Celebrating the 2025 Worldwide Reading Challenge
The 2025 Worldwide Reading Challenge was an incredible year of reading, discovery, and community. With dozens of participants and hundreds of books logged, it’s clear that our community loves to read, and we could not be happier about it!
Let’s take a look at what we accomplished together.
In 2025, 73 participants joined the reading challenge and collectively read an amazing 680 books, totaling approximately 237,879 pages. We read an average of 453 pages per book! Some dedicated readers took on especially ambitious titles with four participants reading books that were over 1,000 pages long. Our shortest story? A petite 18 pages.
Participants read books of all shapes and sizes. Here’s how the lengths stacked up:
- 35% <300
- 55% 300-499
- 10% 500+
This mix shows readers tackled a wide variety of reading, everything from short stories to epic novels.
The challenge participants leaned heavily toward storytelling, with fiction dominating the list: 82% of all the books submitted were fiction!
We read a fantastic mix of genres in 2025, but apparently, we love a good mystery above all else. Check out that graphic.
Readers also embraced multiple formats to enjoy their books:
- 20% digital or e-readers
- 30% print
- 50% audiobooks
Audiobooks were especially popular, showing how willing we are to fit reading into our busy lives.
Some authors appeared on our reading list over and over. The most-read authors of the year were:
- Micheal Connelly - 27 books
- C.J. Archer - 19 books
- Sarah J Maas - 13 books
- T. Kingfisher - 12 Books
- Karin Slaughter - 10 books
- Dianne Freeman - 9 Books
- Rebecca Yarros - 9 books
- Aaron Blabey - 8 books
- Anna Elliott - 8 books
Out of the 680 books read, only 25 titles were read by multiple participants, meaning most people were discovering completely different stories than everyone else. However, one title stood out above the rest: Fourth Wing was the most-read book in the challenge. Overall, participants rated their books highly. The average rating across all books was 4.17 stars, which tells us that readers were finding plenty of titles they enjoyed. Throughout the year, we added a little extra fun with monthly prize drawings. In total, 24 prizes were awarded to one Nebraska reader and one worldwide reader per month. These prizes included bookish goodies like journals, bookmarks, gift cards, and more. Congratulations again to everyone who won!
Most importantly, we want to say thank you to everyone who participated. Whether you read one book or one hundred, every entry helped make the challenge a success. Seeing the variety of books people discovered and shared was truly inspiring. (Check out our Story Graphy 2025 Wrap-up here.)
We’re excited to do it all again in 2026, and we’ve made the process even easier to participate.
This year, we simplified the book entry form. Instead of filling out lots of questions, participants only need to provide a few basic details:
Required:
· Your name
· The book title
· The author
Optional:
· Page count or book length (we can look this up if you’re not sure)
· Where you’re from (We want to know how far we’re reaching)
· A star rating
· Your email address (only if you’d like to be entered into prize drawings)
And one more change many readers will appreciate:
No book review is required!!
That means entering your books is faster and easier than ever. In fact, if you reach out to us at Espressions or at The Leadership Center and tell us in person, by phone, email or carrier pigeon what you read, we’ll enter it for you!
We hope you’ll join us again this year. Whether you read occasionally or constantly have a book in hand, the challenge is a great way to track your reading and discover new favorites.
Start adding your books to the 2026 Reading Challenge (So far, we have 117 books entered!) and let’s see how many pages we can read together this year!
PS! Follow us on The StoryGraph to see what everyone is reading! tlcaurora | The StoryGraph
