What I Read in 2025

The annual book list has become a fun tradition for me over the past twelve years as a way to track what I’m reading and my impressions. I am prone to book chugging, so the pausing and recording is a practice I find valuable.

Over the past few years, I’ve also shared some of my highlights and thoughts as dedicated posts throughout the year. If you read posts within the miscellaneous or reading categories of the site, this is one way I’ve been learning in public/showing my work. For those who enjoy such things, several of my takeaways from my 2025 reading will appear in 2026.

This summer, I took on a new role as Program Director for the radiology residency at the Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, and I got rid of exactly nothing in terms of other commitments, so things remain…busy.

1. Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2. The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr
3. The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell
4. Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell
5. Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell (Sowell is an old and often cited conservative economist. I am genuinely surprised it took me this long to ingest any of his work. Regardless of your political leanings, it is very much worth reading).
6. Alchemy by Rory Sutherland (maybe my favorite book on marketing ever?)
7. The Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman (I am annoyed that I ever started reading another LitRPG series before it finished its run, though Dungeon Crawler Carl is at this point the only one to transcend nerdom to reach broader culture and is slated for film)
8. The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant
9. The Magicians by Lev Grossman (Magicians Trilogy #1; dark, frenetic fantasy, moving the magic school concept into college for a different kind of angst. Overall: really, really good.)
10. The Silver Arrow by Lev Grossman (Grossman’s middle-grade fantasy book, which I bought for my son, who understandably enjoyed it more than I did)
11. Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari (a mostly troubling book on the power of information networks: relevant always, especially relevant in the era of social media, serious food for thought in the coming era of AI)
12. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Wouldn’t this be nice! Also, great cover.)
13. The Magician King by Lev Grossman (The Magicians #2)
14. The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom
15. The War of the Noobs by Ryan Rimmel (Noobtown #8)
16. Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris (Sedaris is one of the best humorists/essayists alive?)
17. Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Constantly referenced but not always correctly, finished up Taleb’s Incerto series)
18. When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi (Scalzi writes highly enjoyable, fast-paced sci-fi, including a lot of light-hearted standalone romps. The premise for this one? The moon literally turns into cheese.)
19. How Not to Invest by Barry Ritholtz (see his take on the forecasting-industrial complex and the narrative fallacy.)
20. Providence by TurtleMe (The Beginning After the End #11)
21. From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks (a few quotes here; the book is intended for a mid-life crisis, but why wait?)
22. The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman (The Magician’s #3, satisfying finale)
23. The Bear by Andrew Krivak (Spare, beautiful prose)
24. He Who Fights with Monsters 12 by Travis Deverell
25. Wild Problems by Russ Roberts (Solid decision-making treatise; my takeaways here)
26. Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen
27. The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (beautifully written, if sometimes a bit overwrought, with some obvious parallels to The Bear though a bit more heavy-handed.)
28. Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson (Stormlight #5, first arc finale: truly impressive mechanics to make a story of this scope function and build to its climax. But. The X-Men of mental health and pop psychology is frankly a little bit tedious. I appreciate the sentiment that flaws can also be strengths and vice versa, but every character is filling roles that are just way too tidy, like a tick on a big checklist. Also, the number of Cosmere Easter eggs and references is becoming oppressive.)
29. Finding Ultra by Rich Roll
30. The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis (Interesting look at the friendship and Nobel Prize-winning work of Kahneman and Tversky; if you somehow haven’t already read it, take the tour of the mind that is Thinking, Fast and Slow and its spiritual sequel, Noise)
31. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
32. The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln (a 16th-century German-Jewish widow writing for her children, which I’ve shared brief pieces of here and here).
33. Happy Go Lucky by David Sedaris
34. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (like Snow Crash depicted the metaverse, the Diamond Age is an interesting exploration of a possible AI/technology age from back in the cyberpunk era of the 1980s)
35. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (I saw this on the list of books that became public domain this year. Hemingway’s prose style is both lively and spare and has aged better than most.)
36. Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod. (I’ve been reading Mod’s newsletter for years, a fan from his early days before transient minor celebrity courtesy of the inclusion of some of his atypical/interesting recommendations for travel to Japan in the New York Times’ annual travel list [coincidentally, it seems like everyone is visiting Japan these days]. I do not know him, but his writing is generally so intimate that it creates one of those strange para-social relationships, such that even as a reader across the world, you feel like you do. This is a book about walking across the Kii peninsula (per Mod, the “drooping penis” of Japan) and a memoir about his childhood. It is good. I don’t write any narrative nonfiction like this, but if I did, I’d only hope it would be as affecting.)
37. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2023 Pulitzer Prize winner; holy moly, this book is dark. Impressive retelling of Dickens’ David Copperfield reimagined for the opioid crisis in Appalachia.)
38. Draft no. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee (McPhee is, like, really good. His discussion on structure, among other things, is great).
39. Can I Retire? By Mike Piper, CPA (answer: no)
40. The Wealth Ladder by Nick Maggiulli (good/useful conception, discussed here)
41. The Laws of Medicine by Siddhartha Mukherjee (very short book, discussed here)
42. Deep Future by Pablos Holman (a mostly optimistic look at the need to move from the lucrative but shallow software to deep tech)
43. On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (My feeling when reading any old philosophy is always how bizarrely timeless it is. There is nothing new under the sun.)
44. The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel (Published in 1951 by a Polish-American rabbi. You’d never know English was not his native tongue. The beautiful central argument is that the Sabbath is a cathedral in time instead of space.)
45. The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel (probably my least favorite of her books but still excellent; I loved Station Eleven and also really enjoyed Sea of Tranquility)
46. The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel (good sequel to The Psychology of Money)
47. On the Edge by Nate Silver
48. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (My class never read this in high school. I remember one of the other literature classes did and the suggestion that it was relatable. Maybe I’m too old, but Holden is insufferable.)
49. Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
50. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Also in the public domain as of a few years ago.)
51. Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, edited by Manjula Martin
52. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (Catcher in the Rye meets the 1990s),
53. Shopkeeping by Peter Miller. (I’ve never been to Miller’s famous bookstore in Seattle, but now I’d really like to. Owning a store seems incredibly difficult, but also, if you had one that had loyal customers and a real neighborhood vibe, maybe super fulfilling?)
54. The Worlds I See by Dr. Fei-Fei Li (Half history of AI, half American dream memoir of a remarkable scientist and her journey. Some people are just built differently.)
55. Going Infinite by Michael Lewis (This story about crypto and SBF is just ludicrous from top to bottom.)

Here are the prior years: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.