Previous book lists: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018. Additionally, my Reading List has a full log of the books I read.

I regrettably skipped my yearly book reviews for 2023 and 2024, so for 2025 I’m including everything I’ve read in the past 3 years. This is an easier task than it should be, as in 2024 and 2025 I didn’t read nearly as many books as I had in the preceding years.

Non-Fiction

1. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

I have a soft spot for “history of science” books. Previous favorites in this category include Chaos (on chaos theory), The Information (on information theory), and Longitude (on the longitude problem). Without a doubt, ‌The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the single best history of science book I’ve ever read.

TMotAB is a long book, at ~886 pages in its physical form and a staggering 37 hours for its audiobook. But it’s entirely worth the commitment. Rhodes traces the history of the creation of the first atomic bomb, alongside a surprising number of related scientific precursors that were necessary to the creation of the bomb. Indeed, much of the book discusses pure scientific research that has little to do with the engineering of atomic weapons: the discovery of atomic structure, the discovery of the electron, proton, and neutron, the discovery of alpha radiation, the discovery of elemental isotopes, and many other foundational discoveries that culminated in the Manhattan Project.

Each of these gets its own careful narrative and introduction of the key scientific figures that contributed these discoveries. Reading it, you get a real sense of science being done in progression, starting from a place of ignorance and slowly making sense of the complexity of the world, rather than a retrospective “atomic weapons were inevitable and here is how they were built” story. There is a delicately created sense of cumulative scientific progress which eventually transitions into a growing sense of dread and, yes, inevitability, as the book transitions from a story of basic scientific research to directed weapons engineering.

The sections of the book related to the Manhattan Project were equally fascinating. Unsurprisingly (and thankfully), engineering nuclear weapons is a complicated process. The book describes several engineering dead-ends and missteps, as well as clashes between various engineering groups within the project. The final working device combined a staggering amount of work: the logistics to enrich the uranium, the precision of the timing devices used to detonate the warhead, the labor intensive means used to model the shockwaves in the blast that were critical in the design, and so on. The book emphasizes what a feat it was that this project succeeded while operating under the technological constraints of the 1940s.

The book is easily read as a cautionary tale for scientific progress. Atomic science greatly expanded our understanding of the world, but it also unleashed an extremely destructive set of weapons that destabilized and reshaped the geopolitical order for decades. Tellingly, until the first nuclear devices were built and demonstrated, there were voices in the scientific community saying that they were impossible to build. There were also those within the Manhattan Project concerned that detonating their device would start a chain reaction that would burn the atmosphere, a view they later ruled out prior to detonation, though the concern was quite real at the time. It’s hard to know what a “view of moderation” would have looked like in such a time of immense progress, even in retrospect. Nuclear weapons were possible to build, and they were terrible, but somehow we muddled through, at great cost. In any case: History rhymes.

TMotAB is worth the time to read it in full. Highly recommended; likely the best book I’ve read in the past 3 years.

1. I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter.

I Am a Strange Loop is a great companion to Hofstadter’s more popular work, ‌Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s an interesting exploration of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and Hofstadter’s characteristic interest in fractal, loopy models of systems.

Perhaps the most interesting portion of the book is its investigation of the neurosymbolic origin of the “self”, or the “I” concept. The book’s title is a pun on the notion that the “I” symbol is, itself, a strange loop.

Among the untold thousands of symbols in the repertoire of a normal human being, there are some that are far more frequent and dominant than others, and one of them is given, somewhat arbitrarily, the name ‘I’. …

Because of the locking-in of the ‘I’-symbol that inevitably takes place over years and years in the feedback loop of human self-perception, causality gets turned around and ‘I’ seems to be in the driver’s seat. …

My claim that an ‘I’ is a hallucination perceived by a hallucination is somewhat like the heliocentric viewpoint… The basic idea is that the dance of symbols in a brain is itself perceived by symbols, and that step extends the dance, and so round and round it goes.

Strange Loop is equal parts thought-provoking, humorous, and earnest. I quite enjoyed it. I wrote a full review of it here.

1. The Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies

The Demon in the Machine is an excellent exploration of information theory as it pertains to biological life. The thesis is that life is the interaction between matter and information, and the book argues this rather compellingly. Along the way, it discusses information theory, Maxwell’s Demon and its applications to biology, “information engines” that extract work out of information itself, and an argument for “top-down causality” via a rejection of a strict reductionist view of science.

The most interesting concept that I took away from Demon in the Machine was the notion that the paradox of Maxwell’s Demon has been resolved with the acceptance that information has a physical basis. Information is, in a real way, something that has tangible and measurable properties.

