As I head into the second week of January I am consciously fighting off the feeling that it’s too late. Too late to wear spf in my youth, to take vitamin D in early autumn, to correct my posture, to follow the right path, to buy something I wanted anyway on Black Friday. I originally wrote ‘Come January it’ll be too late to make New Year’s resolutions, to add anything to my Christmas list, to read any more books, to start the year with gusto’, and then I didn’t post the Substack and it’s now January, so it’s too late even to say that. But this Sunday is the same as any Tuesday is the same as an August Sunday, they’re just 24 hour chunks of time in which you can choose to do and be whatever you want.

I have a post about books that I want to share but I don’t want to make anyone else feel like it’s too late. This list of books was a 2025 New Year’s resolution I had in the grips of a 29-year old’s panic that ‘this might be the last year I ever have time to read 50 books!’. So? You don’t need to read any books, and if you want to, you can. Nonetheless, I wanted to read 50 books: slightly less than one a week and quite a lot more than I would usually read (it tends to be 30-40).

At some anticlimactic point in early December I managed it, and by the end of the year I had read 52 - one for each week of the year. This is what I learned from that experience, in no particular order:

1. If you read a lot you can be less picky about what you read.

2. That also means you move on quicker from books that would ordinarily stay with you for longer - I usually give myself a day max before cracking on with the next.

3. If you find an author you like just read loads of theirs, or use them as cement between books that take a bit more wherewithal, concentration or motivation.

4. Recognising these types of books will help you get through ones you enjoy less so you can get to ones you enjoy more.

5. You can keep books for years without reading them and in all likelihood the mood will strike you at some point: one day you might want to emulate a character from a film and read some Milan Kundera, on another day you finally want to get some Tolstoy out the way (can’t recommend trying to get Tolstoy out the way: there’s a reason war and peace is the proverbial longest thing ever).

6. Reading more makes you want to write more and helps you find different voices.

7. You don’t have to read anything! You can put it down, shift to audio, take years to read it or just never read anything at all but there is no need to force it.

8. Reading isn’t inherently moral. Personally I find it helps me understand different perspectives and have more empathy - and find it infinitely more useful for learning about the world than non-fiction - but if I wasn’t capable of that without reading copiously I wouldn’t be a very good person would l?

9. We have a lot of silly language around the above two points, eg ‘I should read more’ or ‘I only read trash’ or ‘not proper books’ that reminds me of diet culture. There is no should: just do or don’t, and if you’re going to scroll on your phone just make sure you enjoy it.

10. Having a reading goal sometimes made me read stupidly, eg skim reading just to get through it or having an audiobook on and not even really staying near the speaker. Who and what am I doing this for?

11. To hit 50 books I had to keep momentum and to do this I would fall back on classics, books I’d had for years or authors that I related to. Doing this meant I read a less diverse range of authors: I read more queer fiction but also more white authors.

12. No matter how many big secondhand book orders I did, I could never keep a backlog of more than three when reading that quickly.

13. I love Irish literature.

14. My fave authors were Maggie O’Farrell, Miranda July and Alison Espach.

15. Fiction always wins for me, if it’s non-fic it had better be a memoir shakes fist

16. When you finish a book you really don’t know if it will stay with you until a few weeks later, so my rankings changed a lot.

17. Reading a big chunk at first really helps you get into a book and know quickly if you’ll like it or not, which is why I love holiday reading.

18. I have a much stronger sense of what I like and what will be reliably good, but no amount of people loving a book will make you love it: WHAT is the deal w Wuthering Heights? Louise Kennedy (author of one of my faves, Trespasses) described it as demented and I couldn’t agree more. Why is everyone called Cathy and/or Heathcliff? The experience of reading it wasn’t dissimilar to watching back to back Jeremy Kyle for a day, but on a moor. Stop shouting! It is still my favourite karaoke song, however.

19. Being obsessed with the neatness of closing the book on an even page number, fraction of the book (eg. 1/10, 1/2, 2/3) is as good a motivator as any. I imagine it’s a bit like wanting to finish a row of knitting: it just keeps you going.

20. Finishing the fiftieth book was a huge anticlimax, obviously!

21. You can actually read too much. I definitely became fatigued with it and while I enjoyed most of what I read I am looking forward to not counting my books so fervently next year or feeling like I’ve just gotta finish this chapter (as opposed to wanting to), and having a natural ebb and flow with periods of obsessive reading and no reading at all. I’d probably feel my way a lot better and still read a lot of good books, even if fewer overall.

A lot of the above was learned early on. I wrote the bulk of this in October, but now having finished the (trying not to say ordeal) task, I have learned a few more things. One is that having finished something, especially something that stretches you, will have you twanging back to where you were twice as quickly. I read 50 books, and since I read 50 books I’ve only read one, and it was one I started before I’d done 50: AKA runner up for 50th book. I ran past the finish and haven’t moved since. That is obviously fine (as would be not managing 50 at all), but it does show that I had read more than I wanted to, and that maybe there were things I wanted to do more or was neglecting: eg. looking at my phone with reckless abandon, or staring into space on tube after a hefty work day, or sewing. This year was the year of the book, and I’ve loved it, but I also love other things.

In case anyone is interested, these are the books I read. The ranking system is loosely as follows, but I think a lot of these would change on a revisit, and I think Hamnet remains the real GOAT:

⭐ Liked/would recommend

🌟 REALLY liked

👂 Listened to the Audiobook

💩 Did not enjoy

🐐 Greatest of all time

I’ve just remembered my dream. I was talking to Maggie O’Farrell and she volunteered to be my mentor. Whilst I can’t say I have a best selling author as a mentor in my real life, I can try and emulate the confidence that gave me in my dream. Knowing she believed in me made me trust that I could do anything, so I’ll just go with that.