Welcome to 2025, y’all. It feels weird to wish you a happy one, given *waves around*, but I hope the year treats you well. And brings you a lot of books and media to enjoy!

ICYMI on FYA

We kicked off the new year with a few more “end-of-year” posts: Mandy W. shared our top 10 posts of 2024 and I revealed the results of the 2024 Best Books Reader Poll.

I also shared a review of Star Trek: Lower Decks in this week’s Stream It, and Sarah posted the discussion questions for this month’s FYA Book Club selection, Rebecca Barrow’s And Don’t Look Back.

In this week’s Book Reports:

  • Regina reviewed the final novel in Claudia Gray’s Spellcaster series, Sorceress, which made her want to go back to Gray’s sci-fi books.
  • Sarah reviewed Rebecca Barrow’s And Don’t Look Back, the January Book Club selection, and a novel filled with twists and turns.
  • And I reviewed Jill Tew’s The Dividing Sky, a book that had promise but ultimately felt too much like a copy of dystopias of old.

Book-Related Things

I’m a data nerd and love visualizations of my reading stats. My Year In Books isn’t perfect—they consider YA a genre, which we all know it’s not—but pretty fun. (Only available to Goodreads users at the moment.)

Here’s a list of 10 books to read if you like Squid Game, including Kim Ligget’s The Grace Year (the March 2025 FYA Book Club selection!) and Pierce Brown’s Red Rising.

You might have missed some of these—I know I did: “10 of the Most Popular Bookish News Stories of 2024.”

“From Frybread to Aliens: 2025 YA Anthologies for Your TBR.”

Parade recently released their list of 101 Best YA Books of All Time. (Don’t forget about our list of the top 100 from the 2000s!)

Here are the YA books Reese Witherspoon chose for her book club last year.

Onscreen Things

I don’t exactly know what to feel about this new lifestyle show from Meghan Markle.

The death of the rom-com has been greatly exaggerated.

Here’s a list of all the book-to-movie adaptations set to release in 2025. And a list of the book-to-TV show adaptations.

Social Media Things

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Miscellaneous Things

“The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction.”

One Heartland, an HIV/AIDS camp in Minnesota, is for sale after nearly three decades of serving kids. 

What’d we miss? Add your fave distractions of the week in the comments.

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Mandy (she/her) is a manager at a tech company who lives in Austin, TX, with her husband, son, and dogs. She loves superheroes and pretty much any show or movie with “Star” in the name.