the books I read in 2025
I don’t take the Goodreads “reading challenge” too seriously, but I did hit my target last year, and it felt good. I thought I’d try again this year and I did get it done – only just, though, as I finished my last three books in the last two days of the year. I think I would’ve liked to read a bit more through the year, but sometimes I just wasn’t feeling it. So it goes! I think this is a “structure your time” problem, but also it’s not the most pressing thing on my agenda, you know?
So, here’s what I read, not in order, and some brief notes.
Greg Egan
Last year, I read five Greg Egan books. This year, just two. First, I read The Book of All Skies, which I enjoyed. It’s the story of a group of people investigating the frontiers of their very weirdly-shaped world. As with many Egan books, there’s a lot of very weird math and physics under the hood, but it wasn’t critical to think too hard about them, and I think that made the story more enjoyable for me. In this book, they would’ve gotten in the way. That said, when I finished the book I went and read a bunch of Egan’s notes on the underlying ideas, which were interesting (insofar as I understood them).
Later, I read Schild’s Ladder, which was roughly the opposite. That is, it was one of the most physics-heavy Egan books I’ve read. More than once, I wanted to take photos of the page because it was a wall of thick jargon. I did not enjoy the book. At the beginning, I said, “Oh, this is going to be Egan’s take on Cat’s Cradle!” That would’ve been very interesting, especially because Egan and Vonnegut are so, so different. Or: maybe it was that, but I didn’t care to think about the comparison by the end. It reminded me of Vinge, too, but not in a way that excited me. Anyway, look, I’ve read a lot of Egan, and I will read more. This just didn’t hit home.
Effectiveness
“Effectiveness” is my shelf (or label or tag or whatever they call it now) in Goodreads for books on productivity and management. I have a lot of books in that queue, but I only make slow progress, for many reasons.
My favorite of the ones I read this year, by a long way, was Radical Candor. This is one of those books that I’d read about many times. It sounded not bad, but not amazing. But, of course, I’d only been seeing the shadows on the wall. It was great, and I hope I will go back to it in the future to try to puzzle out more ways to do better at my job. It really resonated with me, and I’ve brought it up over and over when talking to other managers, this year.
I also read Laziness Does Not Exist, which I didn’t love. It was okay. I feel the author would probably just give me a knowing “don’t you hear yourself??” look, but I kept wanting to say, “Yes, don’t work yourself sick, but honestly you are going too far.” I think the issue is that an indictment of a society-wide problem requires a massive-scaled critique. But “the Laziness Lie has you in its grip!”, over and over, was too much for me. (It was also funny that I finished this book just today, December 31st, and it had text saying “Don’t get worked up trying to meet your Goodreads goals”!)
Finally, as I wanted to get a bit more handle on some of my team’s rituals, I read Liftoff: Start and Sustain Agile Teams. I found it totally unremarkable, so I have no remarks.
Boss Fight Books
Boos Fight Books publishes short books about influential or otherwise important video games. The books are written by people who found the books to be important to them.
The first one I read was Animal Crossing by Kelsey Lewin. I’ve played all the main Animal Crossing games and have enjoyed them all. (Well, no, the iOS one was awful.) This book, at a pleasing 2⁸ pages, talked about the origin of the game, its weird launch history starting with the Nintendo64 DD, how it changed over time, and how the author enjoyed it (or didn’t) over time. I enjoyed the book, and felt like I’d read more like this – but it was also clear that a lot of the book was about the author’s life, which wasn’t really what I wanted. So, it wasn’t a bad book, it just wasn’t exactly what I wanted.
PaRappa the Rapper and ZZT books, which were similarly a mix of “I am very interested!” and “I am not particularly interested”. I knew what I was getting into, though, so I had no complaint for the authors. I just sort of wish there were more books about these games, focused more exclusively on the history and technology behind them.
