Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
I mostly read newspapers and technical journals, but two books that I read that made an impression: "The Changing World Order" and "The Gulag Archipelago".
- I read the entire “Frog & Toad” collection. Probably about 30 times, some stories more.
- “Little Shrew’s Day”… probably 25 times.
- Many of the “Construction Site” series books, especially the OG “Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site”. The “Garbage Crew” and “Airport” books featured heavily.
- Started to mix in some “Pete the Cat” titles.
- “Detective Dog Nell” got a lot of air play.
Lots of others, but those are definitely the frequent fliers.
It was such a relief when I could start reading them the Narnia Chronicles, and much later Lord of the Rings.
I don't really remember us having much trouble. I was hooked, and I read the whole series by third grade. I had trouble finding a couple of them, which held me up.
I got into many other books those years. My Friend Flicka, Black Beauty. The Hobbit. White Fang, Hatchet. The Forest Runners. Where the Red Fern Grows.
Still some of my favorites on that list. They really shaped my life, actually.
She says she still wants me to read to her, so I do. This year was a bit sci-fi heavy, and we've decided to target more fantasy and literature in 2026.
This year's books included:
"Below the Root", "And All Between", and "Until the Celebration" - The "Green Sky Trilogy"[0] by Zilpha Keatly Snyder. We held off on playing the "Below the Root" video game[1] but I'm hoping that as we get into winter weather and outside time becomes more scarce we can get to it. It's arguably the final book in the "trilogy".
"Redshirts"[2] by John Scalzi. We've been slowly making our way through Star Trek TOS in the last couple years so. That gave her enough cultural fluency with the tropes in the book to make it effective.
"To Say Nothing of the Dog"[3] by Connie Willis. My daughter adores Victorian England and comedy. This book also turned her on to Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)"[4] (which I'm still working thru on my own-- I do not particularly love Victorian England but it is a good book).
Besides the books I read to my daughter, I also read Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries"[5] series myself. I'm vaguely interested in the television adaptation. I'd love to hear what somebody who has read the series thinks of the TV version.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Sky_Trilogy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Sky_Trilogy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirts_(novel)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Say_Nothing_of_the_Dog
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Men_in_a_Boat
Alexander Skarsgard pulled the character off well. My mental picture of Murderbot from the books was very different but now when I re-read the first book after watching the show, I heard his voice. I still feel slightly sad they didn’t get a more genderless or gender-ambivalent actor (he looks male, the bot was agender before the show) or tried to portray him differently… they could have reduced this but the way they filmed him assigns gender to an ungendered character.
The other actors were all excellent too. I felt far more of a sense of them as a team and individuals than I remember from the first book.
If you enjoyed the books I think you’ll enjoy the show, except for me that it has changed my picture of Murderbot and I am not sure for the better, in terms of what I felt were social / identity values the books encouraged.
I definitely see Murderbot as genderless and seeing it as gendered is going to be weird. Fortunately, the series isn't particularly "dear" to me and I think I can deal with the trauma of having my mental pictures wiped-out by somebody else's.
(There are properties like "Neuromancer" and "Snow Crash" that I hope are never adapted to video and, if they are, I will steadfastly refuse to ever see, because I can't imagine anybody else's mental pictures will be better than mine...)
I've never seen "A Christmas Story" (Wikipedia shows it as very American-cultural-icon) but reading the synopsis, I'm surprised how many parts of it are semi-familiar, perhaps culturally reflected in other ways. It'll go on the to-watch list. And looking forward to the narration!
https://axelscheffler.com/who-is-he https://www.juliadonaldson.co.uk/books/
https://www.pbs.org/about/about-pbs/blogs/news/mondays-with-...
Mouse, a Language for Microcomputers by Peter Grogono - Mouse is basically an esolang with barely any abstraction facilities, but the book was well-written and the language compelling enough to explore further.
Notes on Distance Dialing (pdf) by AT&T - Described the telephone systems of the USA and Canada in the mid-1950s. The reading is a dry as it gets, but it was a fascinating dive into a vastly complex system solving extremely hard problems. This is a must-read for folks interested in systems-thinking. That said, I am actively looking for recommendations for books about the process of designing and building the unbelievably complex telephony system over the rudiments of the earlier systems. Recommendations welcomed!
The Eye of Osiris by R. Austin Freeman - This is the first book that I’ve read from Freeman and I suspect that I will read many more in the future. The story follows the disappearance of John Bellingham, Egyptologist and the subsequent investigation. As the investigation stalls, the eminent Dr. Thorndyke digs into the case. The story sets up the mystery nicely and indeed provides enough information to the reader to infer how the disappearance occurred and who or what facilitated it. The book is one of the best whodunits that I’ve ever read.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens - His final work remains unfinished as he passed away before he could complete it. Further complicating the meta-story is that he also didn’t outline the ending nor even put to paper the “villain” of the story. The meta-mystery of the ending has motivated a mountain of speculation around the ending including dozens of continuations of the story from other authors, all deriving their pet endings from textual hints, accounts from Dickens’ friends, illustration notes, and even in some cases seances supposedly accompanied by the spirit of Dickens himself. What was written by Dickens is spectacular and a compelling mystery and although it would be great to know the resolution, in some ways the “Droodiana” that has cropped up over the past 150+ years is reason enough for it to remain a mystery. The whole lore around Edwin Drood is a worthwhile hobby in itself and well-worth exploring. The Chiltern Library edition of the book contains the story and a good bit of the lore around the writing and the meta-works available at the time of its publication.
The Shadow People by Margaret St. Clair - Sadly out of print and difficult to find, but I’ve had it on my shelves for decades and finally got around to reading it. The book came onto my radar in the 1980s when I learned about it in the appendix-n of the 1st edition Advanced D&D Dungeon Masters Guide. I enjoyed many of the books at the time and have slowly swung around to re-reading them over the past few years. Sadly, most on the list do not stand the test of time for me, but St. Clair’s mixture of 60s counter-cultural leanings in a fantasy/sf world still works. The cultural touch-points in the book feel quite dated, but despite the occasional awkwardness, the story is unique even today.
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner - The book started as a passable novel of manners focused on a turn of the century British middle-class family. The titular character was mostly background decoration for the first third of the novel and AFAIR was talked about only in the third-person. It’s only when she made the choice to move out on her own to the country in her middle age does she gain a central role in the narrative and her inner thoughts revealed. This is where things really pick up because I was shocked to learn that this unassuming woman’s inner thoughts had a delicious darkness to them. I don’t want to give away too much, but I’ll just say that you will not expect how the story ends.
Patience by Daniel Clowes - A profound graphic novel using time-travel to explore the idea of enduring love with a story that proceed through time, following Jack as he tries to alter the past and save the woman he loves. This well-known science fiction motif is elevated by Clowes’ signature psychological complexity.
Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse - I’ve read most of the books by Hermann Hesse but this one escaped my attention until this year. The story follows the parallel lives of a monk Narcissus and his passionate friend Goldmund as they respectively search for meaning in life through spiritual means and through pleasures of the flesh.
We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ - A small group of astronauts crash land on a hostile alien world and quickly realize that rescue is unlikely to come. Many SF stories have started this way and so the expectation is that this is a colonization story… but Russ thrives on subverting reader expectations.
Fifty Forgotten Records by R.B. Russell - Another lovely entry in Russell’s series (one can hope) of autobiographical explorations of art, so far covering literature and now music. This book describes 50 records of varying popularity and Russell’s personal connections to each. While I certainly enjoyed finding a dozen or so new albums to explore, the true triumph of the book lies in the vulnerable, reflective memoir threaded throughout.
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler A novel that follows 4-generations of the Ponitifex family, with a particular bildungsroman-esque thread around Ernest, a young man who’s naivete leads to his downfall and how his life unfolds thereafter.
I wrote about these (and more) at https://blog.fogus.me/2025/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-o...
Introduction to Telephones and Telephone Systems (3rd Ed.) by A. Michael Noll: A great system-level overview covering instruments, transmission media, switching, and signaling.
Understanding Telephone Electronics by Carr, Winder, & Bigelow: Focuses on the electronic components and workings of telephone systems.
The best things and stuff of 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46365726 - Dec 2025 (97 comments)
I binged the entirety of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. The cover, & the fact that it was on Kindle Unlimited, made me think it was probably cheap crap, but I was impressed with how well-written it was, and how much I empathized with the characters. (I probably should have read it slower; by the last two books, I was just flowing with the text, not paying as much attention to the overarching plot.)
Heinlein's "Orphans of the Sky" was pretty bad. So much early scifi is considered great because it's groundbreaking, writing about things nobody else has before. The concept of a generation ship was pretty new at the time Heinlein was writing it, and it has some very interesting concepts, but the book has some really bad problems. If you've read it, you know; if you haven't, and decide to, you'll see it for yourself.
I binged a few Brandon Sanderson books. The standalones are great; the Stormlight Archive is a huge slog through some beautiful writing, but I'm not sure I'm willing to spend so much time in beautiful books that move the plot forward so slowly.
Exordia, by Seth Dickinson, started off incredible, kept going, but the ending felt like both a fizzle as well as a cliff-hanger for the next book. I'm glad I read it, but I wish it had a clear conclusion it wanted to reach.
Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Memory" delivers more of the great philosophical questions & answers about the nature of consciousness and personhood that the previous books did, A+. No idea where he could possibly go from there, but if he does, I'm going along for the journey. (Honorable mention: Alien Clay. Dishonorable mention: Service Model.)
Eric Flint's "Fenrir" was a fun BDO near-future space adventure. (As was John Sanford's Saturn Run, but that wasn't a 2025 book I read.)
The payoff is worth it, IMO.
I did really enjoy the first book, kinda want to go read it again.
The ending was just really shitty and stupid to me.
The characters aren't flat at all, there's a lot of nuance to all of them.
I guess this is one of those the beauty is in the eye of the beholder situations.
It will be interesting to see how much of today's scifi holds up half a century from now---not because the science is wrong, but because the moral qualities will be judged outlandish.
Everyone knew from the start smoking is unhealthy, or at least not healthy and addictive. Nicotine probably happened to help with the new kind of stress and frustration the higher tech world caused and so it kind of answered to a real need.
Now when pretty much nobody smokes anymore, at least nobody who don't belong to underclass, it is weird reading. I remember a film of some kind of an underwater station by Cousteau and people where smoking there! A place where air for breathing is sparse if anywhere.
First two were so fun but I think I got hung up on some of the more clumsy stylistic parts of the Endymion books. I guess my “trust” in the author comes from the style and tropes they use, and if I they lose my trust none of the deeper parts resonate. Glad you enjoyed!
Not sure about the Endymion ones.
This year I've reread The Discontented Little Baby Book. If you're getting/have a newborn, this is the book I'd read. It's humane. No sleep training, no nonsense about babies. We went full ‘possum’ with our baby and I like how happy he became.
I've also read Ten Things I Wish You Knew About Your Child's Mental Health. To me this could be an instant classic. No fluff, lots of advice for parents. Prima.
There's plenty of literature on parenting, but so much of it is poorly written or poorly researched. Be careful out there. (And don't read PLS, yikes.)
---
I finally discovered Andy Weir, the Thursday Next series, and The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear. I'm amazed it took me so long to get there. All excellent.
For some reason I decided to read all 7 Harry Potters in French. If you're learning French, it's a great idea, the French gets progressively harder so you can keep up!
Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life has been my companion for some weeks, but it's quite long.
I'm happy with all my reading this year, some 32 books, many in a foreign language. Given I've no time to read during the day, and can only get some pages in after the kid's in bed, it's not too shabby.
Oh, and we've read Stompysaurus, like, 90 times? Grawwwwr!
Happy reading!
Discontented Little Baby is terrific. I was parenting out of fear, the typical stuff of staying indoors, sleep schedules, etc. The book has a really chill approach: just go live your life and bring the baby along. That’s how we wanted to parent, but somehow everyone around us got us into a place of fear.
