10 Bookish Discoveries I Made in 2025

Top Ten Tuesday is currently hosted by Artsy Reader Girl and has weekly topics for bloggers to respond to and share a love of all things books! I love thinking up my responses and the weekly blog hop to see what everyone else wrote!

This week’s prompt is for Bookish Discoveries I Made in 2025.

1. Leif Enger is a new author to me that I am now excited to read more from. I Cheerfully Refuse was fantastic, and my favourite flavour of Dystopian.
2. Literary Thriller is a genre I had not thought existed before, and I really enjoyed Kala by Colin Walsh.
3. Keeping a log as I read a book has been an effective way to gather my thoughts and reactions as I read. It’s really helping me with writing reviews weeks after I finish the book! I don’t know why it took me 20 years to work this out! Obsidian’s bases update has opened up a new world of possibilities for tracking my books and building a dashboard.
4. I can track reading digital comic books with Obsidian too, and plan what I want to read! I get through comics so fast that often my reactions to specific events or issues slip away. I have a whole workflow for how I do this. This has been a much better method than trying to track my reading through trade paperback releases found on Goodreads. 2025 was the year I ‘discovered’ Chris Claremont’s seminal 1980s run of X-Men comics on Marvel Unlimited, and I’m so glad I used that as my entry point into their world.
5. Annotating books actually feels good. I’ve never really done this before, save a bit of light annotation at university. Now I’m rebuilding my physical library of favourites, and wanting to read more deeply, I’m getting into this more. Rouge (re-read 2! I will finally write about it) has been my first go, and I’m finding it very gratifying! The problem is that whenever I start reading, the cat appears and makes annotating very difficult! Mostly, I read in bed, and she likes to sit on my right arm and rub her head on the book. Also, it is possible to annotate in a 400-page paperback without breaking its spine.
6. My best YouTube discovery has been Plant Based Bride, she reads similarly to me, and I’ve been having a pretty good success rate for recommendations from her channel.
7. Audible won’t refund books bought for cash, only credits! Learned this the hard way. This was also a discovery that in December, I get very susceptible to purchasing self-help books on a whim, forgetting that I usually hate self-help books.
8. On another whim, I jailbroke my Kindle, and it’s been fantastic! It feels like a new device, and it’s so good to de-Amazon it and make it feel more my own.
9. After a year of Instagram ads, I finally got a trial subscription for The London Review of Books, and I’m loving it. Well-written articles on interesting new books and ideas I may otherwise not come across. It’s also nice to have a physical print journal to read; it comes in a newspaper-like format, and I’ve also been annotating it as I’ve started to do with books.
10. My brain does still work, and I can learn and think and explore ideas just for my own benefit (without school or university)… And it’s really fun! Often my it just needs a bit of warming up, and to be given the time and space to explore. This is why I want to focus more on learning in 2026, and try planning more intentionally what to read.