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Wrap Up: December 2025 + 4th Quarter Stats

I’m sure every single person you know is saying this, but seriously, can you believe it’s the last day of 2025? The last few months of the year absolutely flew by and before I knew it, the year was coming to an end!

Grab your favorite cozy beverage and/or snack, get comfy and let’s talk about the last month of the year!

It was a slow reading month for me. The beginning of the month was so busy with work that by the 17th I had only finished 2 books. I was reading like 3-4 books at once, but I didn’t really have time to sit and read for long chunks of time because I had so much going on. I also spent a lot of time working on setting up my bullet journal and working on Christmas gifts, so thank goodness audiobooks exist or I really would not have read much this month!

I had originally planned to make a blog post going through my 25 in 2025 to see if I read them all and share mini reviews, but I just got so busy/overwhelmed with everything that I needed to do for the holidays and that didn’t happen, but I did share a bookstagram wrap up for my 25 in 2025, so if you’re curious, you can check that out here!

My 5 star drought finally ended this month with Don’t Let the Forest In! I hadn’t had a 5 star read since July, and I honestly just thought I wasn’t going to have another this year, but wow this one really gripped me and I absolutely adored it. I’m planning on reading Hazelthrorn next month and now I’m even more excited to do so. 

I also did my Taylor Swift Eras Readathon and ended up completing 9/12 prompts! Which really is not bad considering the reading slump I was in at the beginning of the month. If you want to check out my highlights for the readathon, you can do so here.

Books read this month:

  1. Sisters in the Wind by Angeline Boulley (4.5 stars)
  2. What Happens in Amsterdam by Rachel Lynn Solomon (4 stars)
  3. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden (3 stars)
  4. Passion Project by London Sperry (2 stars)
  5. The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter (3 stars)
  6. Junie by Erin Crosby Eckstine (4 stars)
  7. Much Ado About Mistletoe by Christina Dodd (4 stars)
  8. A Cup of Holiday Fear by Ellie Alexander (3 stars)
  9. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (2 stars)
  10.  Don’t Let the Forest In by C.G. Drews (5 stars)
  11. Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee (4 stars)

Blog posts and vlogs I loved this month:

My posts this month:

Wow, what a busy month December was! The first week of the month saw me in rehearsals, tech and performances for one show and starting rehearsal for another show, so I was basically only focusing on work and couldn’t do anything else. Everything with the show that was ending and the show that was starting went very well, but it was for sure a lot happening all at once!

The weekend after that I went to the Dickens Fair with my sister and brother in law, which is a yearly tradition for us and we had so much fun! As always, we had some wonderful food, we watched a show, did some shopping and my favorite activity at the Dickens Fair is solving a mystery with Sherlock. The mystery this year was Alice in Wonderland themed which made it even more fun, and you would be absolutely correct in assuming that I absolutely nailed solving the mystery! I also finally bought a flower crown from a shop that I’ve been wanting to get for years and I wore it the whole day, I’m obsessed with it.

The rest of the month was filled with work, and getting ready for Christmas, but I won’t lie, Christmas completely snuck up on me. The month just went by so quickly that I was literally finishing the gifts I was making until Christmas Eve. I actually had to redo a gift because it got messed up structurally and drove me absolutely insane, but it’s okay, it happens! I made some new crafts for gifts this month; I made felt photo holders for Polaroids and gave them to multiple people and they’re so fun and easy to make, I’ll definitely be making a lot more!

I didn’t consume a whole lot of new media this month, but I’ve been really invested in both Stranger Things Season 5 and season 2 of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. I also watched the Eras Tour Docuseries and uh no one told me that episodes 5 and 6 would make me absolutely sob.

I switched from Spotify to Apple Music this month as well, so I spent quite a bit of time rearranging my library, which was a bit tedious but I also like reorganizing things, so it was kind of fun. I did get my Spotify wrapped though, and it was not at all surprising. 

Since it’s the end of the year, I figured I’d share my quarter 4 stats in this wrap up as well, so let’s get into my stats for the last 3 months of the year! As always we’re starting with books read, pages read, hours listened and new reads vs. rereads per month.

In October, November and December, I read a total of 37 books. I read 13 books in both October and November and read 11 books in December. Of the 37 books, 3 of them were rereads; Macbeth by William Shakespeare, which I reread every Halloween, and Little Thieves and Painted Devils by Margaret Owen which I read in November. 

