A new year means another year to enjoy reading amazing books. And I have gotten off to an incredible start so far. Keep reading to find out what books I read in the first 13 days of 2025!

My reading goal for 2024 was to read at least 60 books and I just barely crossed that number with a total of 61 books read. And how do I follow up after reading 60 books in a year? To read a 100 or more books in 2025!

Yes, I know it is a big goal and won’t be easy to meet. But I looked at my to-read pile and knew that this was a goal that I would be able to reach. And to start of 2025, I have already read 7 books in 13 days.

Yes, you read that read, I am averaging over a book in two days. That won’t be the case going forward because I was already reading three books the previous year that I finished this year. Besides one book, I haven’t been reading more than two hours a day.

The exception to that is when I am traveling and find myself reading for most of the train or plane rides. The secret is to read when you can be playing games or watching videos on your phone.

Back to the books I have read, only one of them was a short novel. Most of the books are about 300 pages or more and my longest novel had over 6020 pages. You can see the full list below!

Books I Read in 2025

As you can see, my list of books is all over the place. It is incredible that I have two-nonfiction books because I normally read a couple in a year. Come As You Are is about Nirvana and how the band came to be with interviews with the bandmates.

Nirvana book
Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana by Michael Azerrad

Knife is a powerful story about the assassination attempt of Salman Rushdie. The novel was beautifully written and shows the power of words as Rushdie shares the details of the attack and the aftermaths of it.

I also ended up reading two fantasy novels and enjoyed both of them a lot. Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi is a fantasy novel that is coated in violence and makes you face the racism and violence that people that are difference face on a daily basis.

The Stone of Farewell by Tad Williams is the second novel in the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series. I enjoyed the first novel and had to continue this series and find out what happens next.

This novel feels like a variation of The Lord of the Rings imagining the enemy to be actively trying to stop the heroes instead of passively like many novels. The heroes are under duress and they feel a sense of hopelessness of the task at end, making this a different experience than most fantasy novels.

The last novel I want to talk about is The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai. This novel was released over a decade ago in Japan and was recently translated and I am happy that it was.

The novel is about a father and daughter running a restaurant that also run a food detective agency. They try to find the dishes that their customers vaguely remember with little clues. This plot is simple and yet, I enjoyed this novel a lot because of the passion the author has food Japanese food, making you wish you were in Japan eating them.

Conclusion

These are the seven books I read in the first 13 days of 2025. I have impressed even myself reading 7 books in 13 days and while I know this pace is going to decrease, I will still be adding a few more books to this list before the month is over!

Follow us on Instagram and Facebook 

Discover more from Books of Brilliance

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.