Some books I read in 2025

The most impactful reads of 2025 are in bold.

• Why Machines Learn Anil Ananthaswamy (2023): A book that presents Machine Learning so lucidly I came away naively thinking it can’t be so simple. Scratch a bit deeper, though, and you find a more complex reality and undergirding theory than what’s presented.
• Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery Theodore H. Schwartz (2024): Brain surgery comes across as trying to fix a car with a chainsaw. Considering the limitations of intervention, neurosurgery’s increasing specificity and corresponding effectiveness is truly inspiring.
• ADHD 2.0 (2021): I listened to ADHD 2.0 as it dawned on me that ADHD is both ubiquitous and might run in my family and profession. What I’d been characterizing among peers as a certain anxiety, awkwardness, depression, unevenness might be seen through the lens of upstream ADHD creating a constellation of downstream symptoms. The upcoming decades will continue to add nuance to ADHD’s various subtypes and treatments.
• Candide (1759), Micromegas (1752) Voltaire: I’d last read Candide in highschool, but had forgotten its punchline. In 2025 he’s still funny and relevant. I was first introduced to Micromegas through Ada Palmer’s thought experiment in Too Like the Lightning: would we take Mr. Micromegas, in his far greater capacity, as God? And, if you accept him as God, would ending Micromegas end our Universe?
• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder Nassir Nicholas Taleb (2012): I didn’t finish Antifragile: after Black Swan and the “philosophers stone” chapter I was hitting diminishing returns.
• Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon (2019): Against the Day sent me chasing historical threads to contextualize its backdrop. This BOGO biography describes how Hamilton’s theory of electromagnetism was informed by Faraday’s experimentation. A Whiggish and workman-like history, it was a good first read on Faraday and Maxwell.
• Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (1966): Continuing to trace the electromagnetic thread, I read my first biography on Nikola Tesla. Over the course of my life, Tesla’s self-proclaimed reputation as the “greatest inventor” of the electromagnetic revolution appears to have been cemented, despite the reversals he experienced during his own time. This book seems to have played a key role in that rehabilitation, making the case for Tesla’s precedence in polyphase and non-hertzian wireless communication.
• My Inventions Nikola Tesla (1919): A relatively short autobiographical account by the inventor himself, parts admittedly felt like a bid to establish patent precedence in the eyes of the public. His work on polyphase motors and wireless communication. I particularly felt the loss naivete of when Tesla emphasized that his Global Wireless System, with it’s world-shaking potential for free energy, should remain under central control.
• Invisible Cities Italo Calvino (1972): The sign is not the thing, and other manifold conceits which words must fail.
• If on a Winters Night a Traveler Italo Calvino (1979): I read this with Caitria, my Other Reader. I enjoyed it as a bibliophile’s love story.
• Ficciones Borges (1944): A slow & satisfying read in Borges’s original Spanish. My fluency only gets me like 20% of the translation, but LLMs can handle the remaining 80%. I was particularly struck by “The Lottery in Babylon” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”.
• The Magus John Fowles (1965): The Magus was a difficult book to finish, however, as the characters claim, to explain is to give away the game. So, rather than some attempted synopsis, I’ll just say: what an excellent piece of post-modern metafiction which I’ll never read again.
• 2666 Roberto Bolaño (2004): 2666 is a hypnotic work, a Giuseppe Arcimboldo composite of literature, forming a horrifying grotesque. It interrogates the paradoxical power and futility of literature, and never reaches the catharsis of resolution. I picked it up, drawn by its reputation as a monumental Spanish language post-modern work, and it delivered a relentless dialectic of violence witnessed.
• Never Split the Difference Chris Voss (2016): A former FBI lead hostage negotiator’s self-aggrandizing take on negotiating, and well-seasoned with Voss’s war stories. Tips on mirroring and empathetic questioning are useful and interesting from a cognitive science perspective. That being said, I’ve found that communicating in a team environment, with it’s shared goals, takes a different toolkit.
• The Xenotext Christian Bok (2016, 2025): Two volumes of elegiac prose explaining how Bok encoded an Orphean sonnet into the DNA of Deinococcus radiodurans, his infernal grimoire. The first poem, the and ranks as the greatest books of poetry I’ve ever read.
• Gravity’s Rainbow Thomas Pynchon (1973): I’ve been working my way back through Pynchon’s historical pastiches, and, as promised, they’re all the richer on the second read. The archetypes and symbols pop out after being the first go indelibly stamped them on my brain.
• Against the Day Thomas Pynchon (2006): On my second read of AtD I tried to listen for the dualistic fugues that evolve and crescendo through his story, especially the interplay between the reality of the day perpendicular to the imaginary night.
• Bleeding Edge Thomas Pynchon (2013): The blurb on the dustcover tells of the dotcom crash and 9/11 and conspiracy and startups and NYC, all catnip from my own world. And, there, it disappoints: he gives no answers to the role of my existence as a American software engineer working in tech at startups or large corporations. Frankly, Pynchon doesn’t seem much concerned with that question at all, letting the answer fall to the status of subjective projection against a fundamentally unknowable and chaotic world. What is the bleeding edge, this phase shift where noise becomes information?
• Shadow Ticket Thomas Pynchon (2025): Pynchon continues to publish at 88, and his pen still drips psychedelic prose. This time he takes us on a journey through pre-WWI’s “dark passages of history”, his last unmapped decade from the twentieth century. Shadow Ticket is a new entry in his detective-driven noir canon: though not as expansive as his historical works, it’s here that his joy in writing shines through the paranoia.
• Chasm City Alistair Reynolds (2001): I didn’t finish this one, but the opening passage sure was satisfying.
• Fiasco Stanislaw Lem (1987): A first contact story of miscommunication and escalation leading to a fiasco. A well-told story, but humorless compared to his Cyberiad or The Futurological Congress, and I’m a sucker for a book which makes me laugh.
• Solaris Stanislaw Lem (1961): I came away with a similar feeling as my reaction to Fiasco: a well-told story that presents truly fascinating concepts, but not a story which left me enchanted.