My Worst/Disappointing Reads of 2025

It’s time to have a little root around in my brain/reading tracker and look back over what I read in the last year. I’m going to start with the bad

The good news on the bad is that I didn’t pick up many stinkers this year! In fact, I had to reach into 3-star reads to pull a few decent yet disappointing reads to give this post a bit more meat.

Without further ado…

Incredibly, I only DNF’d one book, which means I am getting better at picking!

To Sleep In A Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini

That book was To Sleep In A Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini. I’d never read any Paolini before (I was just a bit too old for Eragon), but apparently, he does have a penchant for making his books far too long. This thing is 880 pages or 22.5 audiobook hours. I gave up around 10 hours, so I did get it a good go. The main reason I persevered that far was because the audiobook was read by voice acting goddess (and voice of my beloved FemShep) Jennifer Hale.

This is shallow science fiction written by someone with a surface understanding of the “cool shit” so it was little more than a collection of tropes, with flat characters.

I read this in January, which means, incredibly, I’ve not DNF’d a book in almost a full year!

However, there have been some that got close and squeaked into 2-star ratings because I was able to push through to finish them… even if I didn’t have a good time doing so. I rated 7 books with 2 stars in 2025, but these are the ones I give the dubious honour of being the worst of the lot…

A Court of Thorns And Roses by Sarah J. Maas

I am kind of glad I read this, but also I hate that I read this. It was both better and worse than I expected it to be.

I am still confounded by why this is so fucking popular. The popularity of this book is why everyone in 2025 is complaining about drowning in lazy, unimaginative Romantasy… people have to stop uncritically hyping sloppily written books like this (and Fourth Wing).

It got 2 stars because I finished it, but I hated everything about it, and it was only morbid curiosity that got me over the finish line.

A Lady’s Guide To Scandal by Sophie Irwin

I don’t really remember anything about this other than it was disappointing. I quite enjoyed A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting. It didn’t light any fires for me, but it was fun enough, and I liked the characters. In this one, I hated the protagonist, Eliza. She makes incomprehensibly stupid decisions for the whole book, and I actually started to hope that everything would come crashing down for her. There was a lot about this one that didn’t work.

Moon Over Soho (Rivers of London #2) by Ben Aaronovitch

I discovered the Rivers of London series this year, and it was quite a rough ride. The second book was the most difficult to get through. I actively disliked the main character Peter Grant, in this book (and similar to Eliza above), who made many decisions and took many actions in this book that I did not understand, that were never explained adequately, and that felt like they went against his character as established in the first book.

The Male Gaze is a problem with this series, and in this book, it is turned up to 11, with Peter getting dangerously close to giving me the ick.

Fortunately, the series does recover in the following books (before I lost interest at book 8).

Then I have a few 3 star rated reads that get “honourable mentions” as disappointments.

The Impossible Fortune (Thursday Murder Club #5) by Richard Osman

I just read this, so perhaps recency bias, but after the heady heights of The Last Devil To Die (which actually got me to shed a tear), I was very disappointed to find the latest bookdevoid of any heart. Everything about it felt under-baked to me, and it was missing the emotional core to the story that makes these books so engaging. Osman can, and should, do better.

A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab

This one goes under “disappointed but not surprised.” I decided to re-read this book because I have fond memories of it. When I first read it in 2016, I LOVED it, but after I hated The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue I had a feeling that I’d outgrown Schwab.

Now I know I definitely have outgrown her. She writes engaging YA books, but they are all style over substance. Vibes only, and those vibes are floppy and/or curly hair and nice coats. I need character depth, I need some edge. Give me something to chew on.

I need to never try to re-read Vicious or Vengeful and leave them as happy memories.

Oh also, I re-read this on audiobook, and the narrator, Stephen Crossley, cannot do female voices, which is a major problem where one of the main characters is a 19-year-old girl. She is an annoying character anyway, but he takes it to a new level as she alternates between whiny child and old fish wish.

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

This could have been fun and interesting, but it just wasn’t. I had read similar alien-on-earth books before that were done better than this. It didn’t have anything original or meaningful to say about being different, being a teenage girl, being asexual or any of the other themes that are brought up. It was dull.

Tiamat’s Wrath (The Expanse #8) by James S.A. Corey

Firstly, this is disappointment relative to a fantastic series of books… which unfortunately is on a downslide as I reach the ninth and final one. Books 6-8 have all got 3 stars from me, and I’ve been a bit disappointed in each of them for different reason but this 8th one is where I’m getting a bit worried because we have one book left and there are a fucktonne of unanswered questions dangling and yet we just seem to add more.

I was actually bored for good chunks of Tiamat’s Wrath, and somehow I found myself looking forward to Holden’s chapters (which were basically interludes). Holden! There are characters’ deaths that did not hit me emotionally as they should have done, and I think that is because they occurred in the dullest plotlines, where I’d just started trying to speedread through.

Unless it’s Andor, it’s very difficult to get me interested in reading about resistance movements… and this isn’t Andor.

Turns out 2025 has been a great reading year for me, because it was hard work to write this post!

You can read my favourite books of the year here!