Don’t make the kid nap in the dark, that hinders their cortisol/melatonin cycle development. Go have fun together!
Good luck, internet stranger :)
“Kafka on The Shore”, “Norwegian Wood” - Haruki Murakami
“A Tale of Two Cities” - Dickens
“Count of Monte Cristo” - Alexandre Dumas
LotR, “Hobbit” - Tolkien
“World Atlas of Coffee” - James Hoffmann
“Anathem”, “Diamond Age”, “Termination Shock” - Neal Stephenson
“A Timeless Way of Building” - Christopher Alexander
“Where The Wizards Stay Up Late” - Lyon
“Fahrenheit 451” - Ray Bradbury
“Slaughterhouse V” - Kurt Vonnegut
“Neuromancer”/Sprawl trilogy - William Gibson
Plus an assortment of business, systems thinking, and tech related books that were “fine”, but none that really left me with much to chew on afterwards.
Firstly, reading is actually a bit boring and unpleasurable at first. Only once you’ve gotten up to speed does it start rewarding you. A bit like working out at the gym.
The other surprise is that once you start reading, you get really quick. Like, surprisingly fast. After a while you notice the words are going by faster. So the effort compounds.
When you start you think “my god that took 5 hours of boring reading time to get though” and by book 10 you think “that was 2.5 hours and I learnt a lot and my brain is happy.”
And on top of that: - sleepless nights, when you want to get back to sleep: 30 minutes - ... - just having a good series to grind through. - audiobooks during some manual labor (home restoration works for example).
So for me audiobooks + capability to read at night without disturbing others (dark mode + backlight on e-reader). And from that it adds up.
Is social media to blame? TikTok and meta videos are extremely addictive. I have perhaps the strongest willpower of anyone I know, and the only way I can avoid losing hours to them every day is to delete these apps from all devices, and have a separate browser on my Mac for them.
I’d say 12 books a year is minimal, 52 is excellent. If you’re not in that range, you’re in trouble.
One of the best pieces of advice I got was from my English lit teacher: always carry a book with you. You never know when you’ll have down time to read.
Don Quixote is a long novel that just keeps giving, by contrast.
Still would encourage everyone to read TCOMC at least once.
Not trying to make any money, just feel compelled to do this.
A fiction story about how personal computers have dismantled society over 40 years... it takes place in 1983 and involves a vulnerable opportunistic time traveler who's getting more than he bargained for.
Here's some quotes to give you a feel:
"The smartphone is the electrical stunner in the slaughterhouse of society"
"You’ll be able to access any TV or radio station in real time, around the world, talk to people overseas in high resolution video with live translations for free and be bored by it"
"In the future the hermetic spaces of solitude will be breached as we build a global village. The private will become public and, ironically, the public will become private as the streets empty of experiences taken indoors, inside of bedrooms, beneath our screens of glowing grace."
It's intentionally meant to be ambitious, brutal and challenging. And hopefully insight will materialize from the dust of forgotten dreams.
If you are interested in reading it, just hit me up
Here's my log for 2025, most recent at the top. Currently I am slogging my way through Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast" which I'm not a fan of. Halfway done with it though!
Gabrielle Zevin, "The Hole We're In" (not my usual genre, enjoyed this though)
Robert A. Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land" (pretty good)
Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" (PHENOMENAL, highly recommended)
Robert A. Heinlein, "Methuselah's Children" (pretty good, required to understand "Time Enough for Love")
Richard K. Morgan, "Altered Carbon" (very good)
Robert A. Heinlein, "The Rolling Stones" (young adult, but good all the same)
Robert A. Heinlein, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (very good)
Piers Anthony, "On A Pale Horse" (very good, never got very far into the series though)
Lincoln Child, "Full Wolf Moon" (okay, not great)
Lincoln Child, "The Forgotten Room" (pretty good)
Lincoln Child, "The Third Gate" (very good)
Lincoln Child, "Terminal Freeze" (okay, not great)
William Gibson, "In the Beginning… Was the Command Line" (good, but outdated, look up what he's said about it more recently)
Lincoln Child, "Deep Storm" (very good)
James Patterson, "Along Came a Spider" (not my usual genre, okay though)
Jules Verne, "Around the World in 80 Days" (from childhood, revisited)
That's Neal Stephenson, not William Gibson.
It has been a while since my last Heinlein, you reminded me I should read more.
I read the whole series as a teenager, and loved it - especially the way he was able to wrap up the entire series at the end.
Besides the gulag is a blueprint to basically all the forms of how totalitarian societies treat their subjects, especially if you can see the pattern working in less cruel and plausible forms.
This is one of my favorite books. The series actually. I really like the backstory to the main character which gets revealed in the later books.
Did you see the tv series made from the series? I was, to put it mildly, disappointed.
I like it because it contains the strangest aliens (the Presger) that I have come across. They are as far from humans in costumes as you could get. What the Presger do (and their proxies in the Human world the Translators) is totally unguessable.
A fabulous hard SF read and a must if you read the Ancillary trilogy.
I feel comfortable recommending it even if you haven’t read any other Leckie.
Edit: if you haven’t read the Bloodchild anthology by Butler, give it a read. Some of the short stories will seem very familiar after Translation State, especially the alien parts.
Edit: just to add that the audiobook is really well narrated
I attribute this increase to a few things,
1. Borrowing from Libby puts a 21 day time limit to finish a book, encouraging me to read it before it's due.
2. Not discriminating from reading on my phone. Kindle app syncs between devices, and makes it easier to read a few pages here and there instead of waiting for uninterrupted sessions with my Kindle.
3. Continually updating a To Read list, mostly by going to Barnes and Noble, taking pictures of featured book tables, then adding the interesting ones to my Libby hold list.
4. Borrowing with Libby makes it easier to bail out of a book that doesn't intrigue me. Instead of forcing myself to finish something I spent $ on, I can just return it and move onto something else, feeling 0 guilt.
Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times, Alan Walker
A riveting read by a legendary musicologist and biographer. Walker spent about ten years researching this. It is 700 pages, which seems daunting but he makes this authoritative bio absolutely enjoyable. It's also a "corrective biography", it dispels a lot of myths. This book is one of the best examples of accessible writing with flair. What a writer!
Throughout the book, Walker tastefully quotes musical phrases (in notation) from Chopin's works to situate them in context. I often paused reading and put on the track on a given page (nocturnes, mazurkas, preludes, etc). It made the reading experience incredibly rich and fun. Other things I enjoyed: Chopin's letters to his friends and family, life in aristocratic salons of Paris, London, Warsaw, and more—Chopin had unparalleled access. Of course, there's also a lot of gut-wrenching stuff. As the book's blurb says, it really is for both the casual music lover and the professional pianist.
If you haven't discovered them yet, give a listen to Chopin's nocturnes. But please, give them an attentive listen and play them on a high-quality audio system. Here[1] is one of his finest nocturnes (it is less famous than the "happier" nocturne that follows it, Op. 9 No. 2).
[1] Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9 No. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThMGf07UBHQ
Funny, despite the youtube numbers to me it always seemed to me like Op.1 b-flat minor was the one that would be overplayed left and right (movies and whatnot), maybe because people thought they fit be a moody scene or piece of art better.
>give them an attentive listen and play them on a high-quality audio system
I have no music background and I would like tips on this because I'm partial to the preludes (raindrop etc) for example and they have softer key and louder key parts and I want to blast the softer side without overblasting and distortion occuring when it gets to the louder end of the piece and I wish somebody would remaster a normalized version of the recordings. I don't know if this is idiotic since I have no idea how worse it would make the pieces...
I don't watch much movies, but haven't seen Op. 9 No. 1 often in many places. I hope it remains that way! No 2 is wildly popular for its lovely long opening melody.
> preludes (raindrop etc) for example and they have softer key and louder key parts and I want to blast the softer side without overblasting and distortion
Yes, the preludes are lovely. But please -- you don't need to "blast" this music. This is not rock :-) Yes, there are a lot of "dynamics" (soft and loud and some gradations: pianissimo, forte, etc), but don't overthink it.
Just use a reasonably high-end speaker (e.g. I use an old, Bose "SoundTouch 20") and pick one of the recent recordings from Deutsche Grammophon. I'm currently listening to the nocturne interpretations by Kun-Woo Paik.
:) I guess I should have been more specific. My scenario is listening to the music on the balcony when the speakers are inside. I turn it up to hear the soft notes in the beginning to my liking, only to have go back inside to turn it down when the louder sections begin as it gets too loud. The only thing that comes to mind is doing some sort of normalization.
>I often paused reading and put on the track on a given page
I wonder if this is done in the audiobook version of these types of books by default. It would seem like a missed opportunity not to.
"He took me under the arms, lifted me up, kissed me, and placed me firmly on the jetty. I was sorry for him and for myself. I could hardly keep from crying when I saw him returning to the steamer, pushing aside the porters, looking so large, heavy, solitary. So many times since then I have met people like him, kind, lonely, cut off from the lives of other people."
2025 brought me to:
The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick
Leaders Eat Last - Simon Sinek
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School - Mark McCormack
The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change - Adam Braun
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Blood of Elves - Andrzej Sapkowski
We Were Eight Years In Power - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Mort - Terry Pratchett
I’m Glad My Mom Died - Jennette McCurdy
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - Stephen King
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
The Boy’s in the Boat - Daniel James Brown
Can’t Hurt Me - David Goggins
Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business - Gino Wickman
Source Code - Bill Gates
Mythos - Stephen Fry
Educated - Tara Westover
Leaving Microsoft to Change the World - John Wood
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism is a memoir - Sarah Wynn-Williams
Hail Mary - Andy Weir
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Phipip K. Dick
The Blade Itself - Joe Abercrombie
"Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic" by Monosson, Emily "Options" by Henry, O.
"Population Fluctuations in Rodents" by Krebs, Charles J.
"In Search of the Old Ones: An Odyssey among Ancient Trees" by Fredericks, Anthony D.
"The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024, edited" by McKibben, Bill
"The English Abbey: Its Life and Work in the Middle Ages" by Crossley, Fred H.
"The Stereoscope in Ophthalmology" by Wells, David Washburn
"Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps – Why Nature's Maligned Predators and Pollinators are Essential to Planetary Health" by Sumner, Seirian
"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jacobs, Jane <--- best book I read this year
"The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World" by Kimmerer, Robin Wall
"Making Useful Things Of Wood" by Gottshall, Franklin H.
"States of Disorder, Ecosystems of Governance: Complexity Theory Applied to UN Statebuilding in the DRC and South Sudan" by Day, Adam
"Migration Mysteries: Adventures, Disasters, and Epiphanies in a Life with Birds" by Rappole, John H.
Also highlights were:
- Brandon Sanderson "Wind and Truth" & "Yumi and the Nightmare Painter"
- Indrek Hargla most of "Apothecary Melchior" series (didn't read all yet :)
- Jim Butcher "Brief Cases"
- James Islington "The Strength of the Few"
Rest of the stuff:
- I. Hargla "Süvahavva" series
- John Gwynne "Ruin" & "Wrath"
- nobody103 "Mother of Learning" I, II, III
- Daniel T. Jackson "Gatebound"
- Brandon Sanderson "Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England"
Re-reads (mostly on audio for dozing off, but then got hooked .. again):
- James S.A. Corey "Caliban's War" & "Cibola Burn"
- George RR Martin "Game of Thrones"
- Robin Hobb "Assassin's Apprentice"
Jim Butcher "Brief Cases": I'm a huge fan of the Dresden series. I find it to be very enlightening as we watch an author grow with his primary character. The early books were particularly weak, but they grow and get better and better. However, I'm unfairly biased against short stories, so I avoid all the X.5 releases. Are these worth exploring as I'm waiting for the followup to Battleground?
Mother of Learning: I generally don't like litrpg or progression fantasy, but I'm a sucker for time loops. I enjoyed this series and craved more like it. Anything else you'd recommend in this genre?
I read the Fitz books... fuck... decades ago at this point. Is it worth revisiting in audiobook? I've been burned so many times by nostalgia that I'm reluctant to revisit old favorites.
There sure are positive outcomes in Elderling series. In the long run. The characters and their life. It's not easy laid back reading, but in the end it is one of the best series. (Minus the four books of "Dragon ...", these are slop, not sure why Hobb wrote those).
"Mother of Learning" I picked up from my (ex-)colleague. Not in the time-travelling, but he told me that I would probably like Dungeon Crawler Carl. Haven't gotten to it yet. He's read more fantasy than me so he just suggested after we discussed about our preferences. This one I just wanted to read because he really was into :)
About Fitz -- read my other comment. I think whole Elderling series is worth it. It is the long game. Just being invested in characters and Robin Hobb can write characters. If you only think about Farseer trilogy, then I still think it's worth it, but maybe I'm just sucker for it. :-) (there are pacing issues for sure, but Hobb wrote it in 90s, in that sense it was ahead of time, forgive some of those small issues). Read it first I guess 20+ years ago or so..
But "The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal", often recommended om HN, was amazing. It has so much of the history of how personal computers came to be, and so much that was new to me.
# The Universe and Dr. Einstein (by Lincoln Barnett) - recommended for anyone who is interested about Einstein's thought process that gave birth to two great theories.
# What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (by Haruki Murakami) - it's my first book from H. M. and I really liked it. It's kind of a memoir and made me like Murakami and now I plan to read his novels too.
# How to Build a Car (by Adrian Newey) - that famous F1 car designer... Great read. Gives readers a chance to glimpse into both (technical) thought process behind designing a race car and human side of it.
# Basic Mathematics (by Serge Lang) - not *reading* exactly, working through it (to brush the rust off of my math fundamentals).
He’s a great writer of prose, but I feel it’s wasted on magical realism. He could have been one of the true greats.
I think that its all just one ginormous side note, and that Yossarian is a shit, means I can't enjoy it.
I also suspect that I am not american enough to pick up on the satire references.
I suspect I feel what americans feel when they read jeeves and wooster.
correct!
>English is not my native tongue.
Aha, interesting
I think the thing that trips me up is that it feels like a collection of unrelated short stories mashed together. Worse (for me) is that those stories contradict each other.
Top Recommendations
Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams: This was the most mentioned book on the page, with five different users discussing its "cautionary tale" regarding power and idealism.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir: A favorite for both readers and audiobook listeners, praised for its engaging story and high-quality narration.
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman: Multiple users recommended this LitRPG series, particularly noting that the audiobook experience is exceptional.
Mother of Learning by nobody103: This time-loop progression fantasy appeared in several lists and was described as a "must-read" for fans of the genre.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: A classic that continues to resonate, with several users discussing its humor and depiction of the human condition.
Other Notable Duplicates
Apple in China: Cited three times for its insights into the relationship between the tech giant and Chinese manufacturing.
Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb: Featured in both re-read lists and debates about its emotional intensity.
Permutation City by Greg Egan: Highly recommended by sci-fi fans for its "stimulating" concepts regarding digital consciousness.
The Devils by Joe Abercrombie: Mentioned by three users as a top new release for the year.
While We're Young - KL Walther's gender-flipped Ferris Bueller-like, picked up on a whim during a minor existential crisis (it's completely different from my usual fare). What it says on the tin. The sex scene at the end is only slightly less uncomfortable than the one at the end of Contact Harvest. However, combined with a read-through of Edward Bloor's Tangerine, there's a fascinating comparative lit angle to approach them from. They feature starkly different illustrations of the American suburb, perhaps a useful analogue of the real-life and fraught disconnect between the stable and comfortable and uprooted and desperate Americas. Both stories feature intertwined families; one story is focused on matters of love and the other is focused on matters of violence. Perhaps I was just touched by my personal experience with both dynamics.
Death of the Demon (a Hanne Wilhelmsen novel by Anne Holt) - Really enjoyed this Scandinavian Ghost in the Shell fanfic.
Begin the Begin: R.E.M.'s Early Years, Robert Dean Lurie. A band I read everything about. 1984 and the music that entered my life that year truly changed me. But I don't expect anyone that is not a fan of the early band would find it interesting.
Siddhartha, Herman Hesse. It has been recommended to me many times over the years—finally read it. As I mentioned in another comment, it's a good book that younger me might have found more profound. Older me was more or less just nodding my head, "Yep, you'll have to learn for yourself…", etc.
I've been working an analog computer so have read a bunch of old textbooks and such that I have found on archive.org and other places online.
I see quite a few books I purchased this year but have not read. (The Japanese have a word for me.) I should really try to read more next year.
The only technical book I read was Programming in Lua (4th edition), and still didn't work for me. I guess I don't like Lua, and that's OK.
I stared from Revelation Space - full series. Then did done other ones. Didn't get to the Century Rain.
Thank you!
In your reading journey, which other authors/books have similar grand space scale as how Alastair writes? I mean, there are a lot, I know, but some overdo it and others oversimplify it. I find Alastair striking perfect balance of being "hardcore" in a way, but still making sense:)
I also read The Red Book, Reader's Edition, by Carl Jung. I'm still processing that one. The artwork in the book is breathtaking and I strongly suggest looking it up even if you only look at the art. Narratively, it feels a bit like rambling at times. I'd previously read Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, and Aion, and felt like those had a bit more intelligible substance. The first few chapters of Aion are excellent, but then Jung just goes on for like a dozen chapters about fish symbolism which completely lost me.
I also read a few other books on occult and esoteric topics, but my thoughts on those books are more complex than what I'm willing to type out on mobile. Key takeaway from a book on Wiccan Witchcraft was that they also believe in a system of reincarnation. I'm interested in reading through some of the core texts of Chinese Mythology at some point, but there aren't any good audiobook recordings for some of them.
I'm sad to say that I made very little progress in getting through proper college level textbooks, but I'm working through Molecular Biology of the Cell.
- Obviously Awesome by April Dunford (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45166937-obviously-aweso...)
- Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210137279-building-a-sto...)
Wrote reviews on both Obviously Awesome[0] and StoryBrand[1] for anyone interested.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5369411790 [1] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5686301930
Nash Falls - David Baldacci
Exit Strategy - Lee Child & Andrew Child
Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry - Marvin Minsky & Seymour Papert
We are Legion (We are Bob) - Dennis Taylor
Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition: Volume 1: Foundations - David Rumelhart & Jay McClelland
Semantic Information Processing - Marvin Minsky
Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change - Andy Clark
Associative Networks: The Representation and Use of Knowledge of Computers - Nicholas Findler
The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science - Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, Boicho N. Kokinov (eds)
Similarity and Analogical Reasoning - Stella Vosniadou (ed)
Never Flinch - Stephen King
The Bad Weather Friend - Dean Koontz
Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind - Gary Marcus
After Death - Dean Koontz
The 15th book that I hope to finish will be:
Principles of Semantic Networks - John F. Sowa (ed)
- How to Tame a Fox - great popsci history of a genetics experiment
- "The Sixth Extinction" and "Not the end of the world" - compelling but contrasting takes on climate change
- Through Two Doors at Once - posci history of the double slit experiment
- Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist - Luis Alvarez should get just as much attention as Feynman does IMO!
- A Matter of Death and Life - the last book I read this year that was touching and made me remember what’s really important in life
Those physicists worked hard: he writes in the book that 60 hours of work per week — and there were no phones back in the day to blur the lines between work and non-work — were routine in Berkeley. Those were dedicated people.
Thanks LLM's.
- The Great Gatsby. Really enjoyed it and seemed fitting with the current times.
- Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann. Generational wealth come and gone. Good for putting things into perspective.
- Things Fall Apart, Achebe.
- The Pearl, John Steinbeck
- Hyperion (first book), Dan Simmons. Great sci-fi. Bought the second book and look forward to reading it.
- Stoner, John Williams. Incredibly well written book
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez. Still finishing but I hope to finish in time for next year
. Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones. Found the first book in a local phonebox library. Especially liked the probability computer in Conrad’s Fate.
. Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. Recommended by a barber after I mentioned the cartoon "Scavengers Reign". Annihilation is well worth reading.
. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Novel about memory, forgetting.
. Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. Short novel imagining Einstein's dreams whilst he worked on his relativity theory.
Whats nice about the first book is that its a love letter to london. Its not too serious, which a lot of fantasy can be. Its fun.
Its a light fantasy, in that most of the world is "normal" london, and the "silly bollocks" is threaded through reality, rather than the other way around.
At first Kobna kinda grated, but he now is to me, DCI grant, and a whole bunch of other characters.
It was interesting to read about the various decisions made along the way to the first iPhone launch and remember the real-time launch back then. Even though the first phone had limitations, they were able to do enough things "right" that you could feel the paradigm shift within a few minutes of using it. Coming from a mobile software company at the time (and having access to all the top phones of the time, various Blackerry devices, Moto Razr, etc) it was easy to see that Apple had really made something extraordinary with its software.
For nonfiction, I found Amanda Ripley's High Conflict to be excellent and insightful. I also finally got around to reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins; I expected it to be fine, but it far exceeded my expectations! On top of that, the edition I read also had "end notes" interspersed throughout the book with retrospectives from decades later, which only added to the book's richness.
What was the tattoo if you don't mind sharing?
I got an American traditional rendition of the symbol of the Almighty with a sword through it and the Knights Radiant motto encircled
“life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination”
It’s on my forearm
And I totally relate on the obsession, I've been a big Sanderson fan for 15 years at this point and read almost everything he's ever written :)
"The Way of Kings" by Brandon Sanderson. Beautiful world-building as always.
And some others that I can't remember but those two were the highlights of the year.
Foundation and Second Foundation: for much the same reason.
Both very enjoyable reads, but quite different from the modern interpretations.
"How Life Works: a users guide to the new biology" by Phillip Ball. Really extended my understanding of where biology is now.
The Mule is still great, though.
Some new listens that I liked:
* Blood Over Brighthaven
* Fleabag: A Monster Evolution LitRPG
* Flybot
* The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
* Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
The audiobook for the most recent one released and immediately became the best selling audiobook in the world. The talent of Jeff Hayes and Soundbooth Theater have ruined other audiobooks for me.
My introduction to Andy Weir was The Egg https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html -- which I consider to be a classic.
Also read Apple In China. Was pretty interesting to realize how much Apple (and China) are what they are because of how much they poured into each other
Notable and beautiful
- "The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead
- "Blind Sight" by Meg Howrey
- "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. LeGuin
Non-fiction
- "Workflow"
- "Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D"
- "Debugging: The 9 Indispensible Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems"
The rest (all first-time reads)
- "Absolution" by Jeff Vandermeer (I enjoyed it but it was kind of unnecessary)
- "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte (I don't get the fascination with it)
- "Strange Pictures" by Uketsu (odd)
- "Starship Troopers" by Heinlein
- "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke
- "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick
- "Mickey 7" by Edward Ashton
- "Fugitive Telemetry" and "System Collapse" by Martha Wells
- "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson (I was surprisingly into it)
- "Glass Houses" by Madeline Ashby
- "Cover Her Face" by P.D.James
- "The Crystal Shard" by R.A.Salvatore (I needed to see what Drizzt is all about)
- "James" by Percival Everett (maybe my biggest disappointment of the year)
- "Alien Clay" by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- "Some Desperate Glory" by Emily Tesh
- "Sea of Rust" by C. Robert Cargill
Tech book recommendations: 'Secure by Design', 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications', 'Building Secure and Reliable Systems' and 'Fundamentals of Software Architecture'.
For scifi: 'Murderbot Diaries' and 'The Expanse' - both are just great entertainment
Always looking forward to read the next chapter.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_(novel)
- https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/When-We-Were-Real/Dar...
On the nonfiction side, I can recommend "Careless People" and "Apple in China".
I also liked I Am Not Your Enemy by Reality Winner.
Did a very good job of answering the question: why do (did) bright, ethical, motivated people want to work for a company like this?
To quote Wolsey via Shakespeare:
A peace above all earthly dignities,
A still and quiet conscienceGameDev:
- The Masters of Doom
- The Doom Guy
- Play Nice
- Press Reset
- Blood, Sweat, and Pixels
- Console Wars
- Ask Iwata
- Embed with Games
HP Fanfic:
- All The Young Dudes (by MsKingBean89) [student life of the Marauders]
- Grey Space (by noaacat) [Pre Hogwarts. Focuses on parental abuse. One scene I'll never forget (paraphrasing) is when another student at school notices Harry's bruises, slides up her sleeve, and implies she slipped too]
- Just started the Glasslight series (noaacat).
I also reread the entire Harry Potter series, and revisited a handful of Redwall books. I find it interesting how I loved RW as a kid/teen, was bored out of my mind with it in my 20s, and now I love it again.
It’s not a book where the world changes greatly or great things are done, but honestly that’s kind of nice: It’s a compelling story of a life, the characters were engrossing (one in particular stands out for how strongly _dislikeable_ they are) and the I loved the prose.
Also shoutout to Standard EBook’s excellent, public domain edition (and all their volunteers other work!): https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/w-somerset-maugham/of-huma...
• How AI Works: From Sorcery to Science — Ronald T. Kneusel
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values — Robert M. Pirsig
• Martín & Meditations on the South Valley — Jimmy Santiago Baca
• Akira, Vol. 6 — Katsuhiro Otomo
• Akira, Vol. 5 — Katsuhiro Otomo
• Akira, Vol. 4 — Katsuhiro Otomo
• Akira, Vol. 3 — Katsuhiro Otomo
• Slaughterhouse-Five — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
• Akira, Vol. 2 — Katsuhiro Otomo
• Poems & Prayers — Matthew McConaughey
• Akira, Vol. 1 — Katsuhiro Otomo
• Time’s Arrow — Martin Amis
• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter — Stephen Graham Jones
• Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly — Anthony Bourdain
• Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism — Sarah Wynn-Williams
• Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever — Joseph Cox
• Source Code: My Beginnings — Bill Gates
• The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America — Mark Whitaker
• Good Inside: A Practical Guide to Resilient Parenting Prioritizing Connection Over Correction — Becky Kennedy // I would not recommend this book to anyone.
• Interior Chinatown — Charles Yu
• Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection — John Green
• Dark Matter — Blake Crouch
• Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things — Adam Grant
• Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D — Fabien Sanglard
• Jurassic Park — Michael Crichton
• Killing Commendatore — Haruki Murakami
• James — Percival Everett
• Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre — Max Brooks
• Last Argument of Kings — Joe Abercrombie
The core concept is so well established in the book.
There are also several novels which kind of similar to Diaspora: Schild's Ladder, Incandescence, and stories in the Incandescence universe: Ride a crocodile, Hot rock, Glory.
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It by Janina Ramirez
Acting class - I found this book surprisingly compelling. It made me reflect on my own search for connection and identity, and how easily it is to be misled and manipulated when you've got no one close.
Earthlings - The book's plot gets really horrific (don't let the cover fool you). However, it did make me think about social norms and taboos a little differently.
1984 - It was my first time reading the book, and man, looking around and seeing bits and pieces of the surveillance mentioned in the book in real life is kind of terrifying...
Grapes of Wrath - It's definitely the most heart-wrenching book I've ever read. Watching the Joad family get absolutely devastated by the monster that is unchecked capitalism is so sad :(
Skunk works - Really good book on the development of Lockheed's stealth planes. However, I did wish I got more technical details.
I would love to see some more book recommendations :)
The Fall Between and Burning Mountain by Darcy Tindale recount the investigations of main character Rebecca Giles.
The Survivors by Jane Harper. Seriously, get any book or a shopping list written by Jane and you'll not be able to put it down.
Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth. Another author who's complete catalogue is well worth your time.
Black River and Broke Road by Matthew Spencer.
Unbury the Dead by Fiona Hardy.
Other authors worth noting are Margaret Hickey, Chris Hammer and Christian White.
On the sci-fi side of things, I found Infinite Archive by Mur Lafferty quite cozy. Also the Lady Astronauth Universe series by Mary Robinette Kowal, that starts with The Calculating Starts. Flybot by Dennis Taylor (of Bobbi-verse fame).
I was less enamoured with A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine than others are, and don't feel the need to tackle the second in the series.
I also revisited the John Cleaver horror series by Dan Wells that starts with the excellent I Am Not a Serial Killer.
I've just started Slow Gods by Claire North. I find her books a bit hit and miss for me but so far, so good. I absolutely love The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, and Touch was also quite good, but some of her others I could not finish or didn't event start as they were just not for me.
It’s a story of several generations of poor Korean women who eventually immigrate to Japan. The front half of the book is wonderfully paced to spend time with the characters. The back half can feel a bit rushed, but it becomes more of a page turner.
The Cold Millions by Jess Walter is another period novel about union organizing in the Pacific Northwest around the turn of the century, and follows two brothers. The depth of research makes this book wonderfully vibrant.
My favorite book this year was "Differential Privacy" (2025) by Simson Garfinkel. Differential privacy is a mathematical theory of data privacy sandwiched between cryptography, databases, and ML. This is the first book-length non-technical introduction, and it's well executed.
Here's my full book list for the year: https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-books-2025/.
It’s topping The Idiot for me- and a fitting way to end the year. I have spent most of 2025 stuck in a 19th Century reading cycle which started when reading Murakamis “After the quake” short story collection, specifically Super-Frog saves Tokyo where he mentions Anna K.
Anna Karenina-> Crime and Punishment-> The Idiot and some various Kafka in the mix too.
Hoping to visit some modern stuff again next year
Really well written and well structured novel, and although he uses long sentences and no paragraph breaks, the writing is surprisingly accessible and incredibly immersive.
It was my first fiction book in a long time and it made me love fiction again.
The Red Rising series by Pierce Brown -- lots of sci-fi fun, extremely epic
The Dark Tower series by Stephen King -- King's "Lord of the Rings" opus, great writing, ending maybe a little unsatisfying but not abnormal
Artemis - Andy Weir's first book -- Fun read about a heist on the moon. Anticipating Project Hail Mary movie early next year!
Currently in the middle of: The Talisman - Stephen King / Peter Straub
Enjoy, Red Rising was pretty darn good.
- The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
- Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
- The Devils by Joe Abercrombie
- A Frog In The Fall (And Later On) by Linnea Sterte (A graphic novel)
Overall I'm at 65 books on the year—I maintain a reading list[1] on my personal site that has the rest.
Tolkein. The Silmarillion. I’ve bounced off this book a dozen times over decades, despite deeply enjoying The Hobbit and LoTR. This time I discovered that the best way to read it is backwards, tracing connections to characters you already know.
Stephenson. Anathem. I think I’ll skip the end next time. The first time I read it, I was confused; this time I understood exactly what was happening but I thought it was a bit pointless. Still worth it for the first 3/4 of the novel.
Lots of short stories. I was expecting to like Mark Twain better, but ours is a much more earnest era, and no match for his Gilded Age cynicism. What passes for cynicism today is Twain in his sunniest mood. At any rate, I appreciate Twain, but I enjoy EM Forster, Henry James, JG Ballard, William Gibson, and lots of others I’m forgetting at the moment.
DoD is an interesting design philosophy used in game engine design. This book was both quite concrete and quite abstract, so I walked away not exactly sure if I got the message, but the idea of modelling data closer to a SQL database for performance is interesting.
[Never Split the Difference – Chris Voss]
Nightly audiobook. There's a lot more information than it seems on first reading, I'm trying to internalize and practice it in daily life.
[Lost Connections – Johann Hari]
A book about depression, connection, and medication. It was quite good, though I learned later that the author has quite a bit of controversy.
[The Twentysomething Treatment – Meg Jay]
The book was good, her interviews on people's podcasts are even better.
[You Can't Win – Jack Black]
Awesome HN recommendation, an autobiography of an early 1900s criminal.
[The Starship and the Canoe – Kenneth Brower]
Another HN recommendation. A snapshot of the life of Freeman Dyson of project ORION and his son George, who built a giant fiberglass canoe and paddles the west coast of Canada and the States.
Project Hail Marry by Andy Weir
Dungeon Crawler Carl (Books 1-7) by Matt Dinniman
I'm currently reading:
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams
The only Andy Weir book I've read. Loved it.
* C++ Crash Course by Josh Lospinoso
* Deng Xiaoping And The Transformation Of China by Ezra Vogel
* Magic: A Very Short Introduction by Owen Davies
* Trigonometry by Hugh Neill
I rated each one 9/10
Siddharta by Hermann Hesse. Helped me understand that a perfect life is a collection of ups and downs and that one must accept it all.
Amerika by Franz Kafka. Could relate to the protagonist because people take advantage of his naivety.
Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Made me see the world in a less pessimistic way.
2025 Online: Noahpinion, Zeihan on Geopolitics, Ezra's column NYTimes, Where's Your Ed At
2025 Books: Abundance, Human Nature - Thomas Bell, (Plus a handful of books on maintaining faith despite not being politically conservative)
Looking forward to in 2026: Everything is Tuberculosis - John Green
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
- Playground by Richard Powers
- Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppman
I'm curious how much AI-generated stuff I read this year... likely at least a book's worth, but it would be more like one of those books with 365+ random deep dives into stuff that's not really relevant to my life.
Thomas Mann’s Glass Bead game. Needed some patience to get through.
Benjamin Labatut/ When we cease to understand the world. (Fictionalized accounts of some scientists)
Bird/Sherwin: American Prometheus
Started but abandoned midway:
Stanlislaw Lem’s : His Master’s Voice Thomas Mann’s: Magic Mountain.
About reading habit: I find it useful to make it a point to read in bed at least 30 mins before sleeping.
If you want to try more Herman Hesse I preferred Demian & Siddharta far over Glass Bead game (read in German though, can't speak for translations).
Water by Rumi (translated by Haleh Liza Gafori) - also unexpectedly good. She uses a modern style and it reads so beautifully. It gave me glimpse of the beauty of the Persian language.
I re-read Dave Duncan’s A Man of His Word[0], and A Handful of Men series[1].
I followed up by re-reading The Great Game[2], by the same author.
I re-read the original 10 (+1) books of Chronicles of the Black Company[3], by Glen Cook, again, as he just released a couple of new books, after many years (and has 4 more, on the way). I also recently read Lies Weeping[4] (the latest one).
I just finished Tsalmoth[5], and I’m currently reading Lyorn[6], the latest book in Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/series/53081-a-man-of-his-word
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/40824-a-handful-of-men
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/series/42347-the-great-game
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Company
[4] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222376544-lies-weeping
Even if you think they're shallow you will realize the deeper stuff in that made you be interested in them you later. Your subconscious knows better.
The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder
- More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
- Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
- Hogg by Samuel R. Delany
- The first dozen Discworld books (in publication order) by Terry Pratchet
- The Wall by Mary Roberts Reinhart
- Columbine by Dave Cullen
- Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome
- Stray Bullets: Killers by David Lapham
- Stray Bullets: Sunshine and Roses by David Lapham
I might be missing a few.
Dungeon Crawler Carl - I laughed, I cried, perfect match for my sense of humor.
The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter - Great read, changed some of my training because of it.
Fall of Giants by Ken Follett (#1 of The Century Trilogy series) - An amazing overview of the 20th century through the eyes of several families accross the globe (fiction).
-Some Desperate Glory (Emily Tesh)
-A Memory called Empire (Arkady Martin) both of these are a fairly interesting take on scifi worldbuilding. Could be called "highbrow", but IMO pretty easy reads still.
-Piranesi (S. Clark) - well written fantasy and plenty of other stuff that I've seen in other comments (Dungeon Crawler Carl does stand out a bit, but it's really a guilty pleasure / escape kind of a read).
Non-Fiction
-Brakneck (Dan Wang) - slightly outdated (by ~2y, which seems really breakneck), but still interesting take on modern China
-Capitalism (Sven Beckert) - still halfway through this one, but it's shaping up to be my #1 for 2025 non fiction
-The Origins of Efficiency - from B. Potter, the author of Construction Physics blog. The blog is fairly information dense, but this basically reads like a textbook. Still a pretty good reference IMO for people working in manufacturing.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go - 2nd time I read it. Cool book. It's about a world with a big river where humans are reborn after they die on earth.
Use of Weapons - 2nd time I read it. One of the more popular Iain Banks Culture novels.
Dungeon Crawler Carl #1 - Loved it.
Matter - 2nd time I read it. This is another Banks Culture novel. This book is actually very good. Most of it takes places on a megastructure planet with different levels.
Assassin's Apprentice - I don't get the hype.
Memories of Ice - 3rd Malazan book. I thought the first quarter was lit.
Cursed Cocktails - Cozy fantasy, good book.
I log all my read books here [0].
In the first half of the year War and Peace, which obviously was excellent, although I liked Middlemarch more.
In the second half of the year David Copperfield which was very excellent. Just beautifully written. I still think I probably like Middlemarch more... but it might now require a re-read to know for sure.
This year is going to be Tom's Crossing to start as I just got that for Christmas.
Bhagvad Gita by Eknath Easwaran
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
How The World Really Works by Vaclav Smil
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
Chaos by James Gleick
Wind and Truth (Stormlight Archive #5) by Brandon Sanderson
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle
The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
I read this quite a while ago, and can't remember it at all. What did you think of it?
> The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
Loved this when I was a kid.
Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems is an incredible second book on the subject but it wouldn't be fair to compare it to the Gleick book.
I enjoyed How The World Really Works also.
Of course, I'd also be remiss not to mention that I published a book called Rebooting a Nation about how the nation of Estonia modernized post re-independence and became a hub for startups and e-government in a single generation. Foreign Affairs was kind enough to just do a review: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/rebooting-nation-incr...
And it's hard to convey how much I enjoyed it. I'm afraid to pick up any other novel of a similar kind as I'll be furiously comparing.
So after it I sterted reading hardcore Sci-fi: Vacuum Diagrams, to not let my mind draw any comparative thoughts:)
J.R.R. Tolkien's _The Bovadium Fragments: Together with The Origins of Bovadium_ --- probably the last "new" Tolkien book --- quite the hoot, and an interesting commentary on industrialism and the Oxford Don's opinions on same
Donald E. Knuth's _TAoCP: Vol. 4, Fascicle 7, Constraint Satisfaction_ --- working through exercises now in the hope of finding a typo for the sake of getting an account at The Bank of the Island of San Seriffe to go w/ my physical reward check.
Variety of other things, but those were the notable/interesting ones.
- The Murderbot Diaries (all of them)
- Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero (Sprawl Trilogy) – perfection
- Discworld series (almost all of them)
- Bobiverse serise (all of them)
- Old Man's War series
- Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir – Werner Herzog's autobiography
- The Songlines - Bruce Chatwin
- Kissinger: A Biography (approval of Kissinger not required)
- various collected works of Borges
- various works of Carl Jung
- Starship Troopers
- A Man Called Ove – made me cry
- A Stitch in Time – a star trek actor novelizing his headcannon of the character he played
- Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town
- Mickey7
- Solaris
- Flowers for Algernon
- Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death
- I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
Things I disliked:
- The Wheel of Time (I forget how many I got through)
- Eruption – a posthumous Michael Crichton book was really terrible
- The Book of the New Sun
- The Creative Act: A Way of Being – an artist trying and failing to talk about science
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_(novel)
I liked but didn't love the Stephenson I've read. Unlike William Gibson novels I've read, Stephenson is a solid 7 or 8 out of ten for me (maybe I should have added another category in my list). Your suggestions will probably make it on to my list.
Anathem is definitely a slow start. If anything once it gets going it moves too fast. I'd argue it doesn't spent enough time exploring the world the reader suddenly finds themselves in.
If you haven't, check out Bruce Sterling. His "Heavy Weather"[0] might well be up your alley, too.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Weather_(Sterling_novel)
This is the telecoms book I never knew I wanted. As the title suggests, it explains how the telecom world has evolved in great detail, with a particular focus on mobile technologies, although there's a chapter on SS7 and one on WiFi and Bluetooth. It stops short of packet layout descriptions, but it goes extremely deeply into the technologies it describes while still being understandable to somebody with little to no telecoms experience. This is the book that made me truly understand how that stuff really works.
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler the whole Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman
The Stormlight Archive from Brandon Sanderson got me exactly back. I love it. I must recommend it for anyone who want to experience one of the best high fantasy books.
Also I need to recommend a source where I found it. I somehow stumbled upon https://www.book-filter.com/
Lovely app which scrapped all good reads reviews and let you simply filter through that because for some reason, these pages are garbage.
Have fun and happy new year!
It requires even more suspension of disbelief than a usual sci fi / fantasy combo, but was worth it for the characters and laughs and “where will he take this next?!”.
Personal Growth: “15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership”. The encouragement to “feel all your feelings” is insanely difficult for me, but has sent me on a multi-month life arc to be more present to my body sensations.
Related: If you log your books in Goodreads, I built this web app to recommend future books based on reading history and reviews. Was fun for me and may resonate
- Phylloxera: How Wine was Saved for the world by Christy Campbell is a surprisingly fun read on how the entire wine industry was almost destroyed in the late 19th century.
- Red/Green/Blue Mars by K. S. Robinson hard sci-fi about mars colonization and terraforming. First rereading in 20 years or so. Holds up extremely well.
- Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. A thought provoking take on how broad stroke human history developed since the Bronze Age.His refreshingly honest take is very relatable, humorous and encouraging.
I can highly recommend it if you’re interested in prayer life (and how to use powerful formulations in letters)
I did re-read "The Long Run" from Daniel Keys Moran (one of the very short list of books I've re-read, and this was #4 or #5).
"Were you taught to hate Peaceforcers?" "Taught? No."
The only new book that I read was "Heat 2" by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner.
It was "ok". It honestly felt like a mashup of "Heat", "Miami Vice", and "Blackhat". So, not as fresh as I would have liked. (Mind, I really like all of those movies.)
I'll see the movie when it comes out, but the book was just "ok".
Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli
The Brain: The Story of You by David Eagleman
I had a crack at reading the first Game of Thrones novel (I think it's just called A Game of Thrones) but my brain seems to be in non-fiction mode at the moment. I think I'm drawn to a kind of sweet spot halfway between "related to my everyday experience" and "removed from my everyday experience" - not sure I could read about programming or business at the moment, though I also haven't tried.
Haven’t seen the movie adaptation yet but the books are such delightful dark humor SF, loved them
The Crocodile Hunter by Gerald Seymour
An elderly MI5 also-ran contemptuously tagged "the eternal flame" by his bumptious young colleagues shows doggedness, courage and unexpected depth as he pursues a dangerous ISIS returnee planning an attack on British soil. Unusual and riveting.
- Crime and Punishment - Homo Deus - Catch 22 - Flash Boys - The Art of Strategy - Moby Dick (could only get halfway through though :() - The Great Gatsby - How to be Alone (couldn't get past 2 chapters)
I tried reading Catch-22, but 50 pages in it just seemed like a bunch of military guys trolling each other by being as autistically literal as possible with absurdist Airplane-style humor. I noped out at the prospect of reading 500 more pages of it. I don’t get why people here recommend it so much.
I recently started reading Moby Dick.
Or don't. There's no end of great novels out there.
- The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?
- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition
- The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
- Rework
Added them on my blog as well with a small review on each in case anyone is interested: https://www.alexanderlolis.com/my-2025-reads
Also about halfway into Mastering the Lightning Network.
- Playground by Richard Powers: the ocean reminds us that we, along with our obsessions and rivalries, are small - Orbital by Samantha Harvey: a book were not much happens, but a lot goes on below the surface - Hum by Helen Phillips: looks at an AI controlled near future through a different lens - Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow: sex, lies, and video games
This year was slow for me reading-wise. Not a whole lot:
- The Blind Owl / Sadegh Hedayat - Prince of Annwn (Mabinogion Tetralogy #1) - Norse Mythology / Gaiman: read it before accusations came out - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men / David F Wallace - A Connecticut Yankee ... / Mark Twain (not yet finished)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Housekeeper_and_the_Profes...
is a beautiful novel about a mathematician with a short term memory condition, that should appeal to HN readers.
I read a lot of books for work, talk to people who read a lot of books, and that is my #1 recommendation. Also this year I enjoyed Demon Copperhead, Mobility, Land of Milk and Honey, Afterworld, The Terror. Many of those books aren't new, but I enjoyed them in 2025.
"Solenoid" - Mircea Carterescu"
"The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie" - Agota Kristof
"Septology" - Jon Fosse
I read Theodoros this year (in Romanian) and I was really impressed. Best novel I've read in years. I'm currently reading Orbitor III. I bought Solenoid, but don't yet feel ready for it.
- Futu.re by Dmitry Glukhovsky (author of Metro 2033 series). Interesting take of how life would look like if humans became immortal.
- Blackout by Marc Elsberg. A semi-realistic depiction of a 2-week long blackout in Europe caused by a terrorist attack.
- Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larson. Murder mystery in Sweden. Really enjoyed the setting.
He is a medical doctor, researcher .. plus writes great science / medical books. This one won a Pulitzer prize. Check out his other books "The song of the Cell" and "The Gene". The books take some work to read but every page is a treat.
Strangers in Paradise: How Families Adapt to Wealth Across Generations
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI
The Year in Tech 2024
This Is Strategy
Optimal Illusions
Matrix Energetics
Models
The Value of Others
The Essence of Bhagavad Gita
From Barista to Billionaire
Go On Alone
78 Days Practical Transurfing
The New Game of Life and How to Play It
Getting Real
There Is No Such Thing as Business Ethics
How to Be Happy All The Time
Shape Up
Catching the Big Fish
Babaji The Lightning Standing Still
The Courage to be Happy
Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail
The Art of Spending Money
Laws of Life
The Oracle
Kriya Yoga: Spiritual Awakening for the New Age
Inner Excellence: Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life
The most memorable read of this year was "The Count of Monte Cristo" (1846) by Alexander Dumas .
It's one of the greatest stories ever told. It's ~1250 pages but I sped through it in 3 weeks even if I'm a slow reader.
Highly recommended!
I also read The Stranger by Camus and the two top Orwells which lived up to the hype.
That explains a lot the format, which tended to try to retain the audience.
Also, the author wrote in advance of the daily publication, but the book was written "live", answering to public perception and response. This is a reason why the book is so "good": the author had the chance to adjust the story based on data from sales and feedback from readers.
Of course Dumas was a great writer too, but this live writing, data based is probably why the book resonates so well with audiences.
So, as a joke, if you read count of monte cristo in 3 weeks, you did the equivalent of bing reading it.
This happens with soap operas too. 10 years ago, they lasted 1 year. They had an initial structure, the story, the characters, but responded in "real-time" to audience feedback.
For those willing to read the book, give yourself some time. Try to read it over a course of some years. Read a little, come back to it.
There are several famous books written in the same form, like Crime and Punishment or The Three Musketeers.
Oh, and also authors got payed by installment, so that explains the lenght lol
A Little Life - challenging to read but exceptional
Sci-fi
Three Body Problem trilogy - forget the Netflix series the books are excellent, in my opinion #2 was the peak.
The Glass Hotel, Station Eleven, Sea of Tranquility - anything by Emily St. John Mandel - hard to place but her distinct writing style transports me.
