What I read in 2025.
You can see my reading list here here. This was a pretty good year for reading. Part of it was because I had my 5 year sabbatical at work which 6 weeks paid time off, but also found a better balance of reading.
I started reading some economics books this year. I read some of Wolfgang Streeck's Taking Back Control at the end of 2024. I started with The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner in 2025. This was a good book I thought and went through the history of economics in the major figures. It also took them seriously as philosophers, since economics is not only a science but arguably a philosophy at the core. The treatment of each thinker was balanced and ended with Joseph Schumpeter, who I want to read more of.
The next economics book I read was Chip War by Chris Miller. This was a very fun read due to the topicality but also the fact that computer chips are a great example of how trade has evolved in the last 50 years through continuous offshoring dynamics. It shows the logic of why offshoring happens, but also the costs of offshoring the the MAGA regime highlights and economists like Robert Gordon warn contribute to a long term slow down of growth as well. It also shows the bipartisan risks of critical infrastructure being offshored.
Slightly economics focused but also work related was Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charlie Munger. I did not finish this one, mostly due to the repetitive nature of the book. The first 3 chapters if I recall correctly were sufficient. I think Charlie would have agreed as well. The main takeaway I got from it, besides some good old fashioned Midwestern values, was that investing should be more serious. Munger and Buffet's strategy is the opposite of the hedge funds that are making trades weekly if not daily on their accounts. Imagine you had a punch card with 10 punches, and you could only make 10 investments in your entire life. You would take those investments much more seriously than if you traded every day. The way hedge funds make up for it is by using many signals and analytics, but so far the Munger and Buffet theory works in practice, execution they say is still extremely hard.
Last of the economics books I (mostly) made it through was The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon. This was an extremely large book. It also contained a lot of precise technological jargon and graphs, I skipped these mostly, except the very interesting ones in the beginning. I also skipped a decent chunk at the end when it got too close to present day, and some of his repetitive reflections on why growth is slowing down and why growth was a one-off achievement from the second industrial revolution. The thesis of the book is just that, one-off events, largely that took place and became prevalent in 1870-1970 accounted for the Great Leap of American economic growth. Since then, it has slowed down. The book is largely an argument in defense of this in many sections of the economy. Another aspect of the book is the level of detail and finding of quotes. There are so many interesting aspects of the book, so many real quotes from Americans long gone that give insight into how not only Americans lived, but most of the world for centuries. Another secondary thesis of the book is that GDP is always undercounting the value of good and services, and even if it was more accurate, it would also never capture the quality of life improvements that things like the internal combustion engine improved, such as the fact that by swapping out cars for horses, New York City no longer smelled like shit all the time.
This category is a bit harder to pin down. Since reading Robert Pippin's The Culmination, I have been thinking more about meaning, especially in modernity,in philosophy, instead of the classical philosophical problem of "intelligibility". Two books that were directly up this alley are the The Meaninglessness of Meaning, a collection of essays published in the London Review of Books, and The Witness of Poetry by Czesław Miłosz. Another was Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which I need to reread. I read again a bit of Girard this year, various writings by him and others on him or inspired by him. A slightly adjacent book was the interesting The Horse, the Wheel, and Language on the origins of the proto-indoeuropean language family. These were similar to some of the archaeological and anthropological works I was reading in the Girardian vein as well.
Heidegger, Pippin, and then Girard has taken me into the study of religion. I read the entire Bible this year, the King James Version. I read I would say 90-95% of it, some of it I skipped, the long begats and the many regressions of various Jewish peoples back to paganism. For specific theologians, I read some of Luther and Augustine's Confessions. I had two collections on Christian mysticism, one short and one much longer, that I read most of. I read an older book, called Hebrew Myths, that gives a classic comparative religion treatment to the old Hebrew myths in the Bible and the surrounding literature that was continued on them outside the Bible. I also enjoyed Marilynne Robinson's Reading Genesis quite a bit.
This year I read the most literature so far, and looking to read more this year. The most enjoyable reading was both works by Homer and East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I gave up on the Aeneid, Paradise Lost, and the latter two books of Dante. I found the Aeneid and Paradise Lost to be dissapointing attempts at imitating Homer. Dante was too repetitive and boring as well. I am sure there is a poetic value to them, especially in their original language. I usually enjoy classics, and found value in both Gilgamesh and Beowulf, but no one does epic poetry better than Homer. I particularly thought Virgil was boring and put it down twice before ultimately abandoning entirely, Virgil seething with rivalry with Homer. There were other books I read and enjoyed by Coetzee, Cormac McCarthy, Huysmans, Roth, Robinson, Houellebecq, and others you can see on the list. This year, plan to read more Faulkner, Hemmingway, Mann, Didion, Musil, and others. I might stick more to American literature though. Currently reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.
I try to read a few work books here and there each year. This year was a little light on that. I only read, partially, the classic Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. I found it well written for professional reading. The way sections are written in a system design style, from initial solution to more complex trade offs was great, and I know enough of it I think to use it how most use it, as a reference book. The next work book I am going for is An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson. I watched a video presentation of his on it and think it will be a good book as I enter the second year of being an engineering manager.
There is always a lot of philosophy. I read Kant by Marcus Willashcek. I read his more academic work before, and enjoyed this one a lot. There was a good chunk of Nietzsche and Heidegger this year still, some Kierkegaard, and Emerson. I read the Self-Overcoming of Nihilism by Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani. The debate on secularization in Dialectics of Secularization between Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger was also interesting, Post-Secular Reason. Lastly, I started a reading of the three volumes of Also a History of Philosophy by Jürgen Habermas. I am only on the first volume, but it is a good read. This will probably take me throughout most of 2026. You can see my notes on the book Also a History of Philosophy.