My Year in Books: 2025

 The twice teased Year in Books 2025 is finally here after a gap of a year. I will present it without further ado. 

48 was a good number of reads, I think, considering the whole PhD business and also that this blog has also picked up steam. Much better than 30 last year (also, since I did not write a Blog post, it's worse). I don’t think I am going back to the near-century of 2023, but that’s fine. I chose my life. Many decades later, I’ll get that century; for now, it’s the Corona Problem that has my attention.

I was thinking that 2.9 average rating meant it was a bad year for books, but it was a 2.8 in 2023! Both good and enjoyable years of reading. Guess I beat the whole "Bad is stronger than good" thing.

 अक्रोधेन जयेत् क्रोधम् असाधुं साधुना जयेत्. 

One thing that changed this year is that my little brother got into reading too. That, and the fact that I have DD. Two book buddies was not a thing I previously had. And it does help.

Anyway, the year started with a string of thrillers that DD lent me (read: forced me to read), because I once said I don't like thrillers much. Okay, I had restarted reading with them once, but they seemed to get repetitive and boring after some time. I think it was Suheldev & the Battle of Bahraich and The Vault of Vishnu which finally killed the genre for me. But still the year started with  How to Kill Your Family, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, The Silent Patient and Verity. This, I think, is the Thriller-Girl on Bookstagram starter pack canon. I wouldn't know, since I am not on IG. But DD is, and she keeps sending me reels on WhatsApp. They sometimes feel so relatable that I think DD directs them. These books were different from the ones I had previously read. Much darker, more real, with more sass, with actual emotions rather than cardboard characters, and more adult than what a middle-schooler thinks “adult” is. Also, the female POV feels different. I think my previous exposure to it was limited to Pride and Prejudice (which I didn't like). I also like the aspect that MC may be an unreliable narrator. अन्यत्तृणमिव त्याज्यमप्युक्तं पद्मजन्मना indeed. I went ahead and got my own books in the genre. Lights Out and I Was a Teenage Slasher (whose review I xposted on this blog) didn't work, while I was hooked on Gone Girl. 

Speaking of reviews, I started xposting some GR reviews here. Sometimes they are not even reviews but just my musings, or a longer review than one n GR, field notes as I go on reading or even multipart deep dives like for Makers of Modern Dalit History. I think it was one of the posts that got me back to writing on the blog, the blog did pick up some steam before that, but it was the tuboboost in some ways. I have written more about this exponential growth in posts here. There is something calming about writing these posts, even if no one reads this, and writing on the books is one of the main goals I started the blog with. I really wish GR showed the number of reviews written rather than just the first and last one. 

Speaking of my brother, my parents are surprisingly more lenient with him. Well, there is a 10 year gap between up and the change in parenting style shows. I read library books secretly, and this one gets taken to the Pragati Maidan Book Fair. Just how the time changes. This anyway it nice for me. I can read his books when back in Faridabad. Read Percy Jackson this way, and I was disappointed. Harry Potter is the one true boy wizard for me. The Choosen One. Ditto for The Alchemist. Don't get the hype of either. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, however, was a warm, cozy book that I really liked. Liked enough to gift him Days at the Torunka Café. I also did read, but it doesn't hold up to the first book.

Speaking of books I didn't write, I think it starts with Butter. There seems to be a Tsunami of warm, cozy Japanese novels in the Indian market. But book this, I don't like. Vector: A Surprising Story of Space, Time, and Mathematical Transformation (which I got in a Hardcover, thanks to the DAE contingency grant) was another bad book early in the year. वर्जिन is a free poetry collection I saw years ago on Google Books, I finally gave it a serious read this year, but still bad. Also, I should not have picked up Lords of Wrath as my introduction to Dark Romance. I have not picked another since. I tried That Night to find a good Indian written Thriller, but was disappointed too. The Fractal Murders was a good title on bad writing and a story. I think the 2.9 rating is starting to make sense now. 

Given my trade, there were obviously Maths textbooks. While a lot of Krantz's is good, Axler's MIRA stood out the most.  And the year ended finally with the warm yet depressing Dept. of Speculation.

Reading Goals 2026

1. 30 Books.
2. Complete Ambedkar's जात-पांत का विनाश.
3. 1 book in (not on) Sanskrit.
4. 4 books in Hindi.
   
5. 1 book in Urdu Script (which I will learn via this book).
6. 1 book by Savarkar.
7. 3 Books from the "Ideologically Opposite" Camp.
8. Read the History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire Vol.- 1
9. 1 Indian Autobiography.
10. 1 book on some current policy debate.

Some of these are still uncompleted items from 2023, but the year is still young. We will meet again next time this year to take stock of this.