The best books I read in 2025
Introduction
I read 146 books in 2025. A year packed with fiction spanning multiple languages, deep dives into mindfulness with Thich Nhat Hanh, the complete Expanse series, and a wide range of non-fiction from investing to technology and leadership.
Here are my favorites from this year's readings, in no particular order.
Fiction
Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang
Short stories about free will, memory, time, consciousness. Chiang writes like a scientist who happens to be a poet. Every story is a thought experiment, but they hit you in the gut. I kept putting the book down to think.
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Charlie Gordon gets his intelligence artificially boosted, then watches it slip away. The whole book is written as his progress reports, so the prose itself changes as he does. Wrecked me.
Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes
Finally read it in Spanish. Four hundred years old and still funny. The back-and-forth between Quijote's delusions and Sancho's common sense is timeless, and Cervantes is much weirder and more self-aware than I expected.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The writing is gorgeous, which is the point. Humbert uses beauty to make you complicit. You have to read against the narrator the whole time. Disturbing, but I get why it's considered one of the great novels.
La Trilogie baryonique by Pierre Raufast
Raufast mixes science and philosophy into his fiction in ways I haven't seen before. Hard to describe, you just have to read it. Very French, in the best sense.
Fairy Tale by Stephen King
A teenager finds a portal to a dark fantasy world under a small town. Less horror than usual for King, more of an adventure story. Felt like he was writing the kind of book he loved reading as a kid.
The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey
Read all nine books this year, from L'Éveil du Léviathan to La Chute du Léviathan. Starts as a detective story in the asteroid belt and ends up as an interstellar war across millennia. Great characters, solid science, smart politics. Best space opera I've read.
La casa de los espíritus by Isabel Allende
Three generations of the Trueba family against the backdrop of Chilean history. Spirits, clairvoyance, coups, love, violence, all tangled together. Allende's first novel and probably still her best.
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
Written in the 1970s about a journalist visiting an eco-utopia that seceded from the US. Some of it feels dated, some of it feels like it was written last year. Worth reading just to see which predictions aged well.
The Mountain Shadow by Gregory David Roberts
Sequel to Shantaram. Same Bombay chaos, same philosophical monologues, same over-the-top prose. Sometimes it's too much, sometimes it's exactly right. If you liked Shantaram, you'll like this.
Non-fiction
Enshittification by Cory Doctorow
Doctorow names the thing: platforms get good, lock you in, then get worse on purpose to extract money. He backs it up with detailed examples. After reading this, you'll see the pattern everywhere.
Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates
Gates writing about his childhood and the early Microsoft days. More honest about his personality and privileges than I expected. Not the sanitized version. He admits to being obsessive and difficult.
Carnets d'un moine errant by Matthieu Ricard
Ricard's journals from his years as a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas. He meets the Dalai Lama, treks through Nepal and Tibet, sits with hermits in remote caves. Quiet and warm. I kept coming back to it between other reads.
The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt
How Jensen Huang turned Nvidia from a graphics card company into the center of the AI hardware world. Witt is good at making technical and business decisions into a readable story. Helped me understand why GPUs matter so much right now.
Influence et manipulation by Robert B. Cialdini
The six principles of persuasion: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity. Cialdini explains each with research and real examples. You start noticing them in every conversation and ad after reading this.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins
Perkins says he worked convincing developing countries to take on debt that mostly benefited American corporations. Some of it reads as self-serving, but the bigger picture about how international finance works is hard to dismiss. Made me rethink a lot of what I assumed about development aid.
Zero To Production In Rust by Luca Palmieri
Build a web app in Rust from zero to production-ready. Covers everything: tests, deployment, observability. No hand-waving, no toy examples. Best technical book I read this year.
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick
Mollick skips the hype and the doom and just shows what AI tools can do today and how to use them well. Comes from his experience actually using them in teaching and business. Practical and grounded.
Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom
What if AI solves all our problems? Does life still have meaning without struggle? Heavy going in places, but Bostrom asks questions most people in the AI space avoid. Not a comfort read.
The Genesis Book by Aaron van Wirdum
The history behind Bitcoin: cypherpunks, failed digital cash experiments, the decades of work that made Satoshi's invention possible. Van Wirdum connects all the threads without dumbing it down.
Mindfulness corner: Thich Nhat Hanh
I read six books by Thich Nhat Hanh this year:
- At Home in the World: short teachings, small enough to carry in a pocket
- Love Letter to the Earth: mindfulness through an ecological lens
- Transformation and Healing: goes deep into the Satipatthana Sutta, the foundational Buddhist text on mindfulness
- Understanding Our Mind: Buddhist psychology, the fifty-one mental formations explained simply
- Breathe, You Are Alive: practical mindful breathing, based on the Anapanasati Sutta
- How to Love: a tiny book about what love actually means
He writes the way he teaches: plain, clear, no showing off. Reading one after another through the year felt like an ongoing conversation rather than studying. Different angles, same core idea: pay attention to this moment, start with your breathing.