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Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

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Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

#321

Been a year of re-reads and some classics I never started b/c of thickness. Standouts for me were “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Norwegian Wood.” “Kafka on The Shore”, “Norwegian Wood” - Haruki Murakami “A Tale of Two Cities” - Dickens “Count of Monte Cristo” - Alexandre Dumas LotR, “Hobbit” - Tolkien “World Atlas of Coffee” - James Hoffmann “Anathem”, “Diamond Age”, “Termination Shock” - Neal Stephenson “A Timeless Way…

How much do you read weekly? This is an impressive amount of stuff

This comment slightly terrifies me. My reading has dipped this year, but generally this is a small amount of reading for 12 months. I think the norm on reading quantity has shifted.

Is social media to blame? TikTok and meta videos are extremely addictive. I have perhaps the strongest willpower of anyone I know, and the only way I can avoid losing hours to them every day is to delete these apps from all devices, and have a separate browser on my Mac for them.

Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

#322

How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg Bhagvad Gita by Eknath Easwaran Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke How The World Really Works by Vaclav Smil The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune Chaos by James Gleick Wind and Truth (Stormlight Archive #5) by Brandon Sanderson The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle The Day of th…

Anything from Frederick Forsyth is good.

Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

#323
post #102

# Catch-22 (by Joseph Heller) - had been seeing it mentioned on HN (and other sites) for years, I finally read it and it was one the best novels I've ever read. # The Universe and Dr. Einstein (by Lincoln Barnett) - recommended for anyone who is interested about Einstein's thought process that gave birth to two great theories. # What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (by Haruki Murakami) - it's my first book fro…

Murakami’s fiction novels are extremely different from “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”. If you want to try another non-fiction book of his check-out “Underground : The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche”, I loved it. If you go the fiction route “Kafka on the Shore” and “A Wild Sheep Chase” are a good starting point. Avoid some of his longer works unless you enjoy his style.

Norwegian Wood is far superior to his magical realism.

He’s a great writer of prose, but I feel it’s wasted on magical realism. He could have been one of the true greats.

Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

#325
I really enjoyed Leaders Eat Last and Careless People.

2025 brought me to:

The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick

Leaders Eat Last - Simon Sinek

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

The Time Machine - H.G. Wells

What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School - Mark McCormack

The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change - Adam Braun

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Blood of Elves - Andrzej Sapkowski

We Were Eight Years In Power - Ta-Nehisi Coates

Mort - Terry Pratchett

I’m Glad My Mom Died - Jennette McCurdy

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - Stephen King

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

The Boy’s in the Boat - Daniel James Brown

Can’t Hurt Me - David Goggins

Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business - Gino Wickman

Source Code - Bill Gates

Mythos - Stephen Fry

Educated - Tara Westover

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World - John Wood

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism is a memoir - Sarah Wynn-Williams

Hail Mary - Andy Weir

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Phipip K. Dick

The Blade Itself - Joe Abercrombie

Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

#326
"Lonesome Dove"

And it's hard to convey how much I enjoyed it. I'm afraid to pick up any other novel of a similar kind as I'll be furiously comparing.

So after it I sterted reading hardcore Sci-fi: Vacuum Diagrams, to not let my mind draw any comparative thoughts:)

Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

#327
I have recently been RTO'ed so I'm expecting to have a lot of time to read in coming months - yay for all transport between two points in London taking ~1 hour no matter what the actual physical distance - but in the last year I've been pretty busy with stressful projects and homelife, so feel lightly read compared to previous years.

Despite that, some recommendations:

First, remember that everybody's reading list is naturally capped. If it takes you a week to read a fiction book, and you're 30 years old, you have ~2,500 books left in your life. If you're closer to 50, it's more like ~1,500. And if it takes you a month to finish a book, you're at ~600 and ~350 respectively.

This means being picky is a necessity. Do not read books on "100 hundred books you must read before you die", style lists unless they all appeal to you. Do not try and cover the ground of every Nobel laureate unless you're a) a prolific reader, b) multi-lingual, and c) not easily bored. The same goes for any other prestigious prize, list, etc.

