2025 End of year list 5: Blog traffic

This is the last end of 2025 list, and I don’t expect you to read it – it’s mainly so I’ll have a record.

Here are the posts that attracted most clicks on my blog in 2025:

1. Niall Williams’s Time of the Child (February 2025, 861 hits)
2. Ellen van Neerven’s Throat (July 2020, 847 hits)
3. There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak and the Book Club (October 2024, 734 hits))
4. Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother (March 2023, 591 hits)
5. Yael van der Wouden’s Safekeep at the Book Club (January 2025, 576 hits)
6. Andrew O’Hagan on Caledonian Road with the book club (July 2024, 525 hits)
7. Robert Alter’s Psalms (September 2020, 491 clicks)
8. Mick Herron’s Standing by the Wall (October 2023, 489 hits)
9. The Book Group & Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, page 77 (May 2024, 422 hits)
10. The Book Club and Paul Murray’s Bee Sting (April 2024, 400 hits)

I don’t know what these figures mean. The Mick Herron book is almost not a book.

Here’s WordPress’s list of my all-time top ten posts. This list stays pretty stable. The long-time place-holders don’t need to get many views to stay:

1. Travelling with the Art Student (November 2014, 3567 hits)
2. The Book Group and Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus (June 2018, 3010 hits)
3. (Re-)reading Kevin Gilbert’s poetry (April 2012, 2499 hits)
4. Mary Oliver’s Twelve Moons (April 2020, 2193 hits)
5. Ellen van Neerven’s Throat (July 2020, 2074 hits)
6. Mary Oliver’s House of Light (April 2020, 1909 hits)
7. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (October 2023, 1880 hits)
8. Bran Nue Dae (January 2010, 1856 hits)
9. Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother (March 2023, 1672 hits)
10. The book group’s Harp in the South (February 2011, 1447 hits)

The post at the top of the list is there because someone lifted an image from it and put it up on Pinterest.

That’s it. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to those statistics. Some of you I know IRL, some I’ve met through email etc, some in the comments section, some I know only as anonymous clickers. I’m happy that you’ve visited the blog. Come again.