Books I Read in 2025

Books I read in 2025:

• * The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinberg.
• Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich.
• A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution by Toby Green.
• The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. Stormlight Archive 1. Recommended by Emmett Shear as an example of nobility.
• Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. Stormlight Archive 2.
• * The Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter.
• Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening by Henry Shukman. I also attended a retreat with the author at Mount Madonna.
• * Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen. It takes bravery to just confess your assumptions and moral frameworks in this manner.

My top recommendations noted with a *.

The best book here is Stubborn Attachments, which is also quite short and available on audiobook. You probably won’t agree with his specific framework but it really highlights a lot of important cruxes that we should all should be dealing with regardless of our specific commitments. For example, if you are consequentialist adjacent, what is your discount factor? If it’s low you should care about climate change but also you should want to reduce taxes on the rich, because in the long term they will create wealth that can be taxed to improve future welfare. If it’s high, you should tax the rich but also not care much about long term climate impacts. How many of us are consistent in the way we think about the value of the future?

The Brian Potter book was fun too, lots of wild industrial porn. The modern world is a miracle that’s made possible by endless small optimizations that add up to huge improvements. Inspired me to burn a lot of time playing Factorio.

Aside from those this was a disappointing year in my book choices. Hopefully I am starting the new year off on a better foot with Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob.