What I Read in 2025

Slightly later than in previous years (and looking back I seem not to have posted at all last year which is terribly remiss), here is what I read - and in the order in which I did so - for pleasure in 2025, the eighth year on the trot for which I have kept such tabs. As before, I have not included what I've read for work purposes, and have put an asterisk by the ones I really enjoyed. I really recommend keeping a similar sort of diary list if you don't already as I can just about remember what I read last January, but not five years ago.

* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen
* A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell (asterisk for whole series)
A City of Bells by Elizabeth Goudge
Acts and Omissions by Catherine Fox
Picnic on Craggy Island: The Surreal Joys of Producing Father Ted by Lissa Evans
A Buyer’s Market by Anthony Powell
Out There by Jamie Mackendrick
* The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by Bettany Hughes
To Be Taught if Fortunate by Becky Chambers
Blossomise by Simon Armitage (illustrated by Angela Harding)
The Acceptance World by Anthony Powell
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón
* Minnow on the Say by Phillipa Pearce
Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan
At Lady Molly’s by Anthony Powell
Come Christmas by Eleanor Farjeon
The Crucible’s Greatest Matches by Hector Nunns
Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell
Bookish: How Reading Shaped Our Lives by Lucy Mangan
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
* The Card by Arnold Bennett
On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle
The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell
The Postal Paths: Rediscovering Britain’s Forgotten Trails and the People Who Walked Them by Alan Cleaver
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Sun Has Got His Hat On by Derek Randall
The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell
* You Are Here by David Nicholls
Selected Poems by Stephen Spender
Dickens & Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby
Sharpe’s Eagle by Bernard Cornwall
The Soldier’s Art by Anthony Powell
* A Room with a View by EM Forster
Autocorrect by Etgar Keret
Floodlights and Touchlines by Rob Steen
The Fell by Sarah Moss
The Strange House by Raymond Briggs [pictured top from new Manderley Press edition]
* The History of England in 25 Poems by Catherine Clarke
The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell
* Explorers of the New Century by Magnus Mills
Greengates by R.C. Sherriff
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Penguin Scribe by Steve Hare
Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell
Midfield Dynamo by Adrian Duncan
Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman and other poems by Grace Nichols
Hearing Secret Harmonies by Anthony Powell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
* Long Live Great Bardfield by Tirzah Garwood
Shogun by James Clavell (ongoing)
* Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (ongoing)