This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme is about our bookish goals for 2025, which is always an interesting one to ponder. I fall in and out of love with having strict goals like a target number of books to hit: I feel like it’s an important motivator for me to keep making time for reading, but at the same time it risks making reading be about numbers instead of enjoyment. So my goals always try to balance that out… So, without further ado, let’s jump into the goals!

1. Read 400 books this year. This is the same target I managed to hit in 2023 and 2024, so it feels doable now. “400 books” includes novellas, comics, manga, individually published short stories like Kindle Shorts, audiobooks, potentially even radioplays. It’s a deliberately broad selection. If I hit my goal by reading every volume of Fairy Tail, starting again from the beginning, that’s absolutely fine if that’s what I feel like reading.
2. Roll with it. If it hits September and I haven’t been able to read anything like enough, I am absolutely going to drop my goal to whatever seems reasonable. I can be stubborn about this; I “had” to read 66 books in December in order to meet my goal for 2024. But the whole time I was trying to listen to myself and check how much I still wanted to do it, how much I actually felt like reading. There’s no use in a goal that makes you feel miserable, unless your aim is misery.
3. Read 90,000 pages this year. That means the average page count of the books I read should be 225 pages. I’ve avoided setting it too high, so that it leaves plenty of room for manga that clock in at 160 pages, or graphic novels at 100 pages, or whatever it might be — while encouraging me to also read some of my longer books as well to balance the scales.
4. Ensure at least a quarter of my reading is books from my backlog. I’m not sure yet how realistic this is. So far, 84% of my reads (11/13) have been from my backlog, but that’ll probably change later in the year once I’ve received more review copies, been to bookshops, etc. I actually thought about saying half my reading should be from the backlog, and I might still bump this goal up, but I thought I’d start out by seeing how it goes. I think a quarter should be fine, even a half, but I’m a mood reader, so I try not to paint myself into a corner.
5. Read according to my whim, no matter what. Lists are so tempting. I love lists. But as I just mentioned, I’m a mood reader. There’s no way I can stick to a plan to read a specific list of books, or anything of the kind.
6. Read for an hour a day, on average. It doesn’t always happen; I tend to read for a bit under an hour a day during the work week, and then binge on the weekends, at least while I’m still studying. But it’s a good marker and driver of mental health for me: I read more when I feel alright, and I feel better when I read. So I try to keep an eye on this, and ensure I make the time.
7. Try to finish (or DNF) the books I start within a reasonable length of time. I have some books “on hold” that I’ve been partway through for ages, and I’ve been trying to rid myself of that habit. I don’t want to be super restrictive and say “only one book at a time”, because that’s not at all how I read and it isn’t fun. But I would like to keep it to a reasonable number, and have them all be books I’m actively reading, rather than having a handful of books that have been paused for weeks or months.
8. Stay curious. I want to try new things, and things I wouldn’t necessarily automatically pick up. Manga with silly titles (The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter, I’m eyeing you), non-fiction books about topics I don’t normally read about (though given the range I read, surely few things are unexpected anymore), enormous doorstoppers that will take forever that have been intimidating me (At the Feet of the Sun? I loved the first book, but I’ve been holding off on this one!), and so on and so forth.
9. Read first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I want to stop grabbing my phone first, and reading is an excellent way to start the day slowly, gently, and without immediately turning on the firehose of social media, email, and work. It’s also a good off-ramp for the day, which specifically requires time away from screens, helping to resist the temptation to stay glued to them unil the last minute.
10. Graduate from my MSc. Not a reading goal, you say? No, but if I can just finish this degree, I’ll have more free time again, and you know I’ll be using that for reading. I’m gunning for a distinction, though it feels increasingly difficult to reach; at this point, really I’ll be proud just to finish, because it’s been a rough five years. I’m experienced with studying (this is my fourth degree), and thrive on it to some extent, but the time limit has been a difficult ask alongside full-time work and miscellaneous life events. Technically, I won’t graduate this year (the ceremonies will be in February 2026 — yes, two ceremonies: one from University of London, one from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) but I want to be eligible to graduate at the next ceremony. Once that’s done, I’ll be free to spend more time reading, visiting people’s blogs, etc, etc. I look forward to it very much.

And that’s my plans for the year! We’ll see how they go: what I said in #2 applies to all of these, I want to roll with the punches and adjust my goals as-needed!

