What I Read in 2025

This year I read 30 books (just 2 in Spanish).

January

• Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life
• Sprawball - The belated realization that 3 points are more than 2 points has dramatically changed basketball. This book has excellent data visualizations showing how much the game has changed. Personally, I mostly like the modern game, but basketball isn’t static and I thought he had some good suggestions for tweaking the rules. In particular, I loved the idea to make the corners a restricted area similar to the paint. Long ago we restricted the most valuable area (under the basket) so players can’t just stand there. I think it is reasonable to do the same for the corners. Getting rid of players standing still in the corner would be an improvement.
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - The discipline of his life is impressive. A tender book about accepting one’s limitations. His desired epitaph of “Novelist and runner. He never walked” is pretty great.
• La amiga estupenda (Dos amigas 1) - Spanish Figured I would be reading a translation from the Italian in any case and so might as well read it in Spanish. I could tell this was objectively excellent literature, but for whatever reason it didn’t really grab me.

March

• Wuthering Heights - I found the reading I did about the book after finishing it more interesting than the book itself. In particular, the multiple layers of unreliable narrators opens the book up to various very different interpretations. But solely as a story I didn’t understand the characters’ behavior.

April

• Abundance - I think we can have a society that grows richer and takes care of the less fortunate. I’d very much like to see a liberalism that builds.
• Revenge of The Tipping Point

May

• Strong Towns
• Thinking Basketball
• The Martians
• The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50
• How Infrastructure Works - The actual discussion of infrastructure was interesting. The author seemed to be having an internal struggle between an optimistic, abundance mindset, and a more conventional leftist pessimism about capitalism. When talking about concrete things I found myself agreeing with her. When she started talking about collectivism and the evils of the profit motive and how all things should just be provided to all people without costs I found myself rolling my eyes aggressively.

June

• Longitude
• How to See - I found this a bit disappointing. The photos and groupings were interesting. There were a few exercises sprinkled throughout that I thought would be good for developing mindfulness about the built environment. But I found the author’s relentless contempt for modernity frustrating.
• How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius - It was fine. Some good anecdotes. Wanted more from it.

August

• Mastering Private Equity
• Artemis - I love “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary”. This wasn’t on the level of those but was a fine beach read.
• Hip-Hop is History - Listened to this as an audiobook as we were driving to the beach. Spending a couple hours with Questlove sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of hip-hop history is not a bad way to spend a drive
• Freedom’s Forge This was the optimistic story of America doing hard things that I needed. Immigrants like Bill Knudsen came to America, drove innovation by pioneering mass production in the car industry, and then applied those lessons to convert all of American industrial might to defeat the Nazis. We can do hard (and good) things together and we can do them via private industry.
• The Body: A Guide For Occupants
• Never Split the Difference

September

• Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future -
• Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier Spanish

October

• The Nvidia Way
• The Origins of Efficiency - I’m a fan of Construction Physics so pre-ordered this book as soon as it was announced.

November

• Expensive Basketball
• Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
• The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports - This was excellent. A story of a difficult—but loving—father and son.¹ Alternates memoir chapters of the author with chapters focused on the stories of other runners. The Julia Lucas chapter will stick with me forever (in particular the greek tragedy in a 5k of her 2012 Olympic Trials race)

December

• Babel - 200 pages in I thought this was going to be one of my favorite books of the year. Very well written. The magical system of silver was promising and the prose was excellent. But I was let down by the lack of nuance as the book developed.
• How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology - My level of knowledge of biology is whatever was in IB Bio 25 years ago. There is a lot we’ve learned that I didn’t understand. If nothing else, this book fully disabused me of the idea that DNA / the genome represnts a “blueprint” for life. So much of development is contingent on various physical and chemical processes that have nothing to do with information encoded in DNA.