Happy new year!!

It occurred to me that I have not been doing my year in review (probably for two, maybe three years now?) and I wanted to just write a short post on January 1st to talk about how 2025 was for reading and this blog and what I plan to do in 2026.

In 2025, I read exactly 120 books. That’s about 20 less than 2024, but I’m still very happy about this because out of the 120 books, 12 of them were written in Japanese! I set myself a goal to read one Japanese book a month and I hit it. Additionally, 81 out of the 120 books were borrowed from the library, so it has been a pretty good year for supporting the library, yay!

Choosing to read in Japanese meant understanding that my reading speed was naturally going to slow down. This was actually really helpful in reframing my mindset towards reading, that it was okay to take things slower sometimes because there was no pressure to hit any target.

Following up on this, in 2026, I would like to continue slowing down my reading. I’m not sure how that will look like – if it will be more non-fiction heavy because I need time to think and process it, or if I will learn to slow down while reading novels, but I’m sure I’ll find out along the way. That said, I’m no longer holding on to my 12 books in Japanese goal for 2026 because I’ve just started a course on edX – 『源氏物語』へのいざない (Invitation to the Tale of Genji). It’s available in English as well, but I wanted to challenge myself to do it in Japanese and I suspect that I will slow down drastically on reading for the next three months as I work through the course.

For the blog, last year I published fewer posts but I also managed to write and post a few posts that I’m still proud of, such as:

• Unruly Women: Zheng Yi Sao and Mulan – This was born of many conversations I had with friends on how Zheng Yi Sao was being portrayed (recently listened to a BBC Podcast that just felt so OFF) and after a deep dive into piracy in the Ming dynasty and more generally on how women were viewed, I decided to right this!
• The REAL Crazy Rich Asians – This is another post born out of conversations. Originally, I was planning to write this as Hanfugirl put out her podcast episodes on the same topic, but the podcast got delayed indefinitely so I decided to go ahead and write this before I forgot everything that I learnt.
• My Visit to Sayama Tea-neyland – I was SO excited during this visit to Sayama and I learnt a lot. I hope you got some of my excitement in this post.

I’m also pretty happy with some of my book reviews, like Inventing the Renaissance and Flawless.

Going forward, I think book reviews will still be the main content on this blog, but I hope that as I make my way through the Genji course (and any future courses after), that I can do more non-review posts that are fun and educational. Stay tuned!