Sarah Kee is the Publicity Assistant at UNP and compiles the Staff Reading List every month. Rebecca Jefferson is the Marketing Associate at UNP, editor of the Behind the Book blog, and has never taken a statistics class.

As the year comes to a close, we’re excited to share our staff reading wrapped containing fun highlights pulled from our monthly staff reading list, spanning December 2024 to November 2025.

We had 15 staff members contribute a response to the staff reading list throughout the year and 71 total responses submitted.

There were 2 UNP staff members that contributed a response to the staff reading list every month and 3 that contibuted the highest number of books. Thank you to our top contributors Sarah Kee (14), Lacey Losh (12) and Clark Whitehorn (11) for sharing so many great books!

With everyone’s help, we featured a total of 88 books in the staff reading list this year. Those 88 books added up to a total 28,587 pages read and 49 hours 37 minutes listened.

The average length of a book that UNP staff members read was 325 pages.

UNP staff members predominantly read fiction, with 64 books compared to 22 nonfiction and 2 poetry titles. Our top fiction genres were literary fiction and fantasy. On the nonfiction side, politics and memoir were of interest.

Out of the 88 titles featured in the staff reading list, there were no repeat titles among the responses; but we had 6 repeat authors: R.F. Kuang, Sir Terry Pratchett, Joe Abercrombie, B.J. Hollars, Mona Awad, and Ali Hazelwood.

There were 7 books featured in the staff reading lists published by university presses and the rest of the books were published by a mix of independent presses and big 5 publishers.

The oldest book read was The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, which was originally published in 1897. The most recently published book read this year was Dinosaur Dreams, published in October. There were 16 other books included in our staff reading lists that were published in 2025; we like to keep up with the trends!

At 782 pages, the longest book read was Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Meanwhile, Dinosaur Dance! by Sandra Boynton was the shortest book at 16 pages.

After consulting all of our various stats, and Library Journal‘s helpful breakdown of reading habits by generation, our 2025 “Reading Age” is that of a milennial on the very cusp of Gen X, thirty-eight.

We’re looking forward to seeing what UNP staff members read throughout the year in 2026!