My resolution for 2025 is simple: make reading fun again. Readers around the world seem to experience the same challenges in cycles — many of us struggled with brain fog in the Covid years, or plunged into escapist and The End Is Nigh post-pandemic books, according to taste. 

But for teenagers and adults alike, what people seem to need most today is to get back to reading as an act of pure pleasure. Instead of another worthy chore to be ticked off your endless to-do list, reading can be an indulgence, an act of discovery rather than drudgery. In November, I wrote to a friend who’d run aground with an ambitious project to read only biographies of world leaders: “Guilty pleasures are fine! Try a fun reading goal — sometimes you need the hot chocolate with marshmallows just as much as the beetroot-and-celery juice.”

For many booklovers, the challenge is to step out of your comfort zone and try new things. In 2019, reading more than 150 novels as a Booker judge, the British writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch reflected: “Like so many of us, I filter my book choices to reflect the world I already know. Reading stories that I would never have chosen, mistakenly believing them to be uninteresting or too remote from my concerns, [?.?.?.?] slowly began to change me.”