistent shift. The share of YA books has been declining for several years in a row, while adult books are increasingly becoming the norm on my reading list. This isn’t a sudden break, but rather a gradual evolution that aligns nicely with how my tastes, interests, and reading priorities have developed over the past few years.

What struck me while tracking these figures is that with quite a few books I read, I explicitly wondered if they were truly written as adult books. With some titles, I strongly felt that they could just as easily be classified as YA based on content, but perhaps were marketed as “adult” for economic reasons.

That automatically led me to a broader question: what actually makes a book YA or adult?
Is it the age of the main character? The themes explored? The complexity of the plot? The presence (or explicitness) of violence or sex? The more I think about it, the more blurred that line seems to become. The distinction sometimes feels arbitrary, and perhaps I unconsciously play a role in that myself, with certain expectations or prejudices toward specific labels, themes, or writing styles.

Moreover, a separate category has emerged in recent years (New Adult) which has taken on a life of its own through social media. In my mind, that label often equates to “romantic stories with more explicit scenes,” but even then, I know that’s a simplification. In any case, it feels like the traditional target audience classifications are becoming increasingly less clear-cut.

What I do notice very clearly is that the Young Adult label influences how I read. I have less patience with YA books: I’m more likely to give up, less willing to “read through the initial phase,” and more likely to decide that something isn’t for me. With a book presented as an adult novel, on the other hand, I’m more willing to persevere, even if the beginning doesn’t immediately convince me.

That realization feels somewhat uncomfortable, because it clearly points to a bias. Perhaps some YA books could have surprised me just as much if I’d given them the same space and attention. So it’s definitely something to take with me into future reading years: not only be critical in what I choose, but also in how I read and evaluate, regardless of the label attached to it.

So the numbers of this tracker tell a fairly simple story, but substantively, it raises interesting questions about labels, expectations, and their influence on my reading experience.

Genres

Naturally, I also kept track of the (main) genres the books I read were classified into, although I’ve noticed this has increasingly led to doubts in recent years. Many books simply can’t be neatly categorized anymore, and especially with genres like fantasy, the boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred. Still, it remains interesting to look at the bigger picture here as well.

It will come as no surprise that fantasy is once again by far my most-read genre. In 2025, a whopping 53% of everything I read fell under that heading. This includes a wide range of so-called fantasy, from epic fantasy to cozy fantasy and romantasy.

Traditionally, my top three genres are Fantasy, Romance, and Mystery/Thriller, and that ranking remained the same on paper in 2025. However, this year’s figures reveal more than just a top three.

You can see that mystery and thriller reached 17% in 2025, which is again lower than in previous years. This decline can be directly linked to another clear trend in my statistics: these are precisely the genres I traditionally read most often via audiobook. Since my consumption of audiobooks has steadily declined in recent years, it makes sense that this is also reflected in this genre distribution. Less listening literally means fewer thrillers and mysteries.

Romance also saw another decline, reaching 13% in 2025. Yet, it doesn’t feel like I’ve truly “missed” this genre. Of the 54 fantasy books I read this year, 20 had romance as a secondary genre. So it seems very likely that I’m getting my romance fix less and less from purely romantic stories, and more and more from books that combine genres; in this case, fantasy with a strong romantic plot.

Sci-fi has remained stable over the years, accounting for around 10 to 11% of my reading. That’s not surprising in itself, but it is funny considering what I say every year about this genre: that I’d actually like to read more of it, because I think I’ll really like it. Sci-fi thus remains a genre of good intentions. Present, but never dominant.

The reading rhythm of 2025

Although I have quite a few additional figures in my Excel spreadsheet that I could comment on, this seems like a good time to wrap up this rather extensive post. So, I’ll close with a final overview that brings it all together: the number of books read versus the number of pages read, broken down by month.

What’s immediately striking is that the number of books read and the number of pages read generally run nicely parallel. Months in which I read more books are generally also the months in which I worked through more pages. This indicates a fairly consistent reading rhythm throughout the year, without extreme peaks or valleys.

Yet, there are a few subtle nuances that make the overview interesting. For example, a slight reversal is visible in July and August. In July, I read more books than in August, but in August the total number of pages read was higher. This suggests that I may have picked up slightly longer books during the summer months, or progressed through shorter titles more slowly.

It’s also striking that months like February, April, June, and November were exceptionally strong reading months, both in terms of books and pages read.

When I compare these monthly figures with those from previous years, it becomes clear that this pattern is no coincidence. Months like April, June, and November have been remarkably strong reading months over the years, both in terms of number of books and pages read.

The peak in April is easy to explain: for several years now, I’ve been a faithful participant in the Magical Readathon, which almost automatically means I read more in that month. The fact that this month has been so consistently strong over the years feels less like a coincidence and more like a fixed anchor point in my reading year.

This also adds context to the summer shift visible in the figures. The second part of the Magical Readathon traditionally used to take place in August, which often resulted in a reading boost in that month. However, since 2024, this component has shifted to September, which also explains why August has been less pronounced in recent years, while September has become slightly stronger.

This means that 2025 fits nicely within a reading rhythm that has been recurring for several years: not characterized by extreme peaks, but by fixed moments when reading is slightly more central.

And voilà, with this, I conclude this numerical section of my reading year 2025. All these graphs and percentages may not provide spectacular new insights, but they do confirm that my reading behaviour is becoming more conscious, slower, and more selective.

In that sense, these figures tie in nicely with my reflection on the reading goals for 2025. They don’t show a perfect reading year, but they do show a reading year that suits me better and better, and that is ultimately much more important than any graph.

Cheers,
Charlotte