I was surprised by how few of my peers remembered ZZT. I remember it being both impressive and influential. I was also surprised to learn how programmable its world builder was, and that ZZT (the game)’s author was that Tim Sweeney. (The book’s author was Anna Anthropy, which was one of the reasons I wanted to read this book.)
Finally, I read the book on Spelunky. I almost didn’t, but then I saw that the author was Derek Yu, also the primary creator of Spelunky itself! This book was by far closest to what I’d want from these books, if I was in charge. I got a copy for my nephews, too, who I introduced to the game a few years ago.
Stephen King
I read three Stephen King books this year, all story collections. I’ve been trying to catch up on reading all his story collections, and I’m very nearly done, now.
First, Four Past Midnight, from 1990. It contains four novellas, all of which I liked okay. I read it in part because I’d been doing some idle research into King’s repeated setting of Castle Rock, and saw that The Sun Dog (a story in this collection) was in some ways tied up with Needful Things.
After that, I read Hearts in Atlantis. This was a frustrating experience, because I kept thinking that maybe I’d read it already, twenty years ago, but I couldn’t be sure. This was extra frustrating because it seemed to me like one of King’s best books. Structurally and textually, it was excellent. I would recommend this to somebody who wasn’t sure they wanted to read Stephen King.
Finally, You Like It Darker. This is a collection of short stories published just last year. It was good! I enjoyed just about all of it, maybe most especially the final three stories. One of these was a sequel to Cujo, which I definitely did not expect to be reading!
Technical Books
This year, I’ve become the full-time lead of Fastmail’s Cyrus team. A big part of my team’s work is maintaining the open source Cyrus IMAP server. It’s written in C. My C is miserable, and was probably at its best in 1992. I need to get better. I read two C books this year: Effective C and Understanding and Using C Pointers. I think both were fine, but it’s hard to say. I’m not writing much C, day to day, so probably some of what I learned has already faded away. Still, I thought they were both clear and explained a bunch of topics that I hadn’t understood or only barely understood. Hard to judge, but definitely not bad. I can imagine going back to them later, when doing real work.
I already read tmux 3, a book
about tmux. I like tmux quite a lot, and
this isn’t the first little book I’ve read about it. It’s hard for me to say
what I thought of it. I think it was a bit of a mish-mash for me. I was
coming to it with a pretty long history with tmux, so lots of things were old
hat and not worth my time. But as with many complex tools, even among the
fundamentals there were lots of things I didn’t know. Here’s my biggest praise
for the book: After I read it, I went back to a few sections I’d flagged and
worked through my .tmux.conf, making improvements based on what the book
taught me.
Slough House
Okay, so my biggest category of books was the Slough House series by Mick Herron. A full third of the books I read this year were these books.
Here are the titles:
- Dead Lions
- Real Tigers
- Standing by the Wall
- Spook Street
- Nobody Walks
- London Rules
- Joe Country
- Slough House
- Bad Actors
- The Secret Hours
- Reconstruction
- Clown Town
Look, they’re all very good. That’s why I read them! The only notable exception, I think, is Reconstruction. It’s fine. It’s just the least Slough House-y book, really tied in only by one character, and structured very differently from the rest. I’d almost recommend skipping it. It was a bit of a bummer that it was the last one I read for months. The last one I read, Clown Town, was only released this year, and I read it roughly immediately. (Thanks, Gloria, for giving me a surprise copy!)
Other Fiction
I read Thorns by Robert Silverberg, which was a 1967 nominee for the Nebula and Hugo. I can’t remember why I read it. I think it got onto my reminders list ages ago, and then it was on deep discount. I would’ve done better to just not read it. In 1967, it may have been interesting, but it didn’t age well.
I read How Long ‘til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin, whose massively successful Broken Earth series I enjoyed a few years ago. This is a short story collection, and I’m a sucker for a good short story collection. And this was good. I’m told that LeVar Burton read two of these stories on his podcast LeVar Burton Reads, and I look forward to listening to them.
