NB: This week, we’re taking a look back at some of our favorite and our most popular pieces of writing this year. We’ve got a week of best-of posts to share, with reviews, cover snark, and more. We hope you enjoy revisiting our archives, and most of all, we wish you and yours a wonderful holiday and a happy new year – with all the very best of reading.
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Since we feature other things outside of reviews like HaBOs, Rec Leagues, and general opinion pieces, we wanted to look at what y’all really engaged with the most. I kept out sale posts, our regular new releases, and the Whatcha Reading columns.
Here’s the top five!
5. Track Your 2025 Reading With Our Community-Built Spreadsheet!
Last year’s reading spreadsheet also cracked the top five posts of the year. It’s glad to see the community still loves using the tool. Don’t worry, it’ll be back again in 2026. How’d your tracking go?
4. Careless People and Barbra Streisand
Meta did an oopsie and tried to stop Careless People from being published, and their lawsuit had the opposite effect of what they intended. Now, it was on everyone’s radar. I bought a copy. How about you?
3. Ali Hazelwood Dislikes Peeta, And That Was a Problem for Some Folks
This feels like it was a lifetime ago. Author Ali Hazelwood admitted on a panel that she found Peeta of The Hunger Games to be “useless.” The fandom backlash resulted in Hazelwood closing her Instagram for a time.
2. Fable’s Reader Summary Features Racism (And Probably AI)
AI and racism kicked off 2025. This was published on January 1st. Fable, a social media app for readers, implemented a tool for users to look at their reading stats and it was disastrous. Wonder how Fable is doing now?
1. Sinners & Stardust & Sexual Assault
This was the year of awful book events. I feel like every month, Sarah and I discussed some con or signing that went terribly. What started as a promising event for readers of dark romance ended with horrific stories of alleged sexual assault and predatory behavior.
Posts on the current bookish discourse really shined this year!
Did you have a favorite post this year that really stood out to you? Or are there any features you just love reading?
Quick comment to say I think some HTML weirdness is going on (I’m using MS Edge, if it helps). There’s a banner at the top of the site saying “Notice: Function _load_textdomain_just_in_time was called incorrectly. Translation loading for the subscribe-to-comments-reloaded domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home/smartbit/public_html/smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6121”. When I open the link to this post, I see a list headed “Deprecated” or “Warning”. Eg “Deprecated: DateTime::createFromFormat(): Passing null to parameter #2 ($datetime) of type string is deprecated in /home/smartbit/public_html/smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/themes/smartbitches/includes/smrt-variables.php on line 19” and “Warning: Attempt to read property “ID” on null in /home/smartbit/public_html/smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/themes/smartbitches/includes/smrt-variables.php on line 98″.
Totally boogered up in Safari.
Ok again for me.
Thank you for the heads up! Looking at it now, but I’m not seeing the same error.
@catscatscats are you saying the error is gone for you?
I bought CARELESS PEOPLE because I didn’t want to wait for it from the library. Excellent book. The title is just so accurate. These people care about profit above anything and everything else.
I bought CARELESS PEOPLE but didn’t get around to reading it this year–I had a lot on my plate, unfortunately. But it’s now at the top of my “26 books in 2026” list. I loved the reading spreadsheet even though I screwed it up and had to start over–I kept messing up the date started and date completed on each book and couldn’t get it back to rights. But I finally got the hang of it to the tune of 68 (and counting) books. I don’t know if I’ll get to 70 with less than a week to go in the year, but given that my original goal was 50, I’d say I did pretty good! (Next year’s goal is 100.)