In past years I was able to do detailed analysis of my social media impact, using stats from Facebook, Twitter, etc etc. Nowadays, they have all hidden the statistics from the casual user, but on the flipside I have very good stats for this blog thanks to Jetpack. This ranking probably isn’t going to change in the next 12 days, so these lists are based on year-to-date as of today, 19 December.
1) Top 2025 blog posts, written in 2025
I’m doing two more brief sections, but these are the ten blog posts published this year that got the most hits.
1.10) Reforming the WSFS committee elections (26 July)
This was a topic that had been close to my heart for some time: I was, and am, concerned that under current rules, a single faction with less than majority support could nonetheless win all the seats on offer in the WSFS internal elections. This year’s elections dramatically illustrated the problem when the leading candidate endorsed two other candidates and they won all three available seats between them. In an ironic twist, that leading candidate was, er, me.
1.9) Pope and church thoughts (9 May)
One of two posts in the top ten which were not about science fiction, this picked up on a couple of significant points that I had not seen properly covered elsewhere, including Pope Leo’s choice of regnal name.
1.8) 2025 Hugo final ballot: Goodreads / LibraryThing stats (6 April)
This is a post I do every year, running the Hugo final ballot through the numbers of the Goodreads and LibraryThing websites. This year, the books with the highest reader ratings on both systems won Best Novel and Best Graphic Story or Comic, and the Lodestar Award was won by the book with the highest LibraryThing ratings; but Best Novella went to a dark horse.
1.7) The Baby in the Park, a consolidated account (25 October)
My top non-science-fiction-related post of this year; I had written this story up previously, but in two different posts, as I discovered different parts of the process in 2020-21, and was able to solve the mystery of the parentage of a baby born in 1917 who turned out to be my second cousin once removed. This post pulled the whole story together into a single account.
1.6) Beijing, March 2025 (5 April)
A visit to Beijing for the 9th China Science Fiction Convention, and some tourist impressions.
1.5) Booted from the Ballot: the almost-finalists in the Hugo Awards (19 April)
An analysis of disqualifications and withdrawals from the Hugo ballot, both of which have sharply increased in recent years.
1.4) 2025 Hugo stats (8 September)
My traditional dig into the voting numbers. Several categories were very close, and under the old rules, Best Editor Long Form and Best Fanzine would have been No-Awarded.
1.3) What science fiction predicted about 2025 (1 January)
My annual post looking at books and films which are a) more than twenty years old and b) set in the current calendar year. There were a lot for 2025, which is of course a nice quarter-century number. Spoiler: there will be a lot fewer for 2026.
1.2) Pronouncing the names correctly at the Hugo ceremony (23 August)
This year’s massive Hugo scandal was the mangling of the names of finalists at the Hugo ceremony, which I took personally as I had been involved with gathering information for the convention about how the names should be pronounced, which the convention then ignored. The presenters subsequently apologized, asserting that their carelessness should not be seen as a lack of care. Hmm.
1.1) How Christopher Priest wrote for Doctor Who, and what happened next (21 June)
This turned into one of my best performing blog posts ever, a recounting of my correspondence with Chris Priest soon after I got to know him in 2007, about the events of twenty-five years before when he was commissioned twice to write Doctor Who stories which were never made. I suspect that my post was picked up by Doctor Who fandom, and also to a lesser extent by fans who knew Chris.
2) The top old blog posts of this year
Those were the top blog posts which were written in 2025. However, a lot of blog posts from previous years are still performing very well. The top five of these are as follows:
2.5) The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney (1 August 2024)
This is my third most viewed book review from any year – I think because Heaney himself is very prominent, but this play is not one of his more widely reviewed works. I would not be surprised if this piece has ended up on some college reading lists.
2.4) Rauf Denktaş, a Private Portrait, by Yvonne Çerkez (21 November 2022)
This is my second most viewed book review on this site. I don’t think either my review or the book is exceptional in quality, but Denktaş was a very big fish in his not very big pond, and this account of his side of the story is not widely available – at least, not as widely available as my review.
2.3) Beijing: the Forbidden City, and people wearing pretty dresses (19 October 2023)
I am proud of this post, which consists of photographs taken on the very first day I ever spent in China, in 2023. The Forbidden City itself is stunning, and the custom of local women dressing up in historical costumes on a Sunday is charming. This and the posts on The Cure at Troy and Rauf Denktaş had fewer views than the post about sf set in 2025, but more than the post about the 2025 Hugo statistics.
2.2) The multiplication of descendants of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (12 February 2023)
This is another post that I am proud of, simply tracking in raw numbers the increase over time of (known) descendants of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. I wrote it in early 2023 and predicted that their number of living descendants would pass the 1,000 mark in the following twelve months, and would pass 1,024 probably in 2025. I have not checked to see if either of these milestones was met on schedule.
2.1) William Wordsworth, Annette Vallon and their daughter Caroline (12 April 2023)
My top post of the year written in a previous year, and I suppose also my top book review since it’s framed as a review of two monographs about the subject. I am honestly a bit surprised by its popularity, though, the story of Wordsworth’s French daughter didn’t impact much on his life or indeed on hers; he fled revolutionary France leaving his pro-monarchist lover behind with their unborn baby, and they subsequently met only twice, though relations seem to have been mostly civil. I was charmed to get a nice message recently from one of Wordsworth’s 5x great-grandchildren through Caroline and her great-great-grandson Emmanuel Hublot.
These two posts on Wordsworth’s daughter and the descendants of Vic and Al got more views than the Hugo pronunciation post but less than Chris Priest on Doctor Who.
3) The top book reviews of 2025
I actually think of this blog as mainly book reviews with some other cultural and political commentary, so while I’m pleased that the latter gets plenty of clicks, I’m a little sorry that the contemporary book reviews don’t do quite as well. My top five book reviews from 2025 were:
3.5) My Secret Brexit Diary: A Glorious Illusion, by Michel Barnier (13 September)
Barnier’s own story, with also a dodgy anecdote about de Gaulle.
3.4) The Atlas of Unusual Borders, by Zoran Nikolić (2 February)
A very attractive book listing 47 cases of unusual borders around the world.
3.3) Bellatrix, Épisodes 1 and 2, by Leo (12 January)
First two in the new series by the great Franco-Brazilian comics writer.
3.2) The Americans who married C.S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke; and Childhood’s End (10 March)
Not purely a book review, also an examination of the marriages of two very significant science fiction figures (who both married much younger American women).
3.1) I Who Have Never Known Men aka The Mistress Of Silence, by Jacqueline Harpman (24 January)
Glad to say that I was an early adopter of this surreal but grim story by one of Belgium’s great writers. I think it’s a great book.
Four of the above five were published in the first quarter of the year, which makes me suspect that for the book reviews at least there’s more of a slow constant burn of attention.
I think that’s enough analysis for now. At least it’s reassuring that in this age of micro-attention spans, the longer form still has its plcae.