Today’s theme from That Artsy Reader Girl‘s Top Ten Tuesday is “most anticipated books releasing in the first half of 2025”, so let’s take a look…

1. Murder as a Fine Art, by Carol Carnac (January). Technically this isn’t new, but where would I get my hands on it other than through the British Library Crime Classics reprint? Carol Carnac is slightly better known as E.C.R. Lorac, but sadly less known than she ought to be in all her guises. Her mysteries are some of my favourites, and I’m eager to read this one.
2. A Gentle Noble’s Vacation Recommendation, vol. 10, by Misaki, Momochi, Sando and Lamp Magonote (January). I haven’t quite read all the existing books yet, but I’m eager to keep following Lizel’s adventures, watching him charm everyone he meets, scheme like the best of ’em, and read the entire contents of a bookshop even faster than I would.
3. But Not Too Bold, by Hache Pueyo (February). I’ve read this as an eARC already (review here), but I’m looking forward to seeing what others think. It’s a little bit gothic, a bit creepy, and yet it’s a romance too…
4. The Ten Teacups, by Carter Dickson (February). Another one from the British Library Crime Classics collection. I’ve not always loved the work of Carter Dickson/John Dickson Carr, but I gained a bit more of an appreciation for it in the last year, and I’m curious about this one. There’s still the chance I’ll dislike it, but equally a chance it’ll be a five-star read for me.
5. Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales, by Heather Fawcett (February). I love this series, and I’m really happy to have received an eARC for this one as well. The formatting unfortunately leaves something to be desired (it’s an epub clearly generated straight from a PDF without cleanup), so I might hang on for the published version, alas. But I’m super excited to return to Emily’s world.
6. The Tomb of Dragons, by Katherine Addison (March). I urgently need to get to my eARC of this, because I don’t want to wait for the release in March! And here’s firmly hoping that someone finally gives Thara Celehar a hug. (I can dream.)
7. Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite (March). A fun SF mystery, which I’ve already read (review here). I know a couple of people who are going to love it, and I’m going to very much enjoy their enjoyment.
8. Everything is Tuberculosis, by John Green (March). The number of people who immediately notified this was going to be a thing when the news of it broke was… gratifying, honestly. Y’all know me! Yes, it’s high on my list, and I’m very hopeful for a new book on tuberculosis that will (I hope) make the seriousness of the situation clear to laypeople. Given my current degree and my undergrad dissertation, it probably won’t teach me anything new per se, but I’m always interested in how different people frame the problems — and you never know what someone fresh to the topic may notice or pick out as important. Either way, I expect to have Opinions.
9. A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett (April). I really liked The Tainted Cup, so I’m keen for the follow-up. I love genre mashes like fantasy and mystery, so this is catnip to me.
10. The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, by Malka Older (June). Again, I had an eARC copy of this and enjoyed it (review forthcoming) — it might not be my favourite of the Mossa and Pleiti books in some ways, but it was still a fun time, and I’m looking forward to having more people to talk about it with.

And there we go! I’m sure there’s a lot missing, and I’m looking forward to browsing other people’s lists and learning just how much I missed out…

It’s been a minute since I participated in Top Ten Tuesday, because that exhausted student life has caught up with me (apparently that happens even during your fourth degree), but I couldn’t resist this topic, particularly on this very apt date!

Yep, it’s the best of 2024, according to me. Let’s go!

