2026 has now entered the history books. Well, not exactly, as it will be decades before historians have enough perspective to analyze WTF just happened. Still, it's over, and everything feels like it's starting fresh. Whether it actually is or not, time will certainly tell. In the bookish world, we've all posted our "Best Books of the Year" list for the old year, and now it's time to look at what's coming for us - or at us - in the new.

Welcome to the New Year Giveaway Hop, hosted by Mama the Fox and Mom Does Reviews! Last night we said a hearty, "Goodbye" to 2025, quite possibly along with a wish for the door not to hit its ass on the way out. So long, 2025, it has not been good to know you. From a personal standpoint, this past year has been a good one - even though that has often felt precarious in one way or another.

My Review: This book was always going to be this year’s New Year’s Eve review. After all, what could make a better reading send-off for the year (any year but especially this year) than a bunch of beloved former companion animals turned sages from the stars not just wishing their people (for very open interpretations of both “their” and “people”), their very best wishes for the holiday season and the coming new year?

My Review: First, this was wow. And second, and third, and as it turns out, fourth. Not always a cohesive wow, but a wow all the same. It’s also the conclusion to an epic whose whole is DEFINITELY greater than the sum of its parts. But you really need the parts - and if it’s been awhile a refresher on the parts, …

My Review: The opening of this 12th entry in the marvelous Barker & Llewelyn series at first seems a bit, well, ‘out there’ even for the strange and dangerous places that Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn generally find themselves. Not that Barker doesn’t command every room he enters, but his ‘junior’ partner Thomas Llewelyn seems to still be taking each day a bit as it comes - even after a few years as Barker’s apprentice and a year as his actual partner in their private enquiry agency.

This is the FINAL Sunday Post of 2025! It's almost time to say goodbye to this year - and I'm more than ready. But ready or not, 2026 is ON ITS WAY! I hope that each and every one of you has a fantastic New Year's celebration of the kind you most prefer and can look forward to a HAPPY 2026!

This is the final Stacking the Shelves post for 2025. This year has gone by in a blur - and perhaps that's the best thing that can be said about it. Nevertheless, I have some fascinating and fantastic books in this final stack of the year. While these covers are definitely pretty, they are just as definitely not pretty in the same way.

My Review: I was SO tempted to begin this review with snark - and just keep right on snarking all the way through. Obviously, I chose to begin with a bit of snark, because, well, I do too. Read every day, that is. Reading is life. Not ALL of life, but a lot of life, and all of my life has been filled with books and reading.

Another year, another winter solstice. That solstice, of course, marks the longest night of the year where we live. Day follows night whether we will it or not; what we can do is hope for a better tomorrow and strive to make it so. A poem for today by Susan Cooper (the same person who wrote the The Dark is Rising…

My Review: If the title of this one sounds familiar, there's an excellent reason. The title is a line from one of the truly classic Christmas songs that has been playing everywhere since, well, Halloween. Because “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” on Christmas Eve, which is TONIGHT. The song has been recorded by over 200 artists from Bing Crosby to Lady Gaga.

I feel very accomplished this year, as I managed to get this list down to a 'mere' dozen. At one point early on I was adding an additional book to the list each year, which was not so bad when I began in 2011 with 11 books, but started to get VERY unwieldy as I got to 2018 or thereabouts.

Welcome to the Winter 2025-2026 Seasons of Books Giveaway Hop, hosted by It Starts At Midnight and Versatileer! Once upon a time, this was the Month of Books Giveaway Hop, now it’s the Seasons of Books Giveaway Hop, with the hops starting on the days the seasons change. Yesterday, December 21, was the first official day of WINTER for the 2025-2026 season, meaning that the hop started YESTERDAY everywhere else but, thanks to the graciousness of the hop's organizers, starts TODAY here at Reading Reality.

This is the penultimate (meaning next-to-last) Sunday Post of 2025. This year is winding down. A lot of people are not going to be sorry to see this one go, myself included. I couldn't resist this picture of Luna for this week, because she looks like she's bracing for impact right along with the rest of us! Is that a face, or is that a FACE? 

