t’s hard to believe I haven’t put together a post-COVID review of the GBC’s year in books. Fear not, gentle reader – here we go. Heading for 2026, we have concluded 2025 with the annual EurobookVision get-together and taken stock of the year in reading.
A lovely repast in the cosy cellar of the RIYC, courtesy of one of our distinguished members. Prior to losing the run of ourselves, we considered our December read, Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart. Interspersing a broader reconsideration of our year’s reads, we enjoyed the lovely Christmas fare on offer in our private cavern room, surrounded by a fine array of wines – temptingly accessible. As noted in the past, we take the opportunity during the get-together to reflect on the reads using a uniquely devised and skillfully administered EuroVision-style voting system. As always superbly coordinated by our corresponding secretary and head gamemaster, and ably chaired by the sponsor of December’s read. A complete cohort, save one trusty member, we enjoyed deep literary appreciation combined with abundant holiday cheer.
The full slate of reads this year was:
A lovely and diverse selection indeed. Some new and some older, alternating between fiction and non-fiction as always.
As we entered the end-of-year tabulations, our monthly reads were ranked by the average scores that were recorded immediately after each reading. These were offered and tabulated during the month they were read, and, as noted, our final December book was discussed and ranked before the end-of-year balloting was revealed. The Bounty by Caroline Alexander pipped Rory Stewart to the highest score during the year. The monthly reads were ranked thusly:
Following discussion of our December read, we turned ourselves to the evening’s ‘purpose/entertainment’ – a chance to reflect and re-rank all of our reads in a Eurovision-style balloting system. The ballots were shared a month in advance, and all were completed before the evening. In the full Eurovision experience, we gradually reveal from our lowest (1) choices to our top choice of the year (12). This year again, we ended up with an outright winner, but for the first time in ten years, the top choice was not a single member’s ranked top choice. Clearly, though, it was the club’s choice. It wasn’t the monthly highest-ranked book, which slipped a bit from our memory, and this year’s end-of-year winner is Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge. It was well-appreciated, rated by all members, and nearly read by all, with an average score of 7.06 – somewhat lower than the previous year’s winners. On the upside, and looking at the diverse spread of points awarded and the clustering of europoints, this indeed suggests that we are tapping into a fine subjectivity and proposing books that lead to some discord, varied opinions, and ultimately brilliant discussion.
The End of Year re-rank of our twelve reads was largely straightforward, but returned a tie for the second most popular book, points for all 12 books read :
There were some winners and losers from our month-to-month rankings, as the following chart illustrates, mapping the ranked scores from the 12 months against the year-end ranking. We actually had more winners than losers this year, which suggests to me that we are a critical bunch when we are close to the source, but possibly less so through the mists of time. There was, in fact, only one big loser in scores, which was, rather ironically, the aptly named The Art of Losing.
The top slot was swapped between our monthly scores and the final reflective score. ‘Politics on the Edge’ won the yearly prize. The bottom three choices stayed in the bottom and don’t seem to have improved over the year, or, on further reflection, it is a recurring phenomenon.
One factor that we are always conscious of is the fact that the books read earlier in the year have to be either memorable to battle it out lest they suffer from a more recent familiarity with good (or, in fairness, bad) reads later in the year that may receive an unintentional bump based on our faltering memories. To try a little exercise in controlling for this, I gave some slight weighting +/- up to 20% of the point score in the final meeting, based on the reading sequence. Interestingly, this does mix things up a bit, but it probably overcompensates for time somewhat. The Art of Losing becomes a winner in this retabulation – possibly because it was the very first book we read. Politics on the Edge becomes a loser – but again, it is because it is the last that we read and gets hit with the largest ‘penalty.. It’s the middle of the pack that sees the bigger gains, and A Boy’s Heart (my favourite) is taking a big jump along with Winter in Madrid and The Cyberiad. Interestingly, more books gained than slipped, suggesting we remembered them as better, or they were less memorable. Possibly this also reflects a throw-away comment during a previous evening that ‘I don’t remember even reading that book’ or I thought I was ranking another book I had read, and the potential that it could be left unranked.
We actually have marginally lower average scores this year, reinforcing a repeated note that we didn’t seem to be reading as much quality this year as we did in the past. However, for what it’s worth, we had a higher StdDev in our monthly rankings this year: 1.21 vs last year’s 1.17, and 1.44 in the past. We are creeping back to actually using our range of available points. Further, though, had no monthly StdDev >2, whereas last year we had three months with a StdDev >2 – so maybe we feel we are challenging ourselves with contentious reading, although a certain meeting recently might suggest otherwise?
So, how did we fare between Fiction and Non-Fiction? We have long revered a tendency to rate non-fiction higher than fiction, but this year. Our average score for Non-fiction is 6.77/10, where Fiction averaged 6.15/10 versus a paltry 5.9/10 last year. Despite this tendency for ranking Non-fiction higher as we did again this year, we actually chose a non-fiction book of the year. We have always tended to rank non-fiction higher, but choose a fiction read as our book of the year. This isn’t to say too much in fairness, as we may well have chosen bad non-fiction and particularly (or at least relatively) good fiction – does fiction stick better unless we have a particularly stunning Non-fiction read?
Finally, nearly all members had at least one recommendation accepted for the club’s reading. The results for reactions to recommendations are as follows:
It’s probably worth noting here that the member with the lowest average score also had the largest number of books chosen for reading, which may lead to pulling a turkey and decreasing the overall average.
And on the reading front, we have average scores for each reader with the two outliers removed. So, who ranks high, and who ranks low? By the way, the club’s aggregate score was higher than in the last three years, from 5.8 last year to an average across all eight members and 12 books of 6.49. So other than FOS and SD, we are less scathing this year, but the curmudgeons remain so 😉
The one thing you may be wondering, given that I removed outliers from the average score, is whether we are actually using the full range of marks. If we look at the StdDev of marks returned across the entire year, the use of the scales might be suggested as follows:
There’s nothing too extreme in it and so much of this as with all of our activity is hugely subjective (which is the point) or simply prone to the vagaries of the selections, attendance, moods, and in the end drink taken (no wait we do make sure to mark those ballots in advance of the night – and the tabulator and games master did an absolutely great job of making the process transparent and also tense). However, it is notable that BC uses the full scale of assessment, and JOS is very consistent in his scores.
Finally, considering who likes whose recommendations, I averaged the returned scores for each recommender for each scorer. This was only slightly complicated by having multiple recommendations for a single recommender, so a bit of math was needed. The results show whose books you tend to favour – this will really benefit from looking at things over a longer period, but this year we see (MH favours selections from DK – but we all seem to continue to rank our own recommendations particularly high):
In the past, I had tabulated some longer-term perspectives on the book club reads, and I will update this shortly with our most recent year’s data.
It is great to take a bit of a look at our behaviour here, as demonstrated by the data. I am a little surprised to note that I have not done this since COVID. I suppose it’s been a busy time, both personally and professionally, but I’m glad to be at it.
Thanks to all members for your friendship and collegiality. The club has been going for nearly a decade and a half now, and always gives such warmth and engagement at every monthly meeting.