Like most people, I read mainly on a computer screen - articles, emails and social media (though I try and fail to avoid it). Last year, I saved over 700 long form articles, and likely read over twice as many.

Despite reading so much online, I actually prefer reading physical books. Last year, I read 39 books, a drop compared to 2023 (65 books). I initially thought this was down to reading longer books and more non-fiction, but looking at the figures, it seems 2023 was an outlier with far more fiction than usual.

The books I read were:

Looking over these books, I realised how much of my fiction reading was from various book series:

• Ann Cleeves wonderful Shetland novels
• PF Chisholm’s Robert Carey series
• The Veiled Throne by Ken Liu, the third book in The Dandelion Dynasty
• I’ve continued reading Patrick O’Brian’s excellent Aubrey-Maturin books
• I’ve re-read Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion in the Baroque cycle
• Justin Cronin’s The City of Mirrors (The Passage Trilogy)
• Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo (Lonesome Dove series)
• Mick Herron’s Slough House novels

For my non-fiction reading, it was a very mixed bag, with books on military history, screen writing and Hollywood, modern antisemitism, software architecture, leadership, policing and Russian espionage.

In terms of my favourite books this year, I would have to single out:

• The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North
• The Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurty
• Red Bones by Ann Cleeves
• The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O’Brian
• The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith
• Losing Small Wars by Frank Ledwidge

In terms of the most disappointing books I read this year, the list of shame includes:

• The Veiled Throne by Ken Liu
• A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel
• Tripwire by Lee Child
• Team Yankee by Harold Coyle

Part of the joy of reading books from a series is that you have some assurance of the quality of writing. In terms of my reading for 2025, I’m hoping to find some new authors to start reading, and to read a lot more from some authors I’ve shamefully neglected (like Claire North). I also hope to read some more non-fiction, in particular military history.