Chapters of 2025

Welcome to my 5th yearbook!

Wow, I can't believe I've been doing this for 5 years. This number is not even including the annual wrap-ups I did in my previous blog. I really like reflecting and summarising the year because it's one of the only times I look back with a bigger picture in mind, without coming from a place of nostalgia. I can gauge whether it was a good year, how I've grown, and how I've stayed the same.

These wrap-ups are also for the future me. It's interesting to look at old wrap-ups because, depending on where I am in life and how I'm feeling, I talk about different things. And, of course, some things remain through the years. I'm sure this is the case for you as well.

I usually lowkey plan my annual wrap-up because I want to write it well without missing anything. This time, I'm just writing whatever comes to mind. There's a certain charm in wilding, after all. Imagine I'm sitting on a couch with you, our favourite drinks in hand, because that's how I'm writing this ☕️

reading

I didn't have a reading goal for 2025. A lot of things were changing in my life so I wanted my reading to be purely fun with zero planning or expectations. I didn't even try to do something different throughout the year. I just picked whatever I felt like reading. Hence, it's interesting to zoom out and see what I've been reading—what I gravitated to.

My mood map is so funny, I laugh every time I look at it. It exposes how my year has been very well. I mostly read light-hearted books. The line dipped a bit May to July, probably because I had settled into the new job and city, and it quickly went back up for the rest of the year. I guess I was stressing about everything so much that I only wanted lighter books.

I read 130 books in 2025 which is close to my reading in the last two years. 89 books were romance. Despite not loving the genre as much anymore, it's the one that gives me the most comfort. Sometimes, I try new books just to try to find a new comfort favourite. My second highest genre was fantasy. I read 6 non-fiction books (I thought I read only 2 or so, lol.)

I mostly read ebooks. I honestly barely read paperbacks ever since moving to the new city. I was much more motivated before I moved because I could easily sell back my books for 50% credit and buy more. I can't easily (and affordably) buy paperbacks here so I end up reading ebooks. The format split is 112 ebooks, 11 paperbacks, 7 audiobooks.

My average rating was 3.31 which is not great. The worst month was December with average rating of 2.93. This is not surprising since I intentionally picked bad books in December. But it looks like the rest of my reading weren't that good either, despite picking light-hearted books. I'm guessing my choice to pick without much thought was the major reason.

Some quick reading facts:

• Longest book: Goldfinch by Raven Kennedy at 679 pages.
• Shortest book: The Situationship by Abby Jimenez at 37 pages.
• Most read authors: Catherine Cowles (7 books) followed by Gabrielle Meyer (6 books) and Abby Jimenez (6 books).
• New 5 🌟 reads: 6 books
• Reread: 16 books
• Did not finish: 19 books

78 books were a part of series which is a bit misleading because a lot of romance books nowadays are in series following different characters. The books that were a part of a series in the way it matters (a continuous story) were 25.

Most of my reads were 300-499 pages. This tracks, considering most of my books were romance. Romance books tend to be around 350 pages, usually. 11 of my reads were 500+ pages.

I used Storygraph as my reading tracker. I honestly barely even thought of Goodreads. I didn't update my reading there often. When the year ended, only 75/130 books were tracked on Goodreads, lol. I bulk updated one or two times in the year. I've grown to really like the simple interface of Storygraph, especially after the recent redesign of the review page.

blogging

2025 was a consistent blogging year. I kept a planned schedule throughout the year and published 50 blog posts. I'm pretty proud of this because there were many travels and busy periods (moving cities! new job!) and I managed to plan things well so that I wasn't behind on posting.

I kept a schedule of posting every 8th day. This was a carried-over schedule from 2024 and worked fairly well. It gave me a deadline with enough breathing room. Considering that most of my posts take about 3 days to write, it was a good schedule. It became hard when I wrote extra large posts like my Japan Trip Log but I managed. It didn't tip me towards burnout which I'm really happy about.

The consistent posting is largely due to planning posting days beforehand. I used a digital planner in 2025 and it was very helpful to plan and keep track of when to post. I'd jot down possible post ideas for the future too. I actually planned to write End of Year Content Ideas in the beginning of the year by putting it on the calendar and wrote it in October when the time came.

I tried a lot of new types of posts in 2025. Instead of sticking to a content routine like 1 book review every month etc. (other than monthly wrap-ups), I wrote posts based on what was on my mind, even if they weren't what I generally write about. It led to a lot of fun posts this year. They weren't necessarily ones that get a lot of traffic or engagement, but they were fun to write.