The most important thing is to read things you like reading. Don't read classics unless you like classics. Don't read sci-fi just because you work in tech unless you like sci-fi. I like a lot of contemporary "high brow" literature because I enjoy how people discover new ways to play with language to convey emotions. A lot of people find this incredibly dull, and that's fine.

You do you. You don't have time to read books somebody else says you "should" or "must" read.

One thing I think we can all agree on though is that almost all self-help books and airport style management or "popular science" books do not return the investment they demand. It's for you to decide how to interpret this, but please, read things that bring you a depth of joy not because they're popular or on a list or seem to be "everywhere".

For my style of reading, I like to get pointers from two magazines I subscribe to: The Literary Review [0] and Granta[1]. I am sure there are other sources for your preferred type of reading. Go support them. Be prepared to hand over cash to writers who publish a physical artefact, it's the only way they'll keep eating and doing that thing.

I would like to find time to add other magazines to my list (TLS, Paris Review, etc.), but I have limited time, these specific two tick boxes for me stylistically, have proven the test of time indicating quality, and even if I only find one or two books or authors a year out of them, have paid for themselves many times over. Further, I get a reasonable review of what's out there and can get a sense of what isn't for me, without reading it or feeling guilty about not reading it even though others tell me I "must".

As an aside, Lit Review's history reviews often are so good at covering the ground of the material the book covers, I feel like I've had a 1,000 word Cliff Notes version of the book in my hand and can decide to dig deeper if I want, but if not, I could understand a basic conversation about that topic if I needed to, and on occasion something I read has helped in a pub quiz.

One last point: try and break out of your echo chamber sometimes. It is easy to pick up and enjoy books that support one's own World view, but I like to challenge mine and keep it in check.

Reading the Communist Manifesto will not make you a Communist. Reading Mein Kampf will not convert you into a Nazi, because you have the perspective to rip it to shreds and see it for what it is.

Buying (OK, pirating, maybe you don't want to vote with your money in this category), books that heap praise on people you perhaps don't like or disagree with - Trump, Obama, Putin, Fidel Castro, Biden, Palosi, Blair, Thatcher, Pinochet, whoever... - these books will not make you those people or somebody who heaps praise on them. Develop the critical muscle to question things you read.

I say this because not only has this helped me navigate the news and political cycles of my life, but because it's helped me improve relationships with friends and family and even my reading of fiction.

Books really are the most marvellous things, and they all deserve more of our attention, even the bad ones.

[0] https://literaryreview.co.uk

[1] https://granta.com

Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

#328

I read 14 books this year and my favourite was Eversion by Alastair Reynolds, followed closely by Pushing Ice by the same author. I "discovered" Cory Doctorow this year, reading 4 books (and I have another in my queue), being "Attack Surface" the one I liked most. The only technical book I read was Programming in Lua (4th edition), and still didn't work for me. I guess I don't like Lua, and that's OK.

Alastair is on my S tier for sci-fi. Read so much of him. But didn't read Eversion. Adding it!

In your reading journey, which other authors/books have similar grand space scale as how Alastair writes? I mean, there are a lot, I know, but some overdo it and others oversimplify it. I find Alastair striking perfect balance of being "hardcore" in a way, but still making sense:)

Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

#329

I read 14 books this year and my favourite was Eversion by Alastair Reynolds, followed closely by Pushing Ice by the same author. I "discovered" Cory Doctorow this year, reading 4 books (and I have another in my queue), being "Attack Surface" the one I liked most. The only technical book I read was Programming in Lua (4th edition), and still didn't work for me. I guess I don't like Lua, and that's OK.

Strong recommendation for Alistair Reynold’s Century Rain if you want another of his. It’s part 20th century alternate history, part hard boiled crime noir, and part hard space opera.

Stealing this recommendation.

I stared from Revelation Space - full series. Then did done other ones. Didn't get to the Century Rain.

Thank you!

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