Hello!

I’ve been excited about starting my 2025 reading for weeks, especially since as soon as I drove home for Christmas my time and energy for reading was practically non-existent and I didn’t finish the book I was reading until the first couple of days of January. I love a fresh start and the New Year is the ultimate fresh start.

I refer to my monthly TBR as a ‘functional’ TBR, not because I don’t think other people’s TBR’s aren’t functional but because mine has one. I have a bunch of categories that I have books for and my monthly TBR is basically my way of holding myself accountable to reading them.

As it is the beginning of the year, here is a brief explanation of the categories and how things are a little bit different from where I started in 2024! My January TBR this time last year had eleven books on it, which is an actual joke considering my average reading book is somewhere between 5-7 books. The categories I had then that I don’t have now were two books from Kindle Unlimited (to try and make my subscription cost worth it), two books on Audible (which I now just use to listen to my other picks, I don’t need to be focusing on books that aren’t on my physical TBR), and then the Illumicrate and Afterlight subscription boxes. I cancelled KU because I just have too many books on my physical TBR and I don’t read fast enough to justify it and I cancelled the subscription boxes because they were so expensive and I wasn’t rating the books very highly? My favourite part of the two boxes was the bookish merch that comes with the Illumicrate book and that’s such a dumb reason to pay so much money when quite a few of the items were really stupid (the apron, the tea towel, the food bag clips and the pill box spring to mind… the fact I thought of four things says everything).

Having so many books on my monthly TBR just set me off on the wrong foot for the year so in 2025, my focus is getting through my physical TBR, actually completing my monthly TBRs and enjoying what I’m reading! One thing I did manage to do in 2024 was not feel like I was rushing what I was reading or reading for the sake of numbers and I want to carry that into this year as well.

So my categories for 2025 are as follows!

I still have ‘the wedding book club‘ that started because when my husband and I got married we asked our guests for a copy of their favourite book to make a little library of our favourite people’s favourite books and in an endeavour to read them all, I started a book club where my husband and I take it in turns to choose a book each month and I read it and he doesn’t. We’ve now started using one of those online spinners to choose from the books we have left because my husband couldn’t keep track of the books I’ve read and the ones I haven’t yet but I must confess, for January’s pick I spun a few times because I didn’t want to read Stephen King for my first month of the year, I didn’t want to commit to reading a really chunky book in a month where I know I’m going to be rereading Fourth Wing and Iron Flame ahead of the Onyx Storm release later this month so I spun a few times to land on Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene. I honestly don’t know anything about this book – it’s listed as a classic on Storygraph but it’s only just over 200 pages and the audiobook is only about 7 hours so honestly that’s enough for me to not be too intimidated by it. This book club has made me read some books that are so far out of my comfort zone they’re not even on my radar and even though I’ve not enjoyed all of them, I like being pushed out of my comfort zone so I’m going in with an open mind.

My next category is a new book club for this year! My sibling and I have started our own little book club which we’re calling the D.A.D’s Book Club (depressed autistic delusional, lol) and for our first book, we chose it together. We met in London for my sibling’s birthday last year and in Forbidden Planet we picked the book we wanted to start our book club with She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. If I’d written this post before I started reading it, I probably would have been able to share some enthusiasm for it but at this point, my sibling has finished it and I’m just halfway through and neither of us really like it but I’m reserving full judgement till I’ve finished it. The cover is very pretty – there’s something positive!

In the new release category, obviously I will be reading Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros. I will probably buddy read it with both my husband and my sibling so it could even count for both of those book clubs, but we’re all very excited. I’m so glad the team working on this series spent a bit longer on it than they did on Iron Flame because that wasn’t the best sequel I’ve ever read but the cliffhanger was immense and I’m so intrigued as to where it’s going to go next. I know there’s going to be another intense cliff hanger at the end of Onyx Storm because this whole series is built on huge reveals in the last few pages, but at this point I don’t think the number of books in the series has been confirmed yet so there’s no way that this is the end, but as long as my baby boy Ridoc doesn’t die I’ll be okay… I think.

My next definite category is picking 2 books from my 25 in 2025 annual TBR list – to get through the whole list I need to read 2 books per month (with a bonus book in one month!) so as I choose all of the list from my TBR jar, I put all of the slips of paper in a smaller jar and got my husband to pick two out for this month. The books he chose are The Ex Talk by Rachel Lynn Solomon and the first book in the Maximum Ride series, The Angel Experiment by James Patterson which is a reread from my early teenage years. I think these are actually pretty perfect first picks – The Ex Talk is the only contemporary romance on this list so I am very excited to have it as a bit of a palette cleanser between all the fantasy. With this, I remember Maximum Ride being a really fast paced book with really short chapters and I can’t lie, I’m excited to go back to this series and feed my need for nostalgia.

Then we have the un-definite categories – it’ll make sense, gimme a minute.

So the current categories takes me to five books and whilst that would help me meet my reading goal exactly, having a six books on my TBR just feels like the right number and I think pushes me just a little bit (in a good way, not a high pressure way). So the other categories I see as interchangeable – if I have one, I won’t use the other. This gets more confusing when I say that one of these two categories I’m referring to as Other, but then the other category is picking another book from my TBR Jar.

An example will make this easier to understand 😂

So for January, as I’ve already mentioned, I want to reread Fourth Wing and Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros ahead of Onyx Storm coming out. So as I have two books in the ‘Other’ category (taking my total to seven, which is arguably too much anyway), I’m not pulling a bonus book from my TBR Jar. But if I didn’t have any books in ‘Other’ I’d pick a bonus TBR book. I hope that makes more sense now!

In summary (as there was a lot of explanation in this post!), my January TBR is:

• Our Man In Havana – Graham Greene
• She Who Became The Sun – Shelley Parker-Chan
• Fourth Wing – Rebecca Yarros
• Iron Flame – Rebecca Yarros
• Onyx Storm – Rebecca Yarros
• The Ex Talk – Rachel Lynn Solomon
• Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment – James Patterson

I think this is a good list to start the year! I finished my one carry-over book from 2024 on January 2nd and even though I don’t know if I’ll actually be able to manage to get through this whole list, there’s a chance! My optimism is perhaps baseless but I’ll take it!

Thank you so much for reading,

Sophie xx