Things I Read in 2025

Stuff I finished:

Non-Fiction:

• “Black Elk Speaks” - John G. Neihardt (audio book)

• “Siren’s Call” - Chris Hayes

• “Who is government?” - Michael Lewis

• “Careless People” - Sara Wynn-Williams (audio book)

• “Stories are Weapons” - Annalee Newitz

• “AI Con” - Emily Bender, Alex Hanna

• “More, Everything, Forever” - Adam Becker

• “The Empire of AI” - Karen Hao

• “Gilded Rage”- Jacob Silverman (audio book)

• “Here comes the sun” - Bill McKibben

• “Enshitification” - Cory Doctrow

• “Notes on being a man” - Scott Galloway

• “The Age of Extraction” - Tim Wu

Fiction:

• “Count of Monte Cristo” - Alexander Dumas

• “Picks and Shovels” - Cory Doctorow

• “Dance Hall of the Dead” - Tony Hillerman

• “Nemesis” - Agatha Christie

• “Death of Ivan Ilych” - Leo Tolstoy

• “Tale of Two Cities” Charles Dickens

• “The Wailing Wind” - Tony Hillerman

• “Letters from an imaginary country” - Theodora Goss

Science-Fiction:

• “Noor” - Nnedi Okorafor

• “The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart) - Cory Doctorow - short story / audio

• “Alien Clay” - Adrian Tchaikovsky

• “Half Built Garden” - Ruthanna Emrys

• “Shroud” - Adrian Tchaikovsky

• “Rapport” - Martha Wells (murderbot short story)

• “Automatic Noodle” - Annalee Newitz

• “What We Can Know” - Ian McEwan

Stuff I Did Not Finish:

• “The Annotated Turing” - Charles Petzold - got lost in the original notation of Turing’s paper.

• “Capital in the 21st Century” - Thomas Picketty - well written, but very long.

• “Build a Large Language Model From Scratch” - Sebastian Raschka - slowly working through this book still.

• “Neoreaction a Basilisk” - Elizabeth Sandifer - political science and philosophy; bit to technical for me

• “The Economic Consequences of Peace” - John Maynard Keynes (finished interesting parts)

• “Sutskever’s List” - Richard Heinmann - book not yet complete; read few chapters from a pre-release copy.

Recomendations:

For science fiction I liked “Shroud” best, followed by “What We Can Know”. With “Automatic Noodle” as a sentimental favorite.

For non-fiction I liked “More, Everything, Forever” and “Here Comes the Sun”.

For plain fiction I liked “Nemesis” and “Letters from an Imaginary Country”.