Let’s Talk Bookish: Bookish Trends of 2025

Happy Friday! I hope the new year has been treating you well so far.

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly bookish discussion meme created by Rukky @Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @Book Nook Bits and Dini @DiniPandaReads. Each Friday, bloggers will write posts about a particular topic and share on their blog.

What bookish trends have you noticed? Are certain tropes, types of blogging, or other book-related content becoming more popular?

I tend to stick to my own little bubble online, and that means most of what I see isn’t usually ‘mainstream’ since I don’t read many of the trending books. I’m also not on TickTok so I definitely miss a lot of trends and tropes that are popular.

That being said, the really popular ones do still filter through, and some of my Discord friends are huge romantasy/popular book fans as well, so here is what I have noticed…

Romantasy is still going strong. I’m not particularly surprised about this one, to be honest! Romantasy had a huge popularity spike in 2024, and that definitely continued through to 2025. I also noticed that fantasy romance (very different imo) also grew in popularity last year.

Vampires are everywhere! A lot of my friends are into vampire books, and thanks to them I have been noticing an increase in novels featuring vampires.

Return of the fae. I also noticed that books featuring faeries of some sort have been popping up a lot, whether that’s older series like The Folk of the Air making a comeback, or new ones being released. I have a feeling that maybe the popularity of the Emily Wilde books might be to thank here?

An influx of special editions. They are absolutely everywhere and for every book (or so it seems). We’ve had a lot of discussion around this on LTB recently, so I don’t think I need to go too much into detail here!

Any trend changes from the Bookish Trends of 2024 post?

I didn’t participate in 2024, sadly!

What changes do you foresee in 2026? What bookish trend would you most want to see become popular or come back?

More cosy books! With the general state of the world, I think people are turning to cosier books more than ever before. I expect to see a lot more books classed as ‘cosies’ to be published this year, whether in fantasy, romance or any other genre.

The rise of analogue. I have seen SO many Instagram posts in the last month about people going (somewhat) offline for 2026. Physical reading journals seem to be getting popular, and people generally want to be spending more time reading (or doing other hobbies) these days. I think this is a direct response to the rise of AI and the conversation around how social media and AI tools are ‘rotting our brains’.

I am all for the above, I try not to spend too long on social media anyways, I have never used AI tools (I don’t even know how), and I love me a cosy book!