KUOW Book Club wrapped: 13 books, more than 3,000 pages read in 2025

Move over Spotify nerds. We're wrapping up the year in reading.

Luckily for us bookworms, The StoryGraph provides tons of data to track reading patterns. So, I loaded up the 2025 KUOW Book Club lineup to get our stats. And if you've been religiously reading our picks this year, you have a lot to be proud of.

You can get the reading wrap-up generated by The StoryGraph here, but I've picked out a few highlights (for those of you who need a little break from reading).

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Since we doubled up on books in June to celebrate Pride Month, we read a total of 13 books this year. We started 2025 with the short-story collection "Three Alarm Fire" by Juan Carlos Reyes, and we just finished the year with the biography "Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler" by Susana M. Morris.

If you finished each book — no judgement if you didn't — you read more than 3,000 pages. And that's just for the club! Not to brag, but I personally read nearly 20,000 pages if you include everything I read on my own time. OK, maybe I am bragging a little.

The shortest book we read in 2025 was "You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World" edited by Ada Limón with 176 pages. The longest book was "Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World — and How You Can, Too" by Ijeoma Oluo with 416 pages.

Apparently, I wanted to pull at y'all's heartstrings and get you thinking this year. The StoryGraph considered about half of our picks to be "reflective," including Putsata Reang's beautiful memoir "Ma and Me." (By the way, Reang's book was my favorite pick this year.)

As a fan of horror and thrillers, I also subjected the club to a few "dark" novels. The StoryGraph and I don't entirely agree on which books fit that label.

The StoryGraph counted "We Had No Rules," Corinne Manning's collection of queer short stories. Sure, the collection wasn't exactly happy-go-lucky. Still, I don't think I'd characterize Manning's work as "dark." Rather, their stories are honest and blunt, or as they put it, "unapologetically queer."

"Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century" by Kim Fu was also included among the "dark" picks, and I suppose that's a bit more fair. Fu's speculative fiction collection includes a story about a husband who repeatedly kills his wife, restoring her to life with a special body printer, and a darkly sexy stage performance. But it also includes stories about a teenage girl who sprouts wings. "Dark" doesn't quite capture this collection for me.

The third book The StoryGraph dubbed "dark," though, fit perfectly. That was "The Return of Ellie Black" by Emiko Jean. This thriller delivered more than a few gut punches and included some intense depictions of child abuse. "Dark" was what Jean was going for, as she explained when we talked about the YA author's adult debut.

One novel The StoryGraph missed in the "dark" category was "Elita" by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum. This mystery was moody as heck, and it dove into the darkness of misogyny in addition to the Big Dark of the Seattle Winter. (Shout out to "Elita" for also making NPR's Books We Love list this year! And for the record, NPR put it in "The Dark Side.")

I've just included the top five genres above, but we read books that spanned 16 genres altogether, according to The StoryGraph.

The literary fiction category may be broad, but it definitely applies to works like Daniel Tam-Claiborne's "Transplants."

"The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forests" by Lynda V. Mapes was a sterling example of a nature book, one that makes you want to get outside for yourself.

I would have counted "No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters" by Ursula K. Le Guin among the short-story collections, as the pieces were taken from the late author's blog. But The StoryGraph counted this collection as memoir, and I won't quibble with that.

One book that truly stood alone in the lineup this year was our sole cookbook, "Feasts of Good Fortune" by Hsiao-Ching Chou and her daughter Meilee Chou Riddle. I had such a good time with this one that we'll be checking out another cookbook in 2026.

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