My favourite posts of 2025:

1. Japan 2025 Trip Log — my LONGEST post (yet?!) at 24k words, this was a whole project. I love how I captured memories in it and I know I'll love reading this in the future.
2. 2 Years Without Social Media — wrote this a whole year late 😂 but I'm really glad how it turned out. It also got quite a views.
3. The Artist's Way series — it was really fun to write about The Artist's Way as I did it. It helped me see how it helped. This is also my first ever post-series!
4. The Author Archives: Ann Liang — started another post series in 2025 with Ann Liang's books. I hadn't written a post like this before so it was fun to figure out how to write it and what to highlight.
5. 10 Years of Reading — delved into my (tracked) reading journey, looked at patterns, etc.! It was really fun to gather the data points and correlate them with what was going on in my life then.
6. 9 Things I Learnt On My First Job — I generally don't talk about my job so this was new and different. It's also not for most of my audience, I realized that, but I really wanted to write it to remember my learnings and to look back on my first job.
7. Listen to Music With Me — a musical vlog-style post where I tracked what I listened to for a week and spoke about why, etc. It didn't do well in engagement but I loved the process and how it gave me insight into my days.

Considering that this is a book blog, I ended up writing only 6 book reviews in 2025! I wrote 8 other bookish posts, though.

I'm not great at reviewing every drama I watched but I tried to write more (when I remembered about them). I posted 4 drama reviews in 2025. 2 of them are doing fairly well in terms of search engine traffic.

I started writing in a new category this year—Travel! The first 2 posts were about my Japan trip. I'm really looking forward to writing more. I'm not sure if I'll document every trip of mine. But now that I've written one now, I've kinda fallen in love with it. I want to document the bigger trips. I'm not sure what 2026 holds for me in terms of travel. I will hope for the best.

I don't know if I'll write a whole separate post on blog stats this year like I did the last few years so I'll share the broad strokes here.

FYI, these numbers are not in detail because I don't have Jetpack commercial plan 🙂 Apparently having a "buy me a coffee" link means this site is commercial. It's funny because I got a whole $10 via buy me a coffee in 2025. The commercial plan is $10 a month. I was going to remove it and I got the $10 tip a week after I decided to. I took it as a sign and left it up.

I did not record stats every month like I used to because I don't see the point in doing it anymore. I don't have those granular numbers to come up with the detailed total values for the year. So, we'll deal with high-level numbers.

Quick rundown of blog stats:

• 150k total views. It's slightly lesser than 2024's 170k number. Still fairly good amount of views, though. Mainly through search engines.
• Till date, 1.3M views. This blog actually crossed 1M views last year and I FORGOT to mention it in the 2024 blog stats post 😆
• 598 likes, 445 comments. Lesser than 2024. Blogging may be dying but also I'm not putting that much effort into writing posts that get responses and promoting them.
• 4.1k average word count per post. It increased from 3.3k. My 2 new longest posts did most of the heavy-lifting for this average.

As usual, most of my top posts are ones that were published long ago. My posts from 2020-2022 are still contributing to most of the total views. 30 Best Romance Novels for Adults, the top viewed post, got 22k views—that's 14% of the total! The one big change is that the best romance novels post overtook How to Annotate Books for Fun. The latter had been the top for 5 years so it dropping to 2nd place is the end of era.

Most popular posts (that were also published in 2025):

1. At #14 overall, Lovely Runner Kdrama Review. Kdrama reviews usually shoot up faster.
2. At #28, The Rain in España TV Series Review. It looks like reviews of a Filipino shows do well too.
3. At #39, End of Year Content Ideas. I posted this in October and my bet paid off. This got 513 views in December. 79 were on 31st December 😂
4. At #43, Melo Movie Kdrama Review.
5. At #54, 2 Years Without Social Media. Finally, a post that made it to this list without SEO traffic!

I tried experimenting with the newsletter in 2025 and it didn't work out. I've been writing monthly newsletters for a few years now and I really wanted a change in 2025, to break the monotony of it. It felt like I had settled into a comfortable routine with the kind of emails I was writing.

I switched to Substack in the beginning of 2025 and soon grew to hate it. I switched back to Kit after 6 months. I got caught up in the Substack hype and switched. Honestly, it did have promise, especially if it opened up my newsletter to new audiences that would like what I write. But I was not finding that. A while after I joined, I noticed how Substack seemed to be an echo chamber. The Notes feature sucked too. I wrote some of my best newsletters in Substack and I was disappointed with how it wasn't even reaching my friends' inboxes, let alone new people.

I finally switched back to Kit in the second half of 2025 and revelled in all the features I missed. The newsletter personalisation option in Kit is really important to me. The open and engagement stats made much more sense unlike in Substack.

Other than that, there wasn't anything to note about the newsletter. Maybe there will be a change in 2025?

travel

2025's travel was mostly for friends' weddings. I'm at that age now where multiple friends, batchmates, and colleagues are getting married in a year. Honestly, the weddings in 2025 were just the beginning, there are so many more weddings to come. Especially because I've been blessed with quite a few friends and I do my best to show up for them even if it means travelling via 3 modes of transport to get to their wedding.

The first was a quick weekend trip to Mangalore for a friend's engagement ceremony in January. Then, I didn't travel for many months because it wasn't the wedding season and I was busy moving to a new city and job.

The second was a 5-day trip to Lucknow and Orchha for a friend's wedding ceremonies in May. Yes, plural. We honestly didn't do much other than attend the festivities. It was a stressful trip because of the tensions between India and Pakistan and a really bad allergy flare up on my neck. I spoke about the week in detail in this vlog-style blog post.