Non-fiction:
American Moonshot - fine The Path to Power - anything Caro writes is worth reading
- Anatomy of the State (Murray N. Rothbard)
- Diaspora (Greg Egan)
- The Freeze-Frame Revolution (Peter Watts)
* Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey
* The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton
* Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
* Dawn by Octavia Butler
I then diverged from this list (I have more) to re-read (though it's not such a great divergence):
* If This Is a Man / The Truce by Primo Levi
Other books I enjoyed reading this year in no particular order:
* Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
* Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds
* Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds
* Aurora Rising by Alastair Reynolds
* Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron (loved this)
* The Lord of the Rings (the god knows how many times re-read)
* The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison
* Future's Edge by Gareth Powell
* Blueshift by Joshua Dalzelle
* The Heart of a Continent by Francis Younghusband (I didn't quite manage to finish it, but it was a fascinating read nonetheless)
I'd be interested in a HN discussion on it.
Hank Green had an interesting discussion with one of the authors, Nate Soares: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CKuiuc5cJM
side-note: i wager that the engagement bait title of the video was generated by AI, which is humorous to me in this context
Highly recommended.
[Best fiction] Stoner - John Williams [Best non-fiction] Say Nothing - Patrick Radden Keefe
The Disappearance of Rituals - Byung-Chul Han
Outlive - Peter Attia (This felt like a complete waste of attention)
An Emotional Education - School of Life/Alain de Botton
The Story of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Hayao Miyazaki
Plants from Test Tubes - Lydiane Kyte; John Kleyn; Holly Scoggins; Mark Bridgen
Some biography I've forgotten
It isn't a prescriptive book at all, and perhaps very bleak in a sense. He describes how we've lost much of the ritual and innate temporal rhythms which have historically given us a greater sense of time, place, purpose, closure, and so on. Similarly, he suggests we live in a world now which is arguably incompatible with these things, because it is designed to eliminate the conditions in which this rhythm can exist at all. We're trapped in a sense. The thing we crave is mutually exclusive with the environment we now live in.
Similar to the Burnout Society, he writes a lot about our hyper-individualistic culture which is obsessed with personal optimization and productivity. These are not ideals which are conducive to communal, cultural events and connections which transcend the individual. Yet one could argue that they're quite important to humans, and increasingly absent from our lives.
Another important concept is the fragmentation of time and how everything now blurs together.
There's much more to it. I'm only highlighting the parts which stood out clearly and are coming to mind now. Like burnout, it's short enough to read in a day, and well worth it. Han really speaks to me and his essays are absolute page-turners.
If you want something a bit more substantial and argumentative where conclusions are backed with clearly established points and data, it isn't the right kind of read. He also doesn't offer solutions. For me the pleasure is derived from a sense of understanding, appreciating an eloquent perspective on something I feel I'm experiencing, and Han's signature ability to crystalize the malaise of contemporary life. I know some people who would find the book irritatingly thin in too many places, or lacking any kind of rigour in explaining how he arrived at certain ideas or why he's making certain statements. If you can see past that, it's excellent.
I think the key is remembering that he isn't writing a scientific paper or treatise so much as a provocative essay to share his exploration and wonder about an amorphous, vague, yet visceral and pertinent matter.
I haven’t been reading much in the last couple of years and I credit this book for getting me back in the game.
This is not the case.
Dennis Paul Himes: Raisinbread: The Story of Jennifer Choate and Her Role in the Crisis of 2262
After reading the above book (I didn't get much sleep) I e-mailed the author with the subject "Please take my money!" and asked him to write more books.
- She Said — Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey
- Conclave — Robert Harris
- First You Write a Sentence — Joe Moran
- Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine — Gail Honeyman
- The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov
More books here -> https://pastebin.com/XVeacpHM
I especially enjoyed "Seeing Like a State"
Top 5 fiction
- A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
- Trust by Hernan Diaz
- City of Thieves by David Benioff
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
- Widow Basquiat by by Jennifer Clement
Top 5 non-fiction
- Boom Town by Sam Anderson
- The Second Founding by Eric Foner
- The Club by Jonathan Clegg and Joshua Robinson
- The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel by Douglas Brunt
- The Spy and the Traitor by Ben McIntyre
Highly recommended no matter what your age.
Just a few chapters into The Art of Spending Money by the same author. So far very good as well.
Both cover how personal finance is, first and foremost, personal and specific to an individual and highly dependent on your life experience.
I enjoyed it overall but in large part for the detail/immersion which it sounds like wasn't interesting enough to keep you.
All character growth and relationships were very slow burns, and so if you enjoy watching the same characters just dealing with things as they come up then you'd probably enjoy the other books as much as the first three. Satisfying arc resolution happens almost entirely at the end.
Completely rewired how I view language, consciousness, and matter.
Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46345897
Non Fiction:
- Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang (2025)
- How to Live an Extraordinary Life by Anthony Pompliano (2024)
Fiction:
- The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (1956)
- Consider Phlebas (Culture Series #1) by Iain M. Banks (1987)
- The Way of Kings (2010, Stormlight #1) & Words of Radiance (2014, Stormlight #2) by Brandon Sanderson
Currently in the middle of a re-read of one of my favorites, Ken Kesey's Sometimes A Great Notion. Also the first Otherside Picnic light novel, after watching and loving the anime adaptation.
Happy new year!
I enjoyed Three Body Problem a lot more than I thought I would. That was probably the best book I read in 2025.
I've found many of the individual musings to be quite interesting. In particular the ones that relate to perception (my own biggest pitfall).
Non-fiction:
- The Power Broker by Robert Caro
Fantasy:
- The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson
Sci-fi:
- Sun Eater series by Christopher Ruocchio
- A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr
- Ra by qntm
- Jean le Flambeur series by Hannu Rajaniemi
- Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (didn’t like the subsequent books of the series so much)
Other novels:
- Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard
"When the Moon Hits Your Eye" - John Scalzi
"Making History" - K.J. Parker
"Let Dogs be Dogs" - Monks of New Skete
"The First Gentleman" - Bill Clinton (it's actually fun!)
"The Thinking Machine" - Stephen Witt
Another book I enjoyed this year is The Golden Road by William Dalrymple. It explains the crucial cultural, economical, and religious influence that India had in Eurasia before and during the middle ages. This one is more similar to Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world, I believe.
Re-read “The Art of Not Being Governed” by James C Scott which is really mind-expanding stuff.
Bruno Maçães, World Builders. Good book on the impact of technology in geopolitics has been consistently interesting.
Among fiction re-read a lot of Lovecraft, noticed that I like the Dream Quest stories more than the horror these days which surprised me. But they're more compelling to me now because of how much you can see Lovecraft as a person in them.
The last three Dune books. Liked the last two about the Bene Gesserit a lot, was surprised how much I disliked God Emperor given the praise it gets, but it honestly reads like Frank Herbert posting twitter hot takes as a worm with no story
Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger. Among the best novellas I've ever read, very different in tone from most of his books.
Shūsaku Endō, Silence. Book about a Jesuit mission in early Edo Japan. My favorite Japanese book in a long time.
Among technical books, re-read The Mythical Man Month, probably more relevant than it ever was in an age of artifical man-hours added to projects. Robert Seacord Effective C, after not having written C in a long time. Really good intermediate level book for modern C. Also making my way through The Little Schemer as a replacement for advent of code in the second half of the month this year.
The best were:
- The Eagle and the Hart, on Richard II and Henry IV
- In the Heart of the Sea, on a whale ship disaster that inspired moby dick
- The Siege, on a hostage taking at the Iranian embassy in London
Love narrative nonfiction.
- Four Meals - Meir Shalev
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Currently reading: Anna Karenina - Tolstoy, The Creative Act - Rick Rubin
- In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan. A brilliant "not diet" book about not eating crap and enjoying chocolate cake with your friends. I followed this up with Ultra Processed People to arm myself with the facts to defend not eating the junk people call food.
- The Dispossesed - Ursula Le Guin: recommended in previous year's HN what did you reads. An absolutely triumph for how it manages to portray a believable anarchist society.
- Adult Children of Alcoholics: useful to the multitude of us who grew up with an alcoholic parent(s). I used this to identify the common patterns I share with others who grew up like me. You are not alone!
- The Invention of Clouds (not finished): I really like the context of "dissenting science" which the author conveys brilliantly. Turns out Dark Academia and Bro Science are not new.
- The Art of Frugal Hedonism: Irreverant although it comes off a little pious. This book has helped me accept that I have enough stuff already.
Sci-fi: Exiles by Mason Coile.
Fiction (Fantasy): The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman.
Fiction (post-apocalyptic / zombie): One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford.
Non fiction: The Wager by David Grann.
I read ~80-100 books a year, mostly SF/F.
Because abusive parents false arrested/committed me without a trial as manic for buying a Linux (they can barely use apple) computer and RockBox music player. I spent much time gathering these quotes https://antipsychiatry.yay.boo/
What am I supposed to understand from this?
For example you can search the page for ## False Claims Act. It will show the FBI jailing psychiatrists who illegally over billed Medicaid for fake or unnecessary services.
Not an easy read but very rewarding in terms of sci-fi world building.
The three body problem series. Also sci-fi, recommended if you enjoy deeper reading.
Waiting for the third book.
“Literary theory for robots” - Dennis Yi Tenen
“Visual Culture” - Alexis L. Boylan
- Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler
- The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson
- Lolita, it's mostly what you've read about it.
- a few short stories by Heinrich von Kleist.
Never Finished: Unshackle Your Mind and Win the War Within by David Goggins.
These two books stuck with me. We are often too comfortable with being comfortable. There is nothing wrong with that, but real growth happens when we step outside our comfort zone. We are far more capable than we think.
Apology of Socrates - Plato
The Betrayal of the Intellectuals - Julien Benda
- Children of Time
- Hyperion & The Fall of Hyperion
- Red Dragon & Silence of the Lambs
- Cat's Cradle
- The Book of the New Sun
Five Decembers by James Kestrel
The Names by Florence Knapp
The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers
A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck
I enjoyed Ra - more than "There is not anti-mimetics division" which I felt lost itself in the second half.
I greatly enjoyed Anathem - though I have always been a sucker for Stephenson.
I found 2666 to be profound and tragic. Obviously the intention of the book - but given that the crime rate in my country is analogous to Mexico's - the pain of the femicide in the book and casual cover-ups felt tangible to me. I feel it is clear that is is incomplete due to the Author's death, but I don't think that takes away from the book.
In a similar vein, but in completely different genres I finally finished the wheel of time series which I started nearly 15 years ago. After getting to book 11 I pushed through the rest this year. Unfortunately I felt mostly underwhelmed. I think the Sanderson transition did not age as well as initially received. Maybe it's because I have read too much Sanderson before getting to him. His voice is noticeably different to Jordan's.
Finally I really enjoyed both the Wager and Pachinko.
I have started a slew of other books and not completed them but there are pending standouts. I am still halfway through Stalin by Monetfiore, and I enjoy returning when I can stomach the horrible history.
Honorable mention to Apple in China which I did not complete and might eventually. Don't think I will finish Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas though.
In the current growing pending pile I have 1493 - which I know I will enjoy, everything is tuberculosis and now it can be told. We shall see if I make any headway :)
Outlive by Attia - wouldn’t take everything he says as gospel but he helped me focus on what is really important in health and fitness and why
I am a Strange Loop by Hofstadter - trying to get a grasp on Gödels incompleteness theorem, but this book is a lot more. I particularly enjoyed the bits about Albert Schweitzer, and the chapter on his late wife, how we host the souls of others crudely on our own hardware. Helpful book in the age of AI.
The Man from the Future by Bhattacharya, a Von Neumann biography. Really helped understand the context of this great man’s achievements.
On the Edge by Silver. The signal and the noise was a lot better (which I read last year)
Benjamin Franklin by Isaacson. Fascinating renaissance man, interesting tour through US history
Can’t Hurt Me by Goggins. This book helped me through some emotionally difficult times and has some really great life advice (mixed with some really self-destructive behavior)
The Misbehavior of Markets by Mandelbrot, Hudson. Currently reading this, so far pretty fascinating
For books, this year has been the year with the fewest books read.[1] I ended up reading the past: John Keats’s Poems, Marcus Aurelius, The Great Gatsby, Odyssey, and Iliad by Homer.