A few years ago, I finally read A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vinge. It was excellent, with a sprawling scope, a complex and coherent setting, and a whole mess of interesting ideas that all slotted together. Mark Dominus told me that the sequel, A Deepness in the Sky, was even better, but “very lonesome”. I agree! Vinge’s ability to spin so many plates, each one interesting on its own, and then to land them all into one neat pile was impressive and satisfying.
I read Ship Breaker and its sequel, The Drowned Cities, by Paolo Bacigalupi. They were okay, but I didn’t bother with the third book. Bacigalupi’s sci-fi work for adults is very good, and I’ve re-read a bunch of it. (I don’t think I re-read Pump 6 in its entirety this year, but I re-read a bunch of it.) The Ship Breaker books are young adult fiction, and all I could see on the page was all the depth and nuance missing compared to his other work. It probably would’ve been better when I was twelve. Given that it’s a book for that audience, who am I to complain?
I read Dungeon Crawler Carl because Bryan was reading it and said it sounded fun. It was fun, but I think too long for me. Everything about it was just a bit much. That could’ve been fun for two short books or so, but it was the first book in a seven book series, with books topping six hundred pages. I tapped out, and will probably read a summary some day.
Finally, I read Virtual Unrealities, a sci-fi story collection by the great Alfred Bester. I think I picked it up because I wanted to read Fondly Farenheit, which was good. I read it in the first week of January, so it’s been a while and I don’t remember it terribly well. My recollection was that I thought it was okay, but on the whole not anywhere near as good as The Demolished Man or The Stars My Destination. That’s the problem with writing massive, incredible successes, I guess!
Other Nonfiction
The Society of the Spectacle is the longest 150 page book I’ve ever read. According to Goodreads, I spent almost nine years reading it. It’s a lot, but it’s very good, and I think I will re-read parts of it again, probably several times. It’s one of the key texts of Situationism, a movement in post-WWII European socialism. The book is made up of 221 numbered paragraphs, which construct and explain the concept of “the spectacle”, a 20th (and, I’d say, 21st) conception of the problems of capitalism and, to an extent, imagined solutions. It’s short, but each paragraph deserves a good long think. You can’t just sit down and read the book in an afternoon the way you could a 150 page book about Animal Crossing.
For a long time, I have wanted to read more detailed writing on the Noble Eightfold Path, so I finally did. I read The Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the End of Suffering by Bhikku Bodhi. I’m glad I did, but it’s not easy to recommend generally. First, you need to be interested in Buddhism in general. Then, you need to have read enough about it (I think) that you want to read what is almost a technical manual about some of the core tenets. It’s a bit like reading a catechism, in which serious religious, metaphysical, and practical questions are answered in great and careful detail for the dedicated lay reader. I wish it had been a bit more focused on description and less on instruction. That is: I wanted to read analysis of and relationship between the eight practices, rather than a book intended to convince me of their importance. Still, this got close and I’m glad I read it.
What’s next?
I have no idea! Well, not much of an idea. Goodreads reminds me that I’m currently reading books about Eiffel, Rust, and WebAssembly. I received a few books for Christmas, and of course I already have a huge backlog of owned and unread books. There are just a few Egan novels I haven’t read yet. Lots of books remain on my “effectiveness” shelf. We’ll see where the year takes me.
One thing is seeming increasingly likely, though. I’ve read Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun three (I think) times, now. These books get better as you re-read them and try to work out the many mysteries within them. Last time I read them, I thought, “When I read these again, it will be with a notebook for taking notes.” I think this is the year. I might also finally listen to ReReading Wolfe an epic-length podcast that goes through the books chapter-by-chapter, just for people who are re-reading the books, so spoilers a-plenty. I’ve been thinking about trying to find old hardback copies of the books to mark up, but it seems like most of them are quite expensive!
At any rate, maybe in a year I’ll write another blog post like this one. If I do, I hope it will be able to mention at least 36 books I’ve read in 2026.