I wrote a full review of Demon in the Machine here.

1. Already Free by Bruce Tift.

I read Already Free over the course of several months, entirely on airplanes. I’m still digesting it and hope to write a full review of it at some point, but I strongly enjoyed this book. I initially read it on Kindle, but have bought physical copies – one for myself, and a few to give away.

Already Free’s tagline is “Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation”. If that strikes you as a little woo, that’s reasonable. Already Free walks the line between western psychotherapy, self-help, and spirituality. And I think it does this quite well. Tift discusses the complementary but distinct views of western psychotherapy and Buddhism. The west adopts a “developmental view”, which discusses psychology in a mechanistically causal fashion – “X happened to me when I was younger, therefore I act in Y way”. The work, therefore is to understand and decondition the historical causes of current dysfunction. In contrast, Buddhism adopts what Tift calls a “fruitional view”, which emphasizes a focus on the current moment – that the conditions for regulation and peaceful existence are always present, and therefore the work is to bring about these conditions.

While Already Free discusses the fruitional view in more detail than it does the developmental view, perhaps the key idea of the book is that these two views are entirely complementary. Tift discusses this in one of the most vivid sections of the book:

If we combine [the developmental and fruitional views] into one image, they might start to look like a spiral staircase. The fruitional view would be the circular aspect: we’re always revisiting the same issues over and over again. In practice, we say, “Well, I’ll probably work with this sadness, this loneliness, this feeling of abandonment until I die. I’m going to keep coming across it again and again, so I might as well develop a relationship with it. I’m going to practice feeling it, to see if it’s actually a problem.” The developmental view would be represented by a line, taking us from here to there. We’re trying to improve our lives, to create upward momentum. “I understand where my abandonment feelings originated, and I’m going to stop trying to have relationships with unavailable partners.” Combined, the circular motion and the line start to represent an ascending spiral. The vertical axes are our deeply embedded issues, which we keep having to deal with. But we can intersect these basic themes at increasing levels of maturation. We’re walking in a circular pattern, but things are evolving simultaneously. We continue to encounter our core vulnerabilities, but hopefully at greater and greater levels of awareness and skillfulness.

I quite enjoyed this book, and would strongly recommend it if you have any interest or practice in mindfulness, especially as it relates to self-development.

Fiction

I read less fiction than usual over this period, but these two books stood out.

1. Accelerando by Charles Stross.

Accelerando is a trip. I wish there were a hundred other books in its niche genre of “singularity fiction”, but I’ve yet to read anything else that comes close. It’s irreverent, sharp, and eloquently transhumanist. Reading it is like viewing an optical illusion which flickers between techno-optimist utopia and universe-tiling Gigeresque body horror dystopia.

It’s got Matrioshka brains, Computronium, post-scarcity economics, human uploads, interstellar travel, and more. It is the pinnacle of “techno high weirdness” fiction.

It’s shocking this book came out in 2005; it easily could have been written 10-15 years later and felt just as fresh. Strongly recommend.

1. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.

This was an entirely charming book, weaving together a Pacific Northwest setting, magical realism, and pieces of historical fiction. I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Ozeki herself. While I didn’t feel that the book quite stuck its landing, the ending was still satisfying and as a whole it was quite a good read.

Honorable Mentions

Antimemetics, by Nadia Asparouhova. – I wrote a full review of Antimemetics here. It largely discusses the modern information environment, and how some ideas resist spreading while others go gigaviral. We think a lot about the memetic viral ideas, but the ideas which resist spreading are often valuable – and not just because of their relative unpopularity. ‌Antimemetics captures the vibe of 2025 quite well.

At the Edge of Time by Dan Hooper. I had a few months where I was really into cosmology, and I largely credit this book for starting me down that rabbit hole. The premise of the book is that it tries to help you understand what the moments right after the Big Bang were like. It discusses the current state of scientific consensus, what the known gaps are, and what prospects we have for improving our understanding of the cosmos. I’ve long been interested in physics but couldn’t quite get myself to care about cosmology, but this book ignited my curiosity.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a great historical narrative book in the same vein as, for example, The Devil in the White City. It documents the murder of many members of the Osage Nation after the discovery of oil on their lands. It’s a fantastic whodunnit with a good payoff. Without spoiling anything: there are cowboys, private investigators, a nascent FBI, assassinations, poisonings, and so on. I enjoyed Killers of the Flower Moon more than I expected.

As always, happy reading!