As a habit and a tribute to something I liked in the past, I read Dan Brown’s latest, “The Secret of Secrets.” I also started re-reading some of Sidney Sheldon’s books, but, as of this day, I could no longer summon the enthusiasm to continue beyond Master of the Game and The Sands of Time.
I also re-read the fantastic book, “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions”[2] by Edwin Abbott Abbott.
I’ve otherwise been largely re-reading books I haven’t read in a decade or so
2. Atmosphæra Incognita - Neal Stephenson
3. Idoru (10x time) - William Gibson.
Also, I sometimes like to compare it to Coupland's Microserf's but Microserf's is notably dated by now.
It's a must read for 0.001% of the population.
* The Mom Test
* The SAAS Playbook
Actually in this year, the ones I remember the most:
* Start Small, Stay Small
* From Yao To Mao (more a series of lectures on chinese history)
The most recent one I haven't finished yet but was surprised I liked:
* Software Engeineering at Google
Many more things described ring true or feel desireable, and I recognize too many of the anti-patterns from companies I worked for. Although, I also recognized the good things people were doing and started to appreciate them more.
All over London the lights flickered in and out, calling on the public to save its body and purse: SOPO SAVES SCRUBBING—NUTRAX FOR NERVES—CRUNCHLETS ARE CRISPER—EAT PIPER PARRITCH—DRINK POMPAYNE—ONE WHOOSH AND IT'S CLEAN—OH, BOY! IT'S TOMBOY TOFFEE—NOURISH NERVES WITH NUTRAX—FARLEY'S FOOTWEAR TAKES YOU FURTHER—IT ISN'T DEAR, IT'S DARLING—DARLING'S FOR HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES—MAKE ALL SAFE WITH SANFECT—WHIFFLETS FASCINATE. The presses, thundering and growling, ground out the same appeals by the million: ASK YOUR GROCER—ASK YOUR DOCTOR—ASK THE MAN WHO'S TRIED IT—MOTHERS! GIVE IT TO YOUR CHILDREN—HOUSEWIVES! SAVE MONEY—HUSBANDS! INSURE YOUR LIVES—WOMEN! DO YOU REALIZE?—DON'T SAY SOAP, SAY SOPO! Whatever you're doing, stop it and do something else! Whatever you're buying, pause and buy something different! Be hectored into health and prosperity! Never let up! Never go to sleep! Never be satisfied. If once you are satisfied, all our wheels will run down. Keep going—and if you can't, Try Nutrax for Nerves!
Intriguingly familiar cynicism, vintage 1933.
“There is no antimimetic division”,
“Project hail mary”,
“Permutation city”,
“White noise”,
and non-fiction:
“Measurement”,
“The sovereign child”,
“Don’t die”,
“The basic laws of human stupidity”,
…and I think I am forgetting something
- The Courage to be Disliked. - Moral Tribes - Crazy like us - Careless People - Madness Made Me - The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion.
And a few that were on my 2025 list that I didn’t make it through, and are on my list for 2026 include: - Team of Rivals - Behave - Why Greatness cannot be planned.
Hopefully I’ll get through those three books before the end of Feb when I go back to Uni, and won’t have time to read for leisure for about 7 months.
To anyone interested not just in reading it but asking it questions here's the app I wrote https://reminder.dev
Abundance (great)
Anxious generation (great)
Ishmael (great)
Who we are and how we got here (great)
Non-fiction: A System for Writing by Bob Doto was pretty good. Also gave Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal a chance, but found it to be uninspiring, self-aggrandising drivel.
Liked the first Locked Tomb, didn't really enjoy the remainder of the series.
The Witch King (from the Murderbot author), was alright.
The Time Travellers Almanac. Time Travellers Almanac was meh. A set of short stories, but many retreads of the same ideas we've seen over the decades. There was one good story, and one other interesting concept...
Road to Roswell and Crosstalk. Connie Willis' books were great, as usual.
Brzrkr. Keanu's book was meh.
The first five of the Kate Daniels Series: - Magic Bites - Magic Burns - Magic Strikes - Magic Bleeds - Magic Slays
Kate Daniels is doing an acceptable job filling in for Dresen's absence, though book 3 and 4 go a bit heavy on the romance side.
Pre-orders pending on the next Murderbot book (Platform Decay), and Dresden (Twelve Months)
- ShapeUp
- Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success
In 2026, I hope to pivot slightly and finally read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. I thought recent authors like Fukuyama obviated the need to read such books, but flipping through its pages, they were so poetic and beautiful, I hope it operates like an antidote to too much dry / reductionist reading (of which tools like ChatGPT are accelerating, at least for me).
* Blood, Sweat and Pixels
* Press Reset
* Play Nice
* Masters of Doom
* Color & Light
* Video Game Art
* 2d Graphics Programming for Games (in progress)
- The three body problem saga.
- Cloud Atlas.
Winterplanet - Ursula K. LeGuin
[1] https://www.fnac.com/a21142694/Thierry-Augustin-Recits-des-t...
I also read:
"Digital Fortress" - Dan Brown (not strictly technically plausible but the suspense kept me hooked) "Never Enough" - Andrew Wilkinson (meh)
Currently working on: "The Technological Republic" - Andrew Karp "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" - Martin Kleppmann
I had a tendency of a lot of false starts on books this year. I picked up several recent LLM/AI books and would make it like a chapter before realizing it was mostly just AI generated slop and gave up.
Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series. https://www.goodreads.com/series/112239-southern-reach
Reread books 1-4 of Dennis E Taylor's Bobiverse series to read #5 https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse
John Scalzi's Interdependency Series https://www.goodreads.com/series/202297-the-interdependency
Basically all of the Culture Series by Iain M Banks https://www.goodreads.com/series/49118-culture
Of Peter F Hamilton:
- The Salvation Sequence series https://www.goodreads.com/series/242882-salvation-sequence
- The Void Series, a sequel-trilogy to the Commonwealth Universe series https://www.goodreads.com/series/43520-void
Of Alastair Reynolds:
- Pushing Ice https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48991704-pushing-ice
- Eversion https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60097716-eversion
Of Adrian Tchaikovsky:
- Shroud https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/230237860-shroud
- Elder Race https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56815367-elder-race
- Alien Clay https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199851460-alien-clay
- Going through The Final Architecture now https://www.goodreads.com/series/305076-the-final-architectu...
Also Upgrade, by Blake Crouch https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59439117-upgrade
Also First, by Randy Brown https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196399619-first
I did read it a few years ago, that's very though and it describes in a very technical way how gulags worked. In hindsight I'm not sure it was the best way to do it.
If you liked it tho, id suggest the two kravchenko books on the trials, Rudolph Hess book (very interesting), Simon Sebag Montefiore book on Stalin.
I can provide many more about this kind of subject, I found that fascinating for a few months and did read a lot of books on it.
Although I'd argue that the most fascinating is watching the usa, from outside, turn into a totalitarian state. That is truly incredible to be able to witness how much Trump achieved in a few months.
Usually I hit a book a week pretty reliably, but this past year has been particularly crazy according to my audible purchase history. There are around 80 titles that I've added in 2025 and I've completed the vast majority of them. Some stand outs for me:
Dungeon Crawler Carl - One of the few novels that I think it actually much better in audio format. The narrator is excellent and it's a fun adventure that never takes itself too seriously. I'm not into litrpg typically, but I really enjoyed the 7 novels in the series so far.
The Laundry Files - I've made it through seven of these books and I really like the mix of mundane government IT with supernatural horrors. Tropes come up like the government tracking paper clip usage, and then you'll get a mystical explanation that makes sense in world so suddenly tracking individual paper clip usage doesn't seem so ridiculous. Generally a fun series, but it seems to be moving towards a revolving cast that I'm less interested in continuing on with.
The Library at Mount Char - One of my favorite books this year. Quite dark and mysterious. I liked the payoff and character arcs. But really it's the well maintained atmosphere that pulls everything together.
There Is No Antimemetics Division - What might the science and research of literally unknowable things look like? Things your mind rejects or presences which can influence your mind to make themselves invisible and leaves no memories behind. Weird novel that doesn't hold your hand too much.
Heavy Weather - A sort of modern cyberpunk meets western novel. Storm chasers following a predicted F6 super tornado across the US south.
The Running Man - I'm not typically a King fan, but I do like some of his works. I have fond memories of the movie from childhood nostalgia so finally gave it a try. I do think it's one of his better works according to my tastes.
Mickey7 - I'm a sucker for time loops and death loops and adjacent novels. This was a short but fun book.
The Society of Unknowable Objects - Small group of people collect mysterious objects from around the world to keep humanity safe.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - Another one dealing with memory. What would it be like to be immortal, but everyone you interact with forgets about you minutes after you leave them.
Edge of Tomorrow - Time loops!
The Troop - Decent read if you like horror novels. One of the better horror novels I read for the year.
Bilbo's Last Song scene here(spoiler warning for those who haven't read it as its at the end of the book).
Special mention also goes to Taming Silicon Valley by Gary Marcus.
It's one of my favorites of his, and I can see why he's miffed that Kubrick's adaptation gets all the praise when the source material is just as good.
There's nothing like a slow creeping horror descent into madness to make winter time feel cozy.
The Peripheral by William Gibson.
Enshittification by Cory Doctorow.
- Salem's Lot
- the Moon is a harsh mistress
- Stranger in a Strange land
- The Stand (1990 edition, which initially confused me since I read the 1980 edition long ago)
- The best short stories of Mark Twain
- Nightmares and Dreamscapes
- Liar's Poker
- The Big Short
- The intelligent investor (2009 revised edition -- my ears perked up when he casually mentioned microsoft vs microstrategy during the .com bomb)
- Flash boys
- Next
- Bonfire of the vanities
- Barbarians at the gate
- The man who solved the market
- The Fund
- The world according to Cunk
- The house of Morgan (currently 5 hours in and currently tired of the phrase "house of")
Gene Kim et al., The Phoenix Project. This book reinvigorated my love for management, which I lost in 2021–2022. I'm still an IC, but I decided to stop refusing management roles.
Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, 2nd Edition. This book lit a fire under my ass to figure out better ways of working. I followed it up with the next one in a book club at work.
James Shore et al., The Art of Agile Software Development, 2nd Edition. This book gave me hope that a productive, humanist, productivity-oriented workflow can work in today's software world. I read it with my teammates in a book club at work, including the software engineers, QA tester, product owners, and UX designer. Unfortunately the rest of my team had little interest in putting it into place where I work.
Robert C. Martin, Clean Architecture. This book was a delightful read. Uncle Bob weaved practical advice together with stories from his past that served both to illustrate his points and to entertain. While I don't agree with every word in the book (e.g. Screaming Architecture), I still recommend it to every Senior+ Software Engineer.
Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. Aside from its amazing content, this book has some of the best typesetting I've ever seen. I sought out a font that is a match (or near-match) and reverse-engineered the letter spacing, line height, heading font sizes, etc. Its content was great too, but I was glad to have read Vaughn Vernon's DDDD first.
Vaughn Vernon, Domain-Driven Design Distilled. This book followed up Shore's work in our book club at work. Everybody on the team really liked what they read, but nobody felt like they had actionable insights. So the engineers went on to read Vernon's IDDD, and the non-engineers read Adzic's IM and Patton's USM.
Vaughn Vernon, Implementing Domain-Driven Design. I read this book with a book club at work. While Evans's work was well-grounded in theory and left a lot of interpretation in the patterns behind DDD, Vernon is a practical, nuts-and-bolts DIY guide to one approach to DDD. Luckily, these tactics resonated with my team and our codebase has seen marked improvements in the past few months. I'm looking forward to our process catching up so we can do more than "DDD Lite."
