Books I read in 2025
This is a list of the books I read in 2025. ★ means I loved it. Here are previous year lists: 2022, 2023, 2024.
The books are in reverse order of when I put them into Zotero; I read some books right away, while others waited around for five or ten months until the time was right.
————————————————
Berkeley: A City in History, Charles Wollenberg. This is a history of the city of Berkeley, with attention pretty uniformly spread since the Spanish arrival. Used to write this post.
Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy, Frank McLynn. It is pretty hard to write a biography of Genghis Khan, because of the legends surrounding him and the lack of primary written material. This book was about as good as one could get.
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement. 1950s hard science-fiction, very fun, very focused on the setting. The gravity is accurately reflected in the cover.
.jpg){kind=link}
The Racket: On tour with Tennis’ Golden Generation and the Other 99%, Conor Niland. I don’t care about tennis, but tennis players are consistently and surprisingly good writers. This book is focused more on the players ranked outside the top 200, a sad and dedicated group.
In Praise of Commercial Culture, Tyler Cowen. This was Cowen’s first non-academic book, but very familiar to the throughlines of his writing: how do markets affect what art is produced and made popular?
Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Fernand Braudel. The first volume is as good as advertised. Braudel goes very deep into the everyday life of peasants around the world: what they wore, what they eat, how they lived. While weaker on Asia and Africa, they are not absent. The later two volumes are less interesting to me.
The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis, George Stephanopolous and Lisa Dickey. A cool book, full of fun anecdotes about various map rooms and situation rooms and the events that occupied them. It has a good focus on the banal work as well as the crises.
★Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte. This short story collection has some of the most intense passages I read all year. Everyone talks about the fantasy sequence in “Ahegao”, but I found “Pics” the most harrowing.
Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia Butler. Butler really didn’t like writing short stories; these are her only ones. There must be a lot of early culling, because they’re really good. I liked all of them, even “The Book of Martha.”
Now it Can be Told, Leslie Groves. General Leslie Groves was the military director of the Manhattan Project. It’s great that he lived long enough to write this. For a collection of the best anecdotes, see Isegoria’s running blog series.
The Audacity to Win, David Plouffe. Plouffe was Obama’s 2008 campaign manager; this is his management-focused story of the campaign. He or his ghost-writer has a nice voice. It was a good look back at one of my first moments of political awareness.
The Compass Rose, Ursula LeGuin. All good. “The Diary of the Rose”, “Sur”, “Mazes” are what I remember.
★Something Fresh, P.G. Wodehouse. The first of the Blandings Castle novels, and the one to introduce my favorite character Lord Emsworth. Wodehouse is so consistently excellent, and there are a lot of his books on this list.
The Penal Colony: Stories, Franz Kafka. I remember best “A Report to an Academy” and “In the Penal Colony”.
One Day, David Nicholls. A popular romance-y novel. I finished by momentum.
Shakespeare: the world as stage, Bill Bryson. Bryson wrote a biography of Shakespeare. This has been done very many times before, but Bryson’s voice and focus is excellent.
We Have Engaged the Borg: The Oral History of Wolf 359, Andy Poulastides. A fan-fiction oral history, Studs Terkel-style, of Wolf 359 and the aftermath. If you like Star Trek and Studs Terkel, this is awesome.
Focus: The ASML Way, Marc Hijink. The history of ASML up until early 2023, and thus important. The interdependedness in the AI and hardware industries far outdates the present “bubble”.
Summer Lightning, P.G. Wodehouse. More Blandings Castle.
Heavy Weather, P.G. Wodehouse. Yet more.
Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, Jonny Steinberg. A joint biography, more of a history, very little portraiture. It works very well! My only gripe is that it would have worked better as two parallel biographies. Because Winnie and Nelson spent such little time together, their stories diverge often enough to make the throughlines drag.
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Cat Bohannon. This was a very good popular science book. The still underrated point is that most medical research is on men because women have too many “complicating” features.
Why you should read children’s books, even though you are so old and wise, Katherine Rundell. This is more of an essay, but presented in a gorgeous book. Rundell has great range – see her columns in the LRB on animals, her biography of John Donne, and yes her children’s fiction. This one contained the mos tpassion.
Herzog on Herzog, Paul Cronin. A set of interviews spanning the filmmaker’s carrer. I love his work on volcanoes.
Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky is the current hard sci-fi must-read. Great robots, great spider-aliens.
The Wood at Midwinter, Susanna Clarke. A fable, with beautiful illustrations, set in the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
Journey to the River Sea, Eva Ibbotson. This novel is the bridge between Ibbotson’s children’s books and romance novels. The river sea is the Amazon river, and she is really good at setting; I find these books very cozy.
★Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez. I think this is the book by García Márquez most people should start with. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is easier and the dictator novels are more beautiful, but this book is the most novelistic and personable.
★The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez. One of the dictator novels; a very atmospheric book.
Children of Ruin, Adrian Tchaikovsky. A sequel to Children of Time. Better aliens! Lesser, because the twists have less power.
Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration, Savannah Mandel.