1. Heaven Official’s Blessing, by Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù. This was an inevitable choice. I started reading The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System in 2023, so of the two MXTX novels I’ve read so far, this was the more obvious pick for “best of 2024” (even though I finished Scum Villain in 2024, and it is very fun). It’s an epic love story, but the plot around the love story is pretty astounding too, with Xie Lian’s principles being tested again and again and again. No matter what, though, he has Hua Cheng at his side — and Feng Xin and Mu Qing too, bickering all the way. I love so many of the characters, love the world, and love Xie Lian’s journey to prove that you don’t have to save yourself at the cost of others.
2. A Gentle Noble’s Vacation Recommendation, by Misaki, Momochi and Sando. I’d love to read the light novel, but for now what we have in translation is the manga — and I fell in love with it all in a heap this December. There are nine volumes out, with the tenth dropping in late January. It’s a fairly low-stakes story: Lizel gets transported to another world, where he proceeds to very competently secure himself an adventurer to show him the ropes and a coterie of fans to make life smooth for him. He’s clearly not as sweet (or at least, not as simply sweet) as people think, but Gil sees through him. It’s not a romance, explicitly, but the bonds he forms with Gil, Eleven, Ray, Judge and Studd (and his existing bond with his king) are pretty heavily coded as romances and crushes. I adore Lizel and his excitement about bookshops, and particularly his “friendship”(?) with Gil. I have a few critiques (female characters where?) but I’ve had so much fun with this series.
3. A Letter to the Luminous Deep, by Sylvie Cathrall. This is a debut that absolutely stole my heart. It’s a bittersweet story, since we see E. and Henery falling in love through their letters when they’ve already been lost, and their siblings working through what happened with grief and love. All the same, I love how the mysteries unfold and intertwine, I love the personalities revealed through their letters, and the world we’re presented with. It’s the first of a series and I absolutely can’t wait. It’s haunted me: when I was partway through it, I kept picking it up to read just a little more, and getting lost for a hundred pages at a time; since then, thoughts of how it’s all going to work out have kept coming back to me.
4. The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen. This was one of my earliest reads of the year, and I loved it. It’s a ramble through the history of humans using notebooks to think, from simple jottings of numbers to bullet journals, ICU diaries, morning pages, and more. I’ve been a journaller most of my life (though not always on paper), and loved the rambling trip through the history of it. Learning about ICU diaries made me cry, and I gave morning pages a shot because of it. (It’d have gone better if I had more time — maybe when I’m no longer a student?) Definitely a recommended non-fiction.
5. Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, by Heather Fawcett. It has a bit of a flavour of the Isabella Trent books (by Marie Brennan), which attracted me. It’s by no means a copy, but I could imagine Emily and Isabella getting along beautifully, and they share the same kind of “deranged practicality” that’s Isabella’s hallmark. I love Emily’s serious study of faeries of all types, her knowledge and competence, contrasting with her relative inability with people. (Lovers of Isabella: Emily is even worse at handling stuff like local politics, and doesn’t generally get that kind of thing to come right by her own meddling efforts either.) I found both books of the series so far a lot of pure fun, and not too heavy on the romance as to eclipse Emily’s serious academic endeavours.
6. The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler. In a way this is three books in one, and I preferred one of the three (and didn’t think that the other two stories wove in as well as they ought to have done). But I was so fascinated by the thread I did love that that didn’t matter. I really, really loved this one, and read it in just a few sittings, always reading just a liiiiittle bit more, just a few more pages won’t hurt, etc, etc. I think it has some weak points, but it presents such a compelling thought experiment that that kind of didn’t matter. I don’t know how well I’m selling this, but it had me mesmerised.
7. Moneta: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome in Twelve Coins, by Gareth Harney. This is the kind of history I’ve found myself really liking, where history is teased out of a physical artefact or collection of a similar type of physical artefact. In this case, coins. Harney writes really compellingly, fascinated about his own subject, which is always the most fun kind of non-fiction to read. I usually find it easier to set non-fiction aside for a bit even when I find it really interesting, but I was constantly picking Moneta up to read just a bit more.
8. Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History, by Rebecca Struthers. On a similar vein, this tells us the history of watches, and a little bit about the history of the wider world through discussing watches and the changes in timepieces. It’s another one that I found hard to put down, finding myself as absorbed in the detail as Struthers describes being in the watches she mends. It lent me a bit more appreciation for the pocket watch of my grandfather’s that I’ll be inheriting once it’s been fixed.
9. Honey and Pepper, by A.J. Demas. This is a romance set in an alternate Greece, and I ended up really loving the characters. I had some quibbles about the portrayal of slavery (it’s obviously negative, but some of the characters are neck-deep in slaves when they suddenly decide to free them and support them — which doesn’t and shouldn’t erase a lifetime of keeping humans as slaves), but it does try to be nuanced and handle the fact that one of the main characters has complicated feelings about it all.
10. What Moves the Dead, by T. Kingfisher. Horror isn’t entirely my thing, but this novella managed to tiptoe juuust around the edges of things that trigger my anxiety too much, giving a sense of unease that worked well. It’s a retelling of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, but it’s far more than that too, introducing the character of Alex Easton and an element of Ruritanian romance in kan’s origins and cultural baggage. There’s a bunch of fun characters, and Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher always writes very engagingly. I liked the sequel too, but What Moves The Dead felt creepier and managed that unease better.

That was a mix of my four and five star reads (I’m stingy, there weren’t many of the latter), and it was very difficult to narrow down what should be included here. Honorable mentions go to The Warden, Out of the Drowning Deep, Rose/House, Written in Bone and The Eye of Osiris.