Jeff Patton, User Story Mapping. This book was fun, practical, and completely outside any way I'd ever worked. It also helped me understand exactly why I've failed every time I tried to make my own SaaS startup on nights and weekends.
Gojko Adzic, Impact Mapping. This book was basically a pamphlet. The process seems...good? But since I'm no longer in a role with the influence or authority to recommend product direction, I doubt I'll get much use out of this for a while.
Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path. This book wants to follow in the footsteps of Camille Fournier's The Manager's Path, but it seemed less specific and useful as a roadmap. Perhaps that's because of how different "Staff Engineer" is from company to company, at least when compared to the roles covered by Fournier. But it did help me earn my promotion to* Staff Engineer, so it was clearly worth reading.
Tamar Rosier, Your Brain's Not Broken. This book was the second I read after I got diagnosed with adult ADHD. I appreciated that it helped me de-stigmatize, because I harbored some bummer feelings when I realized no actually I didn't grow out of it. It also helped me reflect on my habits of action, and see them in a new light. I was surprised to see how much of my anger and frustration in life was a coping mechanism to help me get things done. I've had a much calmer life since recognizing that.
Alexander Tarlinder, Developer Testing. I'm not quite finished with this book, but I'll be done by the end of the year. It's been a great overview of automated testing from the perspective of a programmer. It helped refresh my memory on things I knew but forgot. It filled gaps that I had in my baseline knowledge. It corrected things I "knew" but was slightly incorrect about. I now recommend this to any programmer, whether or not they've got a habit of testing.
Austin Kleon's trilogy: Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work, Keep Going. These books were cute, full of incredibly quotable passages, and fun to read. I didn't spend enough time on them, though. A lot of the lessons I thought I'd learned left my brain like water through a sieve.
Kent Beck, Tidy First?. This book helped me understand the economics of software through a new light. That was important to me, because during the time I spent as a Director of Software Engineering I was not given a budget and asked to manage the department's expenses.
Antonio Cangiano, Technical Blogging, 2nd Edition. This book convinced me to start a blog. It was going really well, and then I shrank back from it due to fear of vulnerability. Since I got over those fears and started blogging again, it's been a lot of fun again. I incorporated what would've been tweets into the blog (as "quick posts") in addition to my longer-form, less-ephemeral content (as "articles"). Writing has been a great way to solidify what I've learned and distill my opinions. Heck, I should migrate this comment to my blog.
I also read other books (especially on my journey to becoming a magician), but these were the ones I thought Hacker News might be most interested in.
- My Gita, Devdutt Pattanaik
- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Atul Gawande
- Moonshot: Inside Pfizer's Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible, Albert Bourla
- Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Anne Case
- The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic, Joe Miller
- Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, John Green
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne and Gary Gianni (Illustrator)
- El Deafo, Cece Bell
- Acts of God, Kanan Gill
- Marvels of Modern Science, Paul Severing
- Empire of AI, Karen Hao
Between the lines, my friends, between the lines.
- Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Discipline Equals Freedom by Jocko Willink
- Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
- The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
- The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff
- When the Body Says No by Gabor Maté
- Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke
- The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer
- Standing Strong by John MacArthur
- The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
- We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan B. Peterson
- I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek
- The Holy Bible
- Son of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef
- I Am Giorgia by Giorgia Meloni
- 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
- The Two-Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren
- The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray
- The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray
- The War on the West by Douglas Murray
- Porn Generation by Ben Shapiro
- The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- In Farleigh Field by Rhys Bowen
- Darkest Hour by Anthony McCarten
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown
- Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
- Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming
- Moonraker by Ian Fleming
- Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming
- From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
- Dr No by Ian Fleming
- Goldfinger by Ian Fleming
- For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming
- Thunderball by Ian Fleming
- The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming
- You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming
- The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Next year I will read more books of the Russian writers on this list. I enjoyed those books very much.
After seeing this list, what books do you recommend for me?
- Traction by Gabriel Weinberg (it's ok)
- A Skill Called Luck by Jakob Greenfeld (very good)
- Unf*ck Your Sales by Jakob Greenfeld (very good)
- Books by Alex West (very good)
- How to Live by Derek Sivers (very very good)
- Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown (really enjoyed it)
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (it's okay)
- The Narrow Road by Felix Dennis (it's okay)
- Oh Crap! Potty Training by Jamie Glowacki (success)
- Вишнёвый Сад Чехов Антон Павлович (did not like it at all)
- Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift (liked it)
- Hunt, Gather, Parent Michaeleen Doucleff (this book is a game changer, strong recommend for every parent)
- MAKE by Pieter Levels
- Main Street Millionaire by Codie Sanchez
- Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling
- The Sweaty Startup by Nick Huber
- The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury (did not like it at all)
- Чем Люди Живы Лев Николаевич Толстой (nice)
- 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall (pretty good)
- Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (eye opening)
- Growth Levers and How to Find Them by Matt Lerner (meh)
- Alexander Pushking Stories (very nice. crazy how he makes rhymes yet the whole thing makes sense)
IN_PROGRESS:
- War and Piece (I'm shocked at how much I'm liking it)
- Scaling Fast by Swizec Teller (really good, about to finish)
- Unreasonable Hospitality (it alright)
- Mom Test (it's good, but for some reason I keep failing to finish it)
- Marcus Aurelius Meditations (reading it slowly as inspiration strikes)
- Seneca Dialogues
- Ultimate Guide to Link Building by Garrett French
STARTED, BUT DID NOT FINISH (That's a big add list):
- Michel de Montaigne "Essays"
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (feels to hard to tackle right now)
- Seeking Wisdom
- Product Led Growth
- Demand Side Sales
- Odyssey by Homer
- Full Stack Tao by Alex Kondov
- Logic for Programmers
- The Story of Philosophy
- The Story of Civilization Vol 1
- The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx
- Economic Facts and Fallacies Thomas Sowell
- The Beginning of Infinity David Deutsch
- Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
- SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome Mary Beard
- American Kingpin by Nick Bilton (it's good, just felt irrelevant, will revisit)
- Indexing Beyond the Basics by Tobias Petry (only read it when necessary)
- The Mind Illuminated by John Yates (can't keep meditations to stick)
Note:
- I keep notes on books I finished on my site, but need to bring it up to date: https://www.rasulkireev.com/book-notes/
Despite that, some recommendations:
First, remember that everybody's reading list is naturally capped. If it takes you a week to read a fiction book, and you're 30 years old, you have ~2,500 books left in your life. If you're closer to 50, it's more like ~1,500. And if it takes you a month to finish a book, you're at ~600 and ~350 respectively.
This means being picky is a necessity. Do not read books on "100 hundred books you must read before you die", style lists unless they all appeal to you. Do not try and cover the ground of every Nobel laureate unless you're a) a prolific reader, b) multi-lingual, and c) not easily bored. The same goes for any other prestigious prize, list, etc.
The most important thing is to read things you like reading. Don't read classics unless you like classics. Don't read sci-fi just because you work in tech unless you like sci-fi. I like a lot of contemporary "high brow" literature because I enjoy how people discover new ways to play with language to convey emotions. A lot of people find this incredibly dull, and that's fine.
You do you. You don't have time to read books somebody else says you "should" or "must" read.
One thing I think we can all agree on though is that almost all self-help books and airport style management or "popular science" books do not return the investment they demand. It's for you to decide how to interpret this, but please, read things that bring you a depth of joy not because they're popular or on a list or seem to be "everywhere".
For my style of reading, I like to get pointers from two magazines I subscribe to: The Literary Review [0] and Granta[1]. I am sure there are other sources for your preferred type of reading. Go support them. Be prepared to hand over cash to writers who publish a physical artefact, it's the only way they'll keep eating and doing that thing.
I would like to find time to add other magazines to my list (TLS, Paris Review, etc.), but I have limited time, these specific two tick boxes for me stylistically, have proven the test of time indicating quality, and even if I only find one or two books or authors a year out of them, have paid for themselves many times over. Further, I get a reasonable review of what's out there and can get a sense of what isn't for me, without reading it or feeling guilty about not reading it even though others tell me I "must".
As an aside, Lit Review's history reviews often are so good at covering the ground of the material the book covers, I feel like I've had a 1,000 word Cliff Notes version of the book in my hand and can decide to dig deeper if I want, but if not, I could understand a basic conversation about that topic if I needed to, and on occasion something I read has helped in a pub quiz.
One last point: try and break out of your echo chamber sometimes. It is easy to pick up and enjoy books that support one's own World view, but I like to challenge mine and keep it in check.
Reading the Communist Manifesto will not make you a Communist. Reading Mein Kampf will not convert you into a Nazi, because you have the perspective to rip it to shreds and see it for what it is.
Buying (OK, pirating, maybe you don't want to vote with your money in this category), books that heap praise on people you perhaps don't like or disagree with - Trump, Obama, Putin, Fidel Castro, Biden, Palosi, Blair, Thatcher, Pinochet, whoever... - these books will not make you those people or somebody who heaps praise on them. Develop the critical muscle to question things you read.
I say this because not only has this helped me navigate the news and political cycles of my life, but because it's helped me improve relationships with friends and family and even my reading of fiction.
Books really are the most marvellous things, and they all deserve more of our attention, even the bad ones.
I wanted to read classics, and devoured "The portrait of Dorian Gray" (O.Wilde), where maybe 50% of all the "as O.Wilde said..." quotes seem to come from (uttered by a single, incredibly obnoxious character.)
I challenged myself to read "Les Miserables" (V.Hugo), and actually managed to get two tomes out of five down. Eminently quotable, heavily skippable - why on earth spend half a time on describing the ins and out of Waterloo, except to show off ? - and, surprisingly, at times, _funny_.
The bio of Pierre Mendès France (J.Lacouture) was very much topical, given the mess in Franch politics. We had more PMs in one year than in a few chapters of the book. It's very weird to read that, at some point, some politicians were "liked" by the people - but lost power anyway.
A small Edouard Phillipe book called "Men who read" almost made me like the guy - his next book is more serious and expected. It pains me to think that our next election is going to be about "well read people who disappointed everyone" vs "popular jocks with no education who will end up disappointing everyone".
"Abundance" (E.Klein / D.Thompson) is an attempt from "well read people" to at least try and understand why everyone is disappointed and prefer the jocks. I don't think they included any solution in their book, though - maybe they save it for the sequel, or for E.Klein's presidential bid.
I want to read all Stripe press - if only, because the covers rock, and they're optimistic. Started with "Poor Charlie's Almanach" (C.Munger), which a disappointing rehash of the same funny speech seven times. (Tldr : be multidisciplinary, study cognitive biases, don't trade). In the middle of "The Origins of Efficiency " (Potter)
"The Wave" (Souleymane) was not optimistic. And not practical at all - sure, AI enabled drones carrying bioweapons will suck. "The Age of predators" (G. Da Empoli) reminds us that the AI enabled bioweapons carrying drones will come from an illiberal state enabled by billionaires from Silicon Valley, and Russian trolls. I wish someone told me where to go to avoid being targeted too early.
"Everything is tuberculosis" (J. Greene) reminded me of a time when scientists were trying to solve problems as opposed to creating brand new ones - but at least the next generations won't die of boredom.
"We, programmers" is a rehash of Uncle Bob's pre talks "history of programming". I loved the long and detailed parts about G.Hopper. He ends with a (failed) attempt to convince that programmers will still be needed in the age of AI.
Steve Yegge's "Vibe coding" goes full "resistance is futile" about programming with agents, and, interestingly, ends up talking more about TDD than Uncle Bob - but the words "electricity consumption" and "climate impact" are not utured, because, why spoil the fun.
"The Common LISP cookbook" tried to explain me the difference between ASDF, quicklisp and whatnot - 2025 was the closest year I ever go to actually writing something in LISP instead of reading books about it.
And also, "The baby is a mammal" (M.Odent) and "Becoming a dad for dummies", because this year was probably the last one we're I'll get so much time to read :)