Does going back to Bangalore for a long visit count as a trip? I did multiple small visits to Bangalore but I think the 9-day one in August counts as a trip, especially since I don't have a home to stay at there anymore. The week was very busy meeting almost all of my friends in India and one friend who was visiting from Germany, working at two Google offices, and attending a friend's bachelorette party. There were three different overnight stays at friends' places during that trip.

In late August, I travelled via 3 modes each way to attend a friend's wedding ceremonies in Malappuram and Guruvayur in Kerala. It took 5 days in total because I did a pit stop for a few hours in Bangalore each way and spent time with another friend. Didn't do any sightseeing on this trip either since there wasn't much to do other than visit temples. I went to one only because the others with me wanted to go.

The highlight was the 12-day Japan trip in October. I already spoke a LOT about it in my Japan Trip Log so check that out for details.

In the end of November, I went back to Mangalore for 2 days for a friend's wedding. The same friend got engaged in January. A few friends and I followed it up with a 6-day workcation in Goa. Then, we extended it by a few days to check out Amboli. It was a really chill trip with friends from my previous job.

6 travels in total! Only 2 of them weren't for weddings 😂 I should accept that this is likely how my travelling will be for the next few years, especially since I've got friends from many different cities. I've already received 2 wedding invites for 2026.

I really hope to do more international travel! Visiting Japan was amazing and eye-opening. I'd love to see more countries in person—use their public transport, maybe struggle with their language, and understand how they live.

life

The year was full of changes. I quit my first job and moved out of Bangalore. It was way more emotional than I expected to say goodbye to the people in Bangalore because I won't be close proximity to them anymore. No more impulsive hangouts.

I moved to a new city and started a new job. This is the first time I've moved out of Bangalore so it's quite hard to not be around friends. I've gotta make new friends and it's not that easy. It takes time for me to become comfortable with anyone so I can't expect to have close friends in a few weeks. I honestly only acquaintances at this point, mostly from work. I need to figure out how to meet people here and make friends.

Setting up different avenues to talk to friends helped ease the loneliness a bit. I started writing emails to friends spurred on by a low-key goal to write a few emails every quarter. I hung out on Discord with friends a bunch of times. I set up many virtual hangouts on the Blog & Chill Discord as well.

With all the travel in 2025, it felt like I was always either trying to get back into a good routine so I didn't have a lot of time to experiment and see new places. I kind of lost myself in trying to maintain an active lifestyle. Blogging took more time and effort than I expected too.

I am eating better, though. Working in an office where good meals are provided really makes a difference for daily energy. I've been working on eating balanced meals with as many nutrients as possible. I also ate quite a bit more junk than I have in the past few years, although it wasn't too much.

At the end of the year, I did my health checkup and did not get good results so that put a damper on everything. I didn't end the year in a good mental/emotional/physical state. Apparently, all the effort I did to eat well and exercise well wasn't enough. It's.. a work in progress.

It's very important to acknowledge the good and bad in a year but I can't help but have recency bias because of everything in December. It was just... a very busy year during which I felt off-kilter more times than I felt good.

I spent a good chunk of time doing The Artist's Way. It gave me something to do and a reason to try new things for. The best outcome of it was picking up tiny hobby projects. It's been so long since I did hobby projects that ended unlike the ongoing nature of blogging and newsletter that I forgot how satisfying they can be.

I didn't have much time for them with my active social life in Bangalore. Now that I don't have much of a social life and most of my days are split between work and home, I have enough time to pursue other things.

Motivated by The Artist's Way to pick up an old beloved hobby, I crocheted a fox doll. It turned out really cute. Then, I spent many weeks working on a paint-by-numbers painting. It turned out amazing too. I'm glad that I can say I made a couple of things with my hands in 2025.

endnotes

2025, albeit one of change and experiencing great things, wasn't a "great" year. I'm working in a better job at the cost of living away from home. I'm grateful that my mom moved with me but it doesn't fix the loneliness of not having friends my age to spend time with regularly. I won't lie, this isn't a city that I liked before moving here, so it's harder to like being here.

Looking back, happiness was concentrated at certain times. I was really happy during trips with my friends. I was happy when I had a good exercise routine and I wasn't avoiding anyone whom I was uncomfortable around. I was happy doing The Artist's Way in the first few weeks because it gave me something to pursue.

I tried and failed and tried again at many things. Keeping an active routine was a constant struggle. I gave up on it at the end of the year. The health issues didn't help. I journalled every morning consistently when I did The Artist's Way and let the habit go afterwards. My reading wasn't great. I didn't learn anything new that I'm proud of. I can't say that I made great decisions with respect to a few things.

Maybe, when I look back at this year in the future, I'll think of it as an experience that added to my growth. Maybe I will consider it a turning point in my life. For now, I'm just trying to stay afloat and do things that I'll be happy with day-to-day.

how was your 2025?

Did you travel anywhere cool? Did you start anything new or decide on a big change? Tell me about it in the comments! And if you have a 2025 wrap-up post, add a link to it, I'd love to read it.