Every book I read in 2025

In the Christmas of 2024, I was surprised to unwrap some presents to reveal good old-fashioned paper-filled books. I started reading them every day and found myself thoroughly enjoying them. "Reading books is a cool hobby," I said to myself. "If only it were free!" Then I remembered that there is a public library within walking distance of the Mines campus. I didn't read quite as much as I'd have liked—and I certainly didn't finish as many books as I started—but I did find a way to wind down before going to bed that's much healthier than doomscrolling. So, mostly for myself, but maybe to the benefit of some of my readers, I'm going to list them, in order of most enjoyable to least enjoyable.

Books I finished, from best to worst

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

This is the best book I've read since Les Misérables in 8th grade. In fact, it's among the best I've read, ever. Uniquely, it takes place over some forty years of the protagonist's life, and it does so extremely well. Little recurring themes, scenes here and there, all point to this theme. When I finished, I kept thinking about the whole story, nostalgic for years past that I'd read about only days ago.

Additionally, the protagonist is incredibly likeable and relatable, and finds himself living in a metaphorical microcosm for most of the book. Oh, and a Rachmaninoff piece is heavily featured. I adore Rachmaninoff.

If you only look into one book from this list, read this one. It has earned my highest recommendation.

I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin

Finally, a book about real-life problems that doesn't take place 180 years ago. Enjoy a delightful character-driven adventure involving Reddit, influencers, cryptocurrencies, furry hentai artists, and the great cesspit of internet culture. Great fun, but not without meaning. I'm glad I own this; I expect to find myself reading it again.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte

The book earns its readers' attention with caricatures of legendary paleontologists and stories of their fossil discoveries before going into the science of what made that animal interesting.

Brusatte does a good job emphasizing that dinosaurs were not the monsters we see in movies but rather well-adapted animals that ate and lived and reproduced just like modern ones. Overall, this was a fun read, and I learned a lot. My sole complaint is that sometimes facts are over-sensationalized. I don't know how many times I had to read that T. rex's teeth were the size of bananas. That said, it's not as egregious as pop science shows can be.

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

An autobiography of someone with a rather traumatic childhood, Angela's Ashes preserves the story of a unique culture at a unique time. The style is excellent; it's well-written, draining, or humorous whenever it should be. The book has a bit of a Ralph Moody-esque vibe to it, but a little darker. It was good for me to think about what it might be like to grow up in an environment so unlike the one in which I was raised. I was a little puzzled by the ending, as it seemed to be strictly narrative when it had the opportunity to be more than that. Overall, I'd still consider it one of the better works I read this year.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

I heard about this book from Elijah's blog post and thought I'd try it. I'm glad I did. It's a little bit predictable, but not in a bad way. It had a great message and vivid imagery. My biggest problem was that Haig's prose is adequate but not memorable. I don't get the "master at work" feeling that I do with Mark Twain or E. B. White. If this book is what you're looking for, give it a try!

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

I liked this one as a child. I remember when I was a kid I was sick in bed for a weekend and read this over and over. It's still a great classic, but I'm too old for it now. I only read it because I was waiting for something else to arrive at the library.

The Children of Men by P. D. James

I watched the movie first, and I think the movie was significantly better. The two are very different. Making myself finish this made me feel like I was reading Brave New World for high school English all over again. The same style, the same issue: storytelling is used as a device to illustrate the thesis rather than being recognized as an essential part of an art form, worthy for its own sake. This is the typical pitfall of speculative fiction. Go watch the movie instead. Do note that part of what makes the movie good is the intensity of not knowing the ending, so it's best to go in without any research. Just know that it's neither happy nor light.

Books I started but didn't finish, from best to worst

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

This one was recommended to me by a friend. I think it was quite good, but it had the misfortune of being checked out at the same time as Brusatte's dinosaur book, so it didn't have much chance in the competition for my attention.

The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley

After reading "Ozymandias" in middle school and again in high school, Shelley's name became memorable to me. Many of the books I tried fell short of my goal of improving my own English. Shelley most certainly compensates in this area. Sometimes when listening to classical music I feel very connected to the music itself. It need not imitate an army or a pair of lovers or a sermon on a rainy Sunday afternoon; it is music itself, and therefore intrinsically beautiful. I've never felt this in English until I read "Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude". A more correct enjoyer of poetry than I would hesitate to rip lines out of their context, but for the sake of my blog I reproduce this favorite excerpt:

Hither the Poet came. His eyes beheld
Their own wan light through the reflected lines
Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth
Of that still fountain; as the human heart,
Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,
Sees its own treacherous likeness there…

My library's edition included prefaces written by Shelley's wife, Mary Shelley, also an excellent commander of English. I enjoyed reading those poems which my attention span allowed me to read.

Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis

Varoufakis's thesis widely resonates in the online circles I frequent, though I don't understand it much myself. I think it's very important that I know how to think independently; I've seen what happens when people can't do that. What better way to open the mind than to learn more about a viewpoint with which I was previously unfamiliar? I agreed with a lot of the book, but I felt like I pretty much got it when I was about halfway through.

I guess I haven't thought about it enough to state much here. I noticed some points where lack of technical knowledge seemed to lead to shaky conclusions. However, I must concede Yanis seems quite prescient when considering recent outages in AWS and Cloudflare. It's dangerous to build almost all our infrastructure upon the products of an oligopoly.

More generally, it's alarming that politicians seem to have no trouble ceding control to large private organizations. This I believe to be a product of multiple issues, the most notable of which is that non-technical politicians making policies about technology are inherently uninformed.

Deep Work by Cal Newport

The thesis is wonderful; the writing is not. I don't know what it is about this tone, but it drives me crazy. I tolerated a few chapters before deciding that deep work is good, I suck at making it a habit, and reading another 200 pages is unlikely to change that.

For one of my high school English classes, I had to write a research paper. I procrastinated until the last couple of days and turned in a product I wasn't proud of. When I confessed this to my teacher, lamenting the fact that this was not my first time making this mistake, he replied, "Would that we could all learn a lesson at the first opportunity!" I think deep work is like that. I'll need another four or five lessons before much happens.

The End of Craving: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well by Mark Schatzker

This title came on my radar after I commented to someone about how scientific experiments don't work very well in the medicine field because there are so many confounding variables. I don't think it was written to answer that concern. Instead, it was the ramblings of some guy who did a lot of Googling about food and decided to write it in the most annoying style I have ever endured. Anecdote after anecdote clearly written for someone with no attention span (admittedly, I guess that makes me the target audience) but somehow dry nevertheless. Part of the reason I'm reading books is to improve my language skills. That means I need to read books written by someone better at writing than me. Perhaps Schatzker has mastered the act of regurgitating the self-help best-seller formula, but he's no Dickens when it comes to his prose.

Conclusion

I'm glad I rediscovered the hobby of reading this year. Despite being the cheapest of all my hobbies, costing an accumulated $0 at the time of writing, it has a lot to offer. It makes me smarter, improves my communication skills, teaches me something new, and exposes me to novel ideas (ha ha). It's also quite a bit healthier than alternatives. Hopefully I will find myself continuing to read for the rest of my life. If you used to read but haven't picked up a book in a while, I'd encourage you to try it again!