It’s my birthday today so you’ll have to excuse me as I take this opportunity to wax poetic about one of my favorite activities: reading.

Here’s the list for everything I read in 2025, in chronological order.

The books

1. A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros
2. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
3. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
4. Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
5. The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
6. Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
7. The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by MJ DeMarco
8. Coming Into the Country by John McPhee
9. God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert
10. Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree
11. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
12. Hyperion by Dan Simmons
13. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatreby Keith Johnstone
14. The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
15. Alexander the Great by Robin Lane Fox
16. Of Men and Their Making : The Selected Non-Fiction of John Steinbeck by Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson
17. The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Financial Security by Scott Galloway
18. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
19. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
20. Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II by Robert Kurson
21. The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard
22. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
23. Jadoo by John A. Keel
24. The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy
25. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder
26. How to Make a Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs
27. Master of Middle-Earth: The Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien by Paul H. Kocher

insights and surprises

I read more biographies this year than I would have expected. It all started on a three month sabbatical that I took this summer with my fiancee. We hit 11 different countries in Europe and did all the usual museums, and one thing that kept coming up repeatedly was Alexander the Great. He seemed to have some claim to fame in every country that we visited; either he had conquered the place or there was a bust of him because some later ruler thought he was a cool dude and worthy of emulation.

Then on Paros, an island in Greece, I met a friendly local named Spyridon Chronis (??? how cool is that) who crafts incredible reproductions of ancient coins by hand. You can buy his stuff here. Since I had seen Alexander all over the place, I bought a coin-turned-pendant with his face on it and decided that I should probably learn more about the guy if I’m going to wear his likeness around my neck.

So, I read a biography about Alexander. TLDR: he was a pretty fantastic military leader who had a solid head start because he inherited his dad’s army, then maybe stretched himself too thin by trying to conquer most of the known world. While he’s a heroic figure, he also reminds me of the nuance that no one person is perfect and worthy of emulating 100%. His success met an untimely end due to hubris and unchecked ambition.

And then, maybe to get a bit more modern and America-centric, I decided to read two absolutely massive tomes about John D. Rockefeller and Warren Buffet, both “titans” in their own right who, similar to Alexander, we can pick out the good qualities to emulate, and learn from the bad qualities to avoid.

I guess three biographies isn’t that many, but it probably took me as long to read these three books as the rest of them combined.

my worst books of 2025

Looking back at the list, I don’t see any that gave me such a visceral negative reaction as to be deemed a “bad” book.

my best books of 2025

A Philosophy of Walking was really special. It’s one of those evergreen books that I could see myself coming back to again and again to pick out little nuggets of wisdom.

It’s about, well, the history and philosophy of walking, and how the practice of walking has influenced many of our greatest thinkers: Nietzsche, Rousseau, Kant, Thoreau, Gandhi, even going as far back as Diogenes the Cynic. I found it meditative and finished it with a profound appreciation for the simple act of walking in the woods.

Some favorite quotes:

I like to walk at my ease, and to stop when I like. A wandering life is what I want. To walk through a beautiful country in fine weather, without being obliged to hurry, and with a pleasant prospect at the end, is of all kinds of life the one most suited to my taste. [Rousseau]

Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement – in which the muscles do not also revel. All prejudices emanate from the bowels. – Sitting still (I said it once already) – is the real sin against the Holy Ghost. [Nietzsche]

After all – as the Epicureans had shown – he is rich who lacks for nothing. And the Cynic lacked for nothing, because he had discovered the pleasures of the necessary: the ground to rest his body, what he found to eat during his wanderings, the starry sky for a ceiling, springs to drink from. Well beyond the useful and the futile, the necessary suddenly made the entire world of cultural objects appear trivial, alienating, cumbersome, impoverishing.

All I need is a pair of shoes. [Hölderlin]

Go to any bookstore, at least in the US, and you’re guaranteed to see a few copies of Steinbeck books in stock: Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath, maybe even Travels with Charley and The Log From the Sea of Cortez if you’re lucky.

This book is quite different – it’s a selection of Steinbeck’s mostly short-form non-fiction writing that he wrote for various magazines and news outlets after he became famous. I found it this summer at a used bookstore in Paris called Librairie Les Apprentis and brought it back home with me, which you should know is an extremely high endorsement considering my limited luggage space on the trip.

It’s Steinbeck as a journalist, traveling the world (with short articles featuring Italy, France, Vietnam, Morocco, and more) and doing what Steinbeck does best: making pithy observations about the human condition, chronicling the world about him for us later generations to glimpse through his eye.

Last but not least, Jadoo. This is an odd book that my father-in-law recommended. He said that he had read it as a teenager and remembered being obsessed with it. Since my tastes generally align with those of 13 year old boys (see also: Tom Sawyer), I thought I’d check it out, and boy am I glad I did.

Jadoo is a Hindi word that means “black magic”. Keel, a young starving writer in the 1950s, decides to head off to the remotest (and often sketchiest) parts of the Middle East, Egypt, and India in search of the secrets of this black magic. The book is a travelogue of his adventures which include being invited to stay with some Yezidi devil-worshippers in Iraq, chasing deadly snakes in Egypt, searching for the abominable snowman in India, and much more.

As a skeptic myself, I appreciated the fact that Keel is inherently skeptical and is actively searching for ways to disprove all of the “black magic” that he encounters. It makes it all the more interesting when he finds things that he truly cannot explain. (Of course he might be fluffing the details a bit to make a good story, but we won’t hold that against him.)

in the end

In the end, I’m very pleased with what and how I read this year. There’s really no agenda, no checklist of books that I’m following, topics that need to be covered or page numbers per day to be achieved. For the most part I just pick what’s interesting to me, though I do try to throw in a “classic” every now and then to make sure I’m getting some exposure to what are widely regarded as the best books ever written. Whether or not I agree with that designation is immaterial; oftentimes the most interesting bits of information (about the books and about myself) come when I try to evaluate why exactly I didn’t like a book when so many other people think that it’s unrivaled.

Thanks for following along. If you’ve got a book to recommend for me to read in the new year, I’d love to hear it.

walker