2025-12-26

I read 16 books this year. The full list is at the bottom, and on Goodreads. These are the books I recommend. Mostly nonfiction, one fiction.

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang

Dan Wang is a China expert whose book came out this year.

The main idea in Breakneck is that the US is a lawyerly society while China is an engineering state, and at the same time the two peoples are similar in temperament. Each chapter focuses on a specific domain - high tech, the one-child policy, Zero COVID. China applies engineering to social problems as well. The one child policy chapter was particularly harrowing.

It’s mind boggling how much rail is built, how many highrises. A main takeaway for me is that building big public projects produces civic pride.

A fast and engaging read, highly recommended! And if you need more, Tyler Cowen’s blurb on the book says

The best recent book on China, on China and America, and, arguably, the best book of the year flat out.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

I love Cormac McCarthy! His writing style is minimal and with incredible depictions of landscapes and personalities. This was the book that launched him into the mainstream. You should also read Blood Meridian.

It’s set in the late 1940s and follows a pair of teenage boys who go to Mexico to work as cowboys. An incredible and tragic coming of age book about love, fairness, and the end of the old West.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

Bryan Cantrill’s favorite book and won a Pulitzer Prize, do you need more convincing?

A book about the male urge to build something great. It follows Data General Corporation’s skunkworks project as they design (and debug!) a new computer in the 1980s. The team is led by the enigmatic Tom West. He hires mostly college graduates, who of course end up working night and day for years.

I read this in 2019 but enjoyed it even more the second time round. I recommend it to any engineer who would recognize themselves in it.

Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft by G. Pascal Zachary

Like The Soul of a New Machine, this follows a big technology project: The building and shipping of Windows NT at Microsoft.

As project leader Dave Cutler says, the creation of Windows NT may be the last time anyone ever assembles a team to build a completely new computer operating system, and this book gives a good account of the personalities, the stresses, and the working environment involved in making it happen.

Recommended, but don’t pick this over The Soul of a New Machine.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

A collection of biographies of groups of hackers from the 1950s through the 1980s. Mainframe hackers, hardware hackers, game hackers.

I enjoyed this a lot. Although at almost 500 pages you need to be interested in this stuff.

The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025 by Dwarkesh Patel, Gavin Leech

Dwarkesh, still in his early twenties, came out of nowhere to create an excellent podcast that I really enjoy. He does hour-long interviews with public intellectuals, executives, academics, engineers. He’s done many interviews focused on AI, and this book is a compilation of what leaders in the field think.

It’s a great read if you’re familiar with recent AI developments. It’s surprisingly well-edited and fun to read.

Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing by Randall E. Stross

10 years after starting apple and having started the personal computer revolution, Jobs resigned after a clash of visions with the new CEO. This is when he starts NeXT. NeXT flops commercially, but is bought by Apple after 13 years. Jobs, having now returned to Apple, has an incredible second stint at Apple. This is of course when they invented the iPod and iPhone.

Crucially, this book is written before Jobs’ final arc. This book is just about NeXT and how thoroughly Jobs messed up, and it’s very interesting to read. A lot of hubris, overengineering, and failing to consider the tradeoffs necessary to produce a good business. It’s a very different book than the biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson, which is a lot more favorable to Jobs.

The operating system developed at NeXT, NeXTSTEP, became the foundation of what’s now macOS and iOS, so today we have a lot to thank them for!

Full list

• All the Pretty Horses (1992) by Cormac McCarthy
• Writing for Developers: Blogs that get read (2025) by Piotr Sarna, Cynthia Dunlop
• The Crossing (1994) by Cormac McCarthy
• The Soul of a New Machine (1981) by Tracy Kidder (reread)
• Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft (1994) by G. Pascal Zachary (reread)
• A Philosophy of Software Design (2019) by John Osterhout (reread)
• Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers (2019) by Andy Greenberg
• Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing (1993) by Randall E. Stross
• Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue (2018) by Ryan Holiday
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984) by Steven Levy
• The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change (2022) by Tanya O. Reilly
• UNIX: A History and a Memoir (2019) by Brian W. Kernighan (reread)
• The Art of Readable Code: Simple and Practical Techniques for Writing Better Code (2010) by Dustin Boswell (reread)
• Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (2025) by Dan Wang
• The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025 (2025) by Dwarkesh Patel, Gavin Leech
• Too Big to Fail (2009) by Andrew Ross Sorkin