There are some terribly different definitions of "pretty" in this stack, aren't there? The Architect of New York is real-world pretty, A Curse of Beasts and Magic and A Long and Speaking Silence are both fantasy pretty, and Every Day I Read is somewhere in the middle between the two. Very much OTOH, The Pillagers' Guide to Arctic Pianos is really cute AND the book on this list I picked up for the title.

My Review: "They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago Way!" While the quote is from the 1987 movie, The Untouchables, based on a 1957 book of the same title ABOUT the FBI’s pursuit of the notorious gangster Al Capone in 1930, it also reads as if its ripped from the headlines - the fictional headlines about the case that has Detective Harriet Foster of the Chicago Police Department tied up in knots - and not just because one of the victims belongs to one of the CPD’s own.

My Review: Everyone knows the story of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol - if not from the book itself then from one - or more likely more - of the many, many TV and movie adaptations. My two favorites are still Mr. Magoo’s cartoon from the 1960s and the Muppets’ version from the 1990s. The idea of the story is eternal, that anyone can atone, that anyone can be redeemed, that anyone can learn to celebrate the true meaning of Christmas with a big enough ‘wake-up’ call.

My Review: It’s the mystery of Junetta Plum’s whole, entire life that confuses, empowers, inspires and enables the life that her cousin Harriet Stone drops into in the opening pages of this book. Not that Harriet doesn’t find herself poking into Junetta’s death - because it is mysterious - but it’s Harriet’s amateur, informal, two-steps-forward-one-step-back investigation into her cousin’s whole entire life that pushes this story forward - and very nearly drops it, and Harriet, in their tracks.

Welcome to the Dashing December Giveaway Hop, hosted by Mama the Fox and Mom Does Reviews! December is certainly dashing right on through this year, isn't it? Today marks the last and final day of this year's Ho-Ho-Ho Readathon, so participants have just the rest of today - until midnight ET, to see if they can get in one last entry on the…

My Review: The thing about these holiday shorts series(es), both this year’s Home Sweet Holidays and last year’s Under the Mistletoe, is that the stories are supposed to be short in length - and they are - so they often take place over a rather short time period to make things work. But speaking of making things work, while ‘love at first sight’ is a fun idea, in real life and a romance where the happy ever after needs to feel earned, somehow a bit of time needs to be shoehorned into that short time period.

Tonight marks the first night of Hanukkah - which pretty much explains one of this week's reviews. The Holly Jolly Giveaway Hop ends TOMORROW NIGHT, just in time for the Dashing December Giveaway Hop to dash in on the very last day of the 2025 Ho-Ho-Ho Readathon. It's been fun being one of Caffeinated Reviewer's elves again this year, and I'm already looking forward to the next one!

I had a grand ambition to fit everything I picked up this year into this year's remaining Stacking the Shelves posts. It's not going to happen. I cap these things at 20-ish just to keep the download with all the covers from being overwhelming. So I've already picked up stuff that's going to be a stack in 2026. 2026! When did THAT sneak up on me?

My Review: After yesterday’s book, I realized that what I wanted to round out this week of holiday reads wasn’t a romantic book filled with the holiday spirit, it was a murder mystery to see if getting killed at the holidays would turn the victim INTO a holiday spirit. The haunting kind, that is. I was casting around for something that would fit that mood, and if possible something a bit like last week’s…

My Review:  Ricki James' - more formally Miracle James-Diaz' - life has certainly gotten a bit more complicated (and interesting) in the intervening books in this Vintage Cookbook Mystery series that occurred between Ricki's first adventure in Bayou Book Thief and this delightfully twisted Christmas murder. To the point where I really want to go back and find out all the deets even if I didn’t need them to enjoy this holiday mystery.

My Review: Last holiday season, I kicked off my participation in the #2024HoHoHoRat with The December Market by RaeAnne Thayne. It was my first readathon post EVER, but it was the SECOND book in the Shelter Springs series. So of course the first book in that series, THIS BOOK, had to appear somewhere in my readathon reads this year. It’s only fair.

My Review: Merry and Bright was every bit as delightful as last week’s Snow Place Like Home, and not just because of the cute title. I am seeing that one of the treats of this year’s collection is the way that the stories extend the time the featured couple knows each other in order to make the instant romance seem not quite so instant.