Let’s take a look at the big report, shall we?

A few observations about these statistics:

• Once again, my actual favorite band, Metric, is also my most-Scrobbled band, by a pretty wide margin; and my actual second-favorite band, The Joy Formidable (aka “TJF”), is in their correct spot as well.
• As per usual, Metric also dominated my top albums list, but a couple of other albums with a lot of songs on them sneaked into the top five just by virtue of, you know, having a lot of songs on them. The New Order collection Singles, at #4, has 32 songs, while the Silent Hill Original Soundtrack tips the scales at a whopping 42 songs. Mind you some of them are only like 48 seconds long, but still.
• My top new artist this year was Suzanne Vega. Not that Suzanne Vega is new or anything, but I finally got around to picking up her “best of” album RetroSpective, which has lots of good stuff on it.
• After two years on top of my “Most Played Track” chart, “Liana” has gotten dethroned by Metric’s “Gimme Sympathy”, which is not even my favorite Metric track on the moment; the #2 song “Sick Muse” is. Next month it will probably be something different.
• Apparently I am in some kind of elite-level Metric listener club. I wonder if I get a toque or a free serving of poutine¹.

Although Last.fm only tracks artists and albums by play count, it is possible to use third-party tools to get the approximate time you listened to particular things. My top artists list by time looks a little bit different, although the top two are still what you (meaning I) would expect. 

Next up, Last.fm provides a little bit of trivia:

And after that, we have charts. Yay, data!

Next up, we have my “Mainstream Score” and some Quick Facts and trivia:

All right, time to get into the lists, starting with my top 50 artists for 2024:

Next, we have my top 50 albums of 2024:

And finally, my top tracks of 2024:

This year Last.fm “Playback” was a thing again, so I thought I would take a look at that.

Ooh, there are graphs!

The boba tea chart is back too!

Hey Last.fm, how many albums did you say I had listened to this year? Can you average that out?

All right but I bet you don’t know what my favorite album was, though, right?

Fun fact: I have a special smart playlist on my phone to make sure I listen to everything at least every six months, so that nothing falls through the cracks. This playlist is called “Lost Carols”, which ties back in to the whole Silent Hill soundtrack dealie.

As we know, “Gimme Sympathy” sneaked in just ahead of my actual current favorite Metric song, “Sick Muse”:

Incidentally, lately I’ve been listening a lot to a Metric song called “Days of Oblivion”, which can be interpreted as being about dealing with trauma and PTSD, which resonated with me this year because reasons.

Next the totals and the let’s call it personality profile I guess?

Here’s the “Playback” summary, which basically reiterates everything I already went blathering on about:

And that’s a wrap for this year’s music retrospective! Tune in again in January of 2027 for a look back at the books and music of 2026!

1. Not just an ordinary hat or bowl of soup, on account of Metric is Canadian, of course. ︎

• This year’s longest book, Thieves’ World Volume One (★★★), was relatively short for a longest book, at least by my standards, clocking in at only 776 pages ― just a bit over half as long as last year’s train wreck of a longest book, The Reality Dysfunction (★). It’s also not really a novel; it’s an omnibus of three novels, which are not themselves really novels either but are in fact shared-world story collections. Am I splitting hairs? Probably. But hey, that’s what I’m here for.
• This year’s shortest book was “The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End and Further Still” (★★★), by Catherynne M. Valente, which is also not a book; it’s a short story. But all Goodreads has is a hammer, so everything looks like a nail.
• My least popular book this year was Major Karnage (★★), by Gord Zajac. I don’t remember exactly what this was about, but I do remember that you shouldn’t talk to Major Karnage about The War. Which war? Shhhh! We don’t talk about it!
• My most popular book was Sharp Objects (★★★★) by Gillian Flynn, which, as usual for a Gillian Flynn novel, is about women behaving very badly.
• This year’s page count was down a bit, only 18,391 pages across 52 books. Maybe I needed to DNF a few longer books instead of all those short ones. More on that momentarily.
• The book I read this year that was most highly-rated by the Goodreads community was Caliban’s War (★★★★★), the second installment of “The Expanse”, by James S.A. Corey, which has an average Goodreads rating of 4.39. I read the first one way back in 2019, not long after getting out of the hospital, so I really felt for the poor captain when he woke up in sick bay that time with a tube coming out of a let’s call it “rather private” body part. I also felt bad about his ship’s coffee maker getting destroyed during the climactic battle. I don’t remember if he got a new coffee maker in Caliban’s War but he definitely had the tube out by then. (The third book in the series, Abaddon’s Gate, had a few minor pacing problems and got ★★★★ from me.)
• My average rating for this year came in at 2.8 stars, a rating which was brought way down by the lengthy run of ★ DNF stinkers I encountered near the end of the year, which I alluded to above.
• This year, my ★★★★★-rated books were The Guns Above, Ancillary Justice, Gideon the Ninth, and the aforementioned Caliban’s War. Of those, Gideon the Ninth was easily my favorite.

Here’s the complete breakdown of my ratings at Goodreads this year:

And now, without further ado, here is the Year In Books That Was for 2025:

Next up, we have stats from The StoryGraph, an alternative to Goodreads that, among other things, actually still lets people look at it without requiring them to make an account (a restriction adopted by both Goodreads and Last.fm in the last several years, possibly to stop their data from being scraped by bots, or possibly just to be dickish). This makes The StoryGraph much easier to use for sharing book information, and, as another benefit, the StoryGraph also supports fractional star ratings in 0.25 increments, allowing the obsessive data collectors such as myself to leave much more accurate scores. The StoryGraph also provides a year-end wrap-up, which has a bunch of new features as opposed to last year, I think. And look! It has, as the name of the site would suggest, graphs! (For the online version, which includes the ability to drill down into categories if you are that manner of data nerd¹, click here.)

And that was the year in books for 2025! Stay tuned for the year in music, with stats provided by Last.fm, which—unlike some music services I could mention—provides the year-end statistics at the end of the year, where they belong.

1. And if you’ve gotten this far, you probably are. ︎
2. Possibly the issue is that I was reading Gideon the Ninth while waiting at the DMV, where normal rules of time and space cease to apply. ︎