Favorite books of 2025

35 books, 17,000 pages. That fell short of the 50 books target I set for myself, but there were quite a few great books in there. Most of my “reading” this year was through audiobooks, so I ended up listening to 240 hours (that’s 10 whole days!) worth of books.

Non fiction

A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Burton G Malkiel)

Malkiel is one of the earliest advocates for index funds, so a lot of today’s personal finance wisdom comes from this book. Originally written in the 1970s, but regularly updated, it has remained relevant through half a century. He also weaves the narrative much better than most personal finance writers, so it is a delightfully engaging read. He can easily jump from the Dutch tulip bulb craze to Japanese real estate bubble to the 2008 recession and explain the forces of economics at the same time.

100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Gary Provost)

Not only does Provost teach you how to write better, he gives you beautiful prose that you can learn from along the way. This book has one of my favourite pieces of writing:

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

The Innovator’s Dilemma (Clayton M Christensen)

Explores why disruptive technologies usually come from small startups repackaging existing technologies at a lower cost, and existing successful companies fail at this. The primary example is the disk drive industry, and how the established players couldn’t release disruptive technologies, and instead doubled down on established, “sustaining” technologies.

A Philosophy of Software Design (John Ousterhout)

One of my new favourite technical books. This was an interesting contrast to books like Sandi Metz’s Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby and Bob Martin’s Clean Code. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m pushing ideas from those books (like short methods) too far. This book pulls back from those ideas a bit too much for my liking, but it can help you figure out a good middle ground for dealing with complexity in software.

A People’s History of the United States (Howard Zinn)

A retelling of the American history from the perspective of the marginalized groups. The original book is a massive tome, but I listened to an abridged audiobook narrated by Matt Damon. Even the abridged version can be a bit dry at times, but thoroughly illuminating about the origins of modern America.

Careless People (Sarah Wynn-Williams)

Wynn-Williams was an exec at Facebook, in charge of government relations. She chronicles the toxic work environment and the leadership’s disregard for ethics as they tried to expand into authoritarian nations like China and Myanmar. Heard about this because Meta Streisand-ed themselves by trying to get it banned.

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Roland Allen)

Fascinating history of the notebook, going all the way back to clay tablets, through to da Vinci, Newton, the evolution of double entry bookkeeping, police notebooks and the creation of Moleskine notebooks. When this was recommended to me, I was skeptical it would be interesting to someone who doesn’t use a physical notebook. I was wrong to doubt it, though!

On Writing (Stephen King)

One of the masters of storytelling writes about the craft of writing, interleaving it with a memoir about his own writing journey. An entertaining read, even if you don’t want to become a writer.

A Bite-Sized History of France (Stéphane Hénaut, Jeni Mitchell)

A thoroughly entertaining history of France, told primarily through the lens of the history of French cuisine. Having recently visited France for the first time, this was a great way to understand the French love for food.

Fiction

All The Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr)

The book introduces us to two children in the 1930s - Marie Lauer, a blind Parisian girl and Werner, a German boy with a knack for fixing radios who later becomes a soldier. From there, we follow their journey on the opposite sides of WW2, until they finally encounter each other in the midst of a battle. Incredibly beautiful writing, and one of the more powerful world war novels I’ve ever read.

Nettle & Bone (T Kingfisher)

Beautifully written fairy tale. A princess puts together a group to go on a mission to rescue her sister from her abusive husband, who also happens to be the prince of a powerful kingdom.

The Iron King (Maurice Druon)

Set in the 1300s, the book follows the court of Philip the Fair, and the aftermath of his persecution of the Knights Templar. There’s political intrigue set in a medieval world, with lots of gritty violence, and reminds of Game of Thrones, without dragons. In fact, George R R Martin has cited this as an influence on the series.

Parable of the Sower (Octavia E Butler)

The teenage protagonist suffers from hyper-empathy, feeling the pain of others, and needing to hide it to survive. She lives in an American society that has fallen into anarchy. Escaping violence, she and a couple of friends have to make the dangerous trip North to find a safer place. This part is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. While a brilliant read, one weak area is that it takes a hard turn into the spiritual side. I would have preferred it as a pure speculative, dystopian novel.

Wind and Truth (Brandon Sanderson)

Not the best entry in the Stormlight Archive, but the last 400-500 pages whizzed by. Sanderson is really good at writing finales, and he was able to resolve the dozens of plot lines he had in motion reasonably well. The book is structured as 10 separate sections, each dealing with one day. This brought an interesting sense of urgency to parts of the story, but the first half was quite slow.

Stats

This year, I started collecting some additional stats about my reading:

• 35 books, 17000+ pages
• 18 non-fiction vs 17 fiction
• Formats: 23 audiobooks, 11 ebooks, 1 physical book
• Top genres: 8 science fiction, 5 fantasy, 4 history, 4 business.
• 241 hours of audiobook listening time (I listen at 1.5 to 2x, so this was probably closer to 120-150 hours)

2026

Some goals for the new year:

• Balance physical/ebooks with audiobooks: I’ve fallen behind on spending time sitting down with a book, and have relied mostly on audiobooks while walking outside. I want to make more time for actual reading.
• Read genres other than SFF: My reading has skewed a lot towards science fiction lately. I’ve been working through the list of Hugo award winners, reading 15 winners in the past two years. I want to ease up on that and read more of other genres in the coming months, especially detective fiction.
• Explore literature in other languages: I haven’t explored much of Kannada, Malayalam or Hindi literature because I can’t read those languages at a comfortable pace. Audiobooks should be great for exploring them.