Chelsey's 2025 Mid-Year Reading Recap
I’m currently on a 10-day trip with my mom and youngest sister, and I’m trying to unplug completely, so I won’t be able to write up my June 2025 Reads until after I get back. In the meantime, here’s my mid-year reading recap!
If you know anything about me, you know that I love statistics and spreadsheets and numbers. In some areas of my life, trying to track things robs the activity of joy (for example, fitness). But in other areas, like reading, tracking information about books adds to the enjoyment of the activity.
I track my books in two places—Goodreads and Notion. I really only use Goodreads as a backup, so that I can quickly enter in a book I’ve finished and it will save the date. In Notion, I track a variety of information that I have to input manually. I use the information in Notion when I write my monthly posts about what books I’ve read, because there are ways to save the book cover image and quickly link to the book in Amazon.
As of the writing of this post near the end of June 2025, I have finished 78 books, which averages out to a nice even 13 books per month.
🔢 General Stats
Here are some of the big picture stats I found interesting:
Pages read: 24,589
Average pages read per day: 145 pages
Average pages per book: 315 pages
Books published in 2025: 13
Oldest book: So Big by Edna Ferber was published in 1924, making it the only book I’ve read this year that is more than 100 years old.
Books published before 2000: 25
Year with most books published: 23 of the books I’ve read so far this year were published in 2024
🏆 Best & Worst Books
Here are the winners and loser so far this year. It’s hard to choose just one in each category, so stay tuned until the end of the year when I’ll share more of my 5-star reads.
Best fiction: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien
Worst fiction: The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson1
Best nonfiction: The Devil at His Elbow by Valerie Bauerlein
Worst nonfiction: Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart2
Best spiritual: The Soul of Shame by Curt Thompson
Worst spiritual: This was impossible to choose, because all of the spiritual books I’ve read so far were 4- or 5-star reads for me. No losers.
📚 Genre Breakdown
As usual, I split up fiction and nonfiction pretty closely, while also managing to read 2-3 spiritual books each month.
Fiction: 27 books
Nonfiction: 36 books
Spiritual: 15 books
⭐️ Ratings
I am pretty good at picking books I’ll like, but I still managed to read 18 books that were not 4 or 5 star reads for me (23%). I’m always trying to get this number lower!
⭐⭐ — 2 books
⭐⭐⭐ — 16 books
⭐⭐⭐⭐ — 30 books
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ — 30 books
🧑💼 Authors & Formats
I read 74 unique authors so far this year, but my most-read author was J.R.R. Tolkien.
Not only did I read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, but I also read The Hobbit.
Here’s the breakdown of the format in which I consumed books:
🎧 Audio: 46 books
📱 Ebook: 9 books
📖Print: 22 books
📏 Book Length
I truly never pay attention to how long a book is before I start reading it, and it’s also tough with an audiobook to gauge the actual length. I track how many pages are in the physical book, whether I read it in print or not.
Longest book: Two books tied for longest, clocking in at 640 pages: The Quiet Game by Greg Iles3 and The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo.
Shortest book: How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen (96 pages)
Concluding Thoughts
At the beginning of the year, I thought I’d try to read 200 books this year, which I have done in the past. As of right now, I’m on track to read about 170 books at my current pace, and I have decided I no longer want to set goals for the entire year. That actually does hamper my enjoyment of reading.
And if I do start to feel sometimes like I’m not reading that much, I can look at the fact that I’m averaging the equivalent of about 150 pages per day, and that feels pretty significant given how busy our life is. That’s almost half of a book of average length.
I also wanted to go back and see how the formats in which I’m reading compare to last year. In 2024, I read roughly 58% audiobooks, 5% ebooks, and 37% print. Hilariously, I’ve read 58% audiobooks so far this year as well, but 12% of my books have been ebooks and only 30% have been print. I have felt like I’m using my Kindle Paperwhite more, and I’m curious if that trend will continue.
Do you track anything about the books you read? I’d love to know if you’ve noticed anything interesting about your reading so far this year. Or at the very least, your best and worst of books so far!
If you want to see more roundups of books, I have compiled a page on my website of all my Book Roundups.
Read more about this one in my March 2025 Reads post.
See my April 2025 Reads to learn why this was not one of my favorite books.
I did not enjoy this book—check out my January 2025 Reads to see why.