Star Wars: the rise and fall of the Galactic Empire, Chris Kempshell. An in-universe history of the Galactic Empire. I got this to understand the Empire’s canonical sovereign debt and monetary policy.
Where Credit is Due, Gregory Smith. This book was about sovereign debt in Africa, and it’s excellent. Smith has had a fascinating career.
Africa’s last colonial currency: the CFA franc story, Fanny Pigeaud, Ndongo Samba Syalla, William Mitchell. A great overview of the topic.
★A Man of the People, Chiune Achebe. This novel is about a young man in a newly decolonized West African state, adjacent to politicians. My favorite of Achebe’s novels.
How I Won a Nobel Prize, Julius Taranto. A novel about an island of cancelled academics off the coast of Connecticut, where they can research and harrass as much as they like. Weird fun real science. Tails off at the end.
★A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchmann. Tuchmann writes a biography of Enguerrand VII de Coucy, a powerful noble in northern France closely connected to the Kings of both France and England. The biography is a lens for examining the Hundred Years’ War, the Black Plague, the Papal Schism, the liberation of Switzerland, and the Battle of Nicopolis.
Congo, Michael Crichton. A mining expedition to the Congo finds some unexpected stuff. I think this is better than Jurassic Park.
★Coming into the Country, John McPhee. This is a collection of McPhee’s essays about Alaska for the New Yorker. Really beautiful.
Death is our business: Russian mercenaries and the new era of private warfare, John Lechner. Lechner spent a lot of time in Africa for this project, and spent time with active Wagner operators. The methodological stories are what I found most interesting.
The Seventh Floor, David McCloskey. A silly and quick CIA thriller.
American Zion: a New History of Mormonism, Benjamin Park. Deep and interesting history of the Mormons. The first and last thirds were the most interesting: how the Mormons became what and where they are, and how that’s affecting current America.
The Cubs and Other Stories, Mario Vargas Llosa. I never got into Vargas Llosa’s novels, but the stories are great. More political than Gabo or Borges.
The Golden Trade of the Moors, Edward Bovill.
Hell’s Gate, David Weber. Excellent hard sci-fi about interdimensional gates, the first in an unfinished three-book series.
Hell Hath No Fury, David Weber.
The Road to Hell, David Weber.
Tell them of kings, battles, and elephants, Mathias Énard. A novel about a fictional trip taken by Michelangelo in 1506 to Constantinople to design a bridge across the Golden Horn. Good but too French.
Fry the brain: The Art of Urban Sniping and its Role in Modern Guerrilla Warfare, John West.
Bitter Harvest, Ian Douglas Smith. Smith was the Prime Minister of Rhodesia. This was an incredibly honest memoir, about why he did what he did, and what he expected to happen after the creation of Zimbabwe. Bad guy, but good forecaster.
West With the Night, Beryl Markham. Markham was a very early aviator (20s and 30s) in Africa, and the first person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic from Britain to North America.
Going Zero, Anthony McCarten. A 2023 tech thriller, mostly forgettable.
The Complete Euripides: Volume I: Trojan Women and Other Plays, Euripides.
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James Scott. This is a 2017 book byt Scott on how agriculture influenced the earliest states. I diagree with him a bit here.
The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk. This is a long classic novel about mine-sweepers during WWII, and a court-martial resulting from the titular mutiny.
A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering, Andy Murray.
Glorious Exploits, Ferdia Lennon.
The Age of Capital: 1848-875, Eric Hobsbawm.
The Path to Power, Robert Caro. The first volume of Caro’s (hopefully) five volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Some thoughts here.
Means of Ascent, Robert Caro.
★Master of the Senate, Robert Caro.
The Passage of Power, Robert Caro.
★The city & ytic eht, China Miéville. So so so weird – this is not science fiction. Reminds me most of Jan Morris’ Last Letters from Hav.
Early Economic Thought In Spain 1177-1740, Marjorie Grice Hutchinson. A lot of ideas, surprisingly early.
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Burgin. A collection of interviews covering the whole career and wide literature.
On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters, Matthew Desmond. This is an ethnography of Desmond’s wildland firefighting crew. Desmond is more famous for his newer works on poverty and race.
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Ken Liu. A collection of short stories from a decade+ of writing. Some thoughts here.
The White Album, Joan Didion. A very Californian collection, read upon moving to California.
American Ground, Unbuilding the World Trade Center, William Langewiesche. A collection of Langewiesche’s pieces on the pile for The Atlantic.
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Tom King. This is the comic book that the upcoming Supergirl movie will be based on. I’ve never read a super hero comic book before; this was beautiful and interesting and I will watch the movie.
Killing Season: A Paramedic’s Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Opioid Epidemic, Peter Canning. He’s a good writer; he used to work as a speechwriter for Connecticut senators and a governor. Then it’s just good stories and polemics.
The Human Target, Tom King. A second super hero comic book. Also good, but diminishing returns.
Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day, Daryl Collins. This is an academic book based on data collected about a bunch of very poor people in Africa. The descriptives are great! $2 a day is so alien to all of us.
No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, **Gabriel García Márquez.
Bleak House, Charles Dickens.
★Super-infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Katherine Rundell. An excellent biography of John Donne; Rundell is weird enough (see her book about children’s books above) to keep it interesting if you’ve never read any Donne before.
Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer. A re-read of Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series. Still amazing, and going to be a comfort re-read forever.
Seven Surrenders, Ada Palmer.
The Will to Battle, Ada Palmer.
Perhaps the Stars, Ada Palmer.
Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War, Perry Anderson. A fun historiography of the couses of WWI, with biographies of six leading historians who wrote on the topic. Anderson is a Marxist historian and has no use for counterfactuals.
Hitler’s Personal Security, Peter Hoffman.
Proto: How One Ancient Language went Global, Laura Spinney. A history of the proto-Indo-European language. Some thoughts here.
The Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis. Lewis’ science-fiction. Some thoughts here.
Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Kirti Narayan Chaudhuri. This is a really good history of oceanic trade in the Indian ocean, until the European navies began to dominate it. It was the first book I read trying to undersatnd early-early Mozambique; on which it underprovided.
Before European Hegemony: The World System A. D. 1250 - 1350, Janet Abu-Lughod. A good theorizing of early trade as much more connected that we suppose. Each chapter on an individual world system (I read the Indian Ocean one with the msot interest) is excellent. The Abu-Lughod family is a bit of a dynasty.
Katabasis, R.F. Kuang. Kuang’s latest novel, about a couple of magical PhD students who go to hell to recover the soul of their dissertation chair. Nice concept, but I think Kuang has fallen off my must-read list.
Engines that Move Markets: Technology Investing from Railroads to the Internet and Beyond, Alasdair Nairn.
★Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala. A memoir of a Sri Lankan economist who loses her entire family (parents, husband, sons, siblings) in the 2004 tsunami. My favorite book of the year.
Bring the House Down, Charlotte Runcie. A fine novel about a theater critic who writes a one-star review about a one-woman show and then has a one-night stand with the woman. She takes it poorly.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, Samin Nosrat.
Northern Lights, Philip Pullman. The first of three books in Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. Some notes here.
The Subtle Knife, Philip Pullman.
The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman.
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata. A novel about a woman working at a convenience store in Tokyo and checking out of society’s expectations. Very good.
The Adversary, Emmanuel Carrère. A French and literary true crime book. Well-written.
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy. Some notes here.
The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green. An extremely earnest collection of essays reviewing aspects of Green’s life.
★A Company of Swans, Eva Ibbotson. A romance novel set in the Amazon. Ibbotson, like Wodehouse, writes the same book repeatedly, and like Wodehouse I love them every time.
A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique, William Finnegan. Thoughts on all of the Mozambique books are here.
★A History of Mozambique, M.D.D. Newitt. Thoughts on all of the Mozambique books are here.
Mozambique, Bartolome Mitre. Thoughts on all of the Mozambique books are here.
Blank Verse: A Guide to its History and Use, Robert Shaw. A book about unrhymed iambic pentameter. Very strong on the modern and post-modern uses (Keats, Tennyson, Frost, Nemerov, Hecht).
Can we Trust the Gospels?, Peter Williams.
Scram!, Harry Benson. This is a history of the British helicopter corps during the Falklands War.
Training for Sudden Violence: 72 Practical Drills, Rory Miller.
The Day’s Work, Rudyard Kipling. “William the Conqueror” was my favorite of these short stories.
Naples ‘44: a World War II Diary of Occupied Italy, Norman Lewis. Norman Lewis was a British intelligence officer in Naples; this is his diary through the year.
The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown. Some thoughts here.
Angels and Demons, Dan Brown. Some thoughts here.
Strange Pilgrims, Gabriel García Márquez.
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg.
The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World, A.J. Baime. Some thoughts here.
Big Sur, Jack Keruoac. Some thoughts here.
Cooking at Home, David Chang. A very meat- and simplicty-heavy cookbook.
The Battle between the Frogs and the Mice, A.E. Stallings. A modern translation of the Batrachomyomachia, a parody of the Iliad. Illustrated by Grant Silverstein.
The Mysteries, Bill Watterson and John Kascht. This book is the only public thing Bill Watterson has done since the end of Calvin and Hobbes. Don’t expect that! But really excellent art.
On the Calculation of Volume, Volumes I-III, Solvej Balle. A time loop story. Some thoughts here.
The U.S. Navy: A Concise History, Craig Symonds. Some thoughts here.
★Imperial Spain 1469-1716, John Huxtable Elliot. Some thoughts here.
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder. Some thoughts here.
The Evolution of Diplomatic Method, Harold Nicholson. Lectures on how the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French and so on did diplomacy.
The Employees, Olga Ravn. A short literate sci-fi, an oral history told to an HR committee.
Multiple Choice, Alejandro Zambra. A short experimental novel, in the style of a mutliple choice test.
The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme, John Keegan. Focused histories of three battles and what it was like to exist in that time and place.
★The Wide Wide Sea, Hampton Sides. A history of Captain James Cook’s third voyage. I kept bouncing off of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novels, so I decided to read the real thing and it was excellent.
★The Cuckoo’s Egg, Clifford Stoll. A real-life thriller about catching a hacker in the 1980s. Also very heavily located in Berekely.