In October I read 2,451 pages and listened to 18.86 hours of audiobooks. In November I read 2,074 pages and listened to 32.04 hours of audiobooks. In December I read 1,523 pages and listened to 23.21 hours of audiobooks. The last few months were super busy with work and other obligations, so a lot of my reading was done via audiobooks. Thank goodness for audiobooks, because otherwise I would’ve barely gotten any reading done these last few months, especially this December.

I read mostly full length novels again this quarter; 31 of my reads were full length novels, I read 2 non-fiction, 2 plays, and 2 novellas. My non fiction reads were The House of My Mother by Shari Franke and The Official Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour Book, my plays read were Macbeth by William Shakespeare (a reread) and Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee, and the novellas were The Fallow Year by Margaret Owen and Much Ado About Mistletoe by Christina Dodd.

As for distribution of how I got these books, 12 were owned, 2 from Audible, 16 from the library, 1 from Kindle Unlimited, 1 newly purchased, 1 gifted, 2 ARCs, and 2 from a book box (Book of the Month). 

When it comes to reading method, 12 were read physically, 7 were read via ebook, 15 via audiobook and 3 via multiple formats. As I mentioned earlier, this quarter was a big audiobook quarter for me, which you can more easily see through this graph. What makes me happy though is that after audiobook the next most read format was physical reads. At one point in the quarter it didn’t feel like I was reading a lot physically, so I’m glad to see that that wasn’t the case! As for the multiple formats, 1 of the reads was with the ebook and audiobook, 1 was with the physical book and the audiobook and the last was with the physical book and the ebook; so there was a nice distribution there as well!

Now let’s talk genres and star ratings! Let’s start with genres. This quarter my genre breakdown is as follows: 8 romance, 7 fantasy, 7 mystery, 4 horror, 3 historical fiction, 2 non fiction, 2 contemporary, 1 thriller, 1 drama, 1 classic and 1 literary fiction. 

Definitely not the wildest distribution of genres I’ve seen, but wow, look at fantasy coming in hot with 7! That’s actually a lot of fantasy for me, and I really enjoyed most of them! I did end up reading quite a few similar fantasy novels within the November though, and that was maybe a little too much for me in a row, so while I would like to continue expanding my horizons when it comes to fantasy reads, I for sure need to space them out better.

As for star ratings, here’s that breakdown:

  • Unrated: 2
  • 2.5 stars: 2
  • 3 stars: 1
  • 3.5 stars: 11
  • 4 stars: 5
  • 4.5 stars: 14
  • 5 stars: 2

I always like to see the majority of my ratings be 3.5 stars and higher, so I am happy with this distribution, especially with 4.5 stars coming in the lead with 14! I don’t rate biographies/memoirs and I didn’t think the Eras Tour Book needed a star rating, so that’s where the unrated books came into play. 

I’m going to be so honest, after only one new 5 star read in July and then not having a new 5 star for August, September, October and November, I honestly thought I wouldn’t have another new 5 star read for the rest of 2025, but then in December I read Don’t Let the Forest In and I finally had a new 5 star read! I shared my thoughts on Don’t Let the Forest In in my Top Books of 2025 post (linked above) so if you want to hear my thoughts, you can check out that post.

I didn’t end up getting to all of the books on my 25 in 2025 list, but I did read most of them! In this last quarter I read 5 more books from the list. The 5 I read were:

  • The Firefly Summer (October)
  • Private Rites (October)
  • Say You’ll Remember Me (October)
  • Holy Terrors (November)
  • What Happens in Amsterdam (December)

If I were to rank these, What Happens in Amsterdam would come in first, followed by Holy Terrors, The Firefly Summer and then Say You’ll Remember Me and Private Rites. I ended up reading 21/25 of my 25 in 2025 list, which I honestly think is really great! 

If you missed them, here’s a list of all of my posts from October and November, as the December posts are listed in the monthly wrap up section of this post. The second half of the year was definitely a slower time on the blog, but thank you all for sticking with me! I’m hoping to get back into the swing of things in 2026.

  1. Books on My Owned TBR That I Want to Read by the End of the Year
  2. Quarter 3 Stats
  3. October Wrap Up

And just like that, 2025 is over. Wow. There were a lot of really great moments of the year, but the last few months have been…a lot, so I’m excited to see the year in the review mirror and am looking forward to what’s to come in 2026!

I’d love to know about how December and the holidays went for you! What were your favorite moments and reads? What were your favorite reads of the year? Let me know in the comments!

I hope you all have a happy and safe New Year!

Until 2026 💜

Comments

  1. We both started on Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Season 2

    I saw Wicked: For Good, fun lights with wonderful displays, books were A Christmas Carol; Christmas with L.M. Montgomery; and Christmas Gift

    Reply

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