2025 Reading

I only read 38 books in 2025, but I suppose that’s partly because I read a lot of academic papers. I’d like to write more often and in more depth about my reading in 2026, including about the academic papers I’m reading. For 2025, I’ll just do a quick review.

As for fiction, as mentioned earlier, I read Delaney’s Babel-17 with high hopes, but didn’t enjoy it very much.

By contrast, Robert Harris’s Imperium was a really fun take on the early part of Cicero’s political career, told from the point of view of Tiro, his trusted slave. I’m not familiar with much of Cicero’s biography, so I’m not sure how historically accurate it is, but it’s certainly suspensful and interesting throughout. I’ve always meant to read more historical fiction and this was a nice start.

In anticipation of a trip (sadly cancelled) to Montreal, I reread Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, a great Canadian classic. Recommended if you want a glimpse of Montreal’s past or you appreciate a well-drawn anti-hero.

Still trying to open myself up to more SciFi, I read VanderMeer’s Annihilation. It was good enough to finish, but it didn’t blow me away either. Maybe the problem was me, though, and not the book.

Miranda July’s All Fours has gotten a lot of attention since it was published in 2024. I read it partly because of the buzz, but also because I remember loving her book of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, when I read it years ago. All Fours was an uncomfortable read for me in some ways, since the author’s way of looking at the world is so different from my own (absurdly, I find fiction that features dishonesty hard to take sometimes), but it was also real and arresting enough in spite of all that for me to read it. Now that half a year has elapsed since I finished it, I can see it’s passing the “this book stayed with you” test. I might reread it in a decade.

I read Pezeshkzad’s Hafez in Love, a fictionalized account of a few episodes in the life of Hafez Shirazi, the great(est) Persian poet. I enjoyed this less than I expected—I think the poetry and its assumptions and conventions must not translate well, at least into my brain.

I finally read my first Terry Pratchet, Night Watch. It was silly and fun and I’ll read more from him but I think I also understand where the minority of haters is coming from. It is not subtle, that’s for sure.

I gobbled up Susan Minot’s 1989 Lust and Other Stories, the collection held together by the theme of disappointed expectations and romantic misadventures. Her voice reminded me a little of Lorrie Moore’s, but still all her own.

I finally read (it’s been on my shelf forever and I kept meaning to get to it) David Gutterson’s Ed King, a modernization of Oedipus Rex. It was fun, but not among my favourite reworkings of classical texts. Will not reread.

Since I read Ted Chiang’s wonderful Stories of Your Life and Others I’ve been looking forward to Exhalation, his follow up collection of stories. This I finally got to in 2025. His stories are wonderful and I will absolutely be rereading both volumes.

Finishing up English fiction, I read Amie Barrodale’s You Are Having a Good Time. These are dark, funny, perfectly told stories. After I finished the first story, I put her novel on hold at the library. Great stuff.

Moving onto English non-Philosophical non-Fiction, I read Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. This is a nearly 500 page blow-by-blow account of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. If you were glued to your screen during these events (as I was), then little of it will be new to you. If you weren’t glued to your screen, then this book might be too much. Or perhaps not. The story has an obvious relevance beyond Twitter, since Musk’s takeover of Twitter both helped Trump win the election and enhanced (in some circles) Musk’s reputation for extreme but effective organizational makeovers. So the book is important background reading for DOGE and Musk’s dismantling of American state capacity.

If there’s a thesis to the book it’s that Musk saw Twitter as “a knot of technical issues that a great engineering mind like himself could easily untangle, enabling the growth of free speech in the digital town square. But at its core, Twitter was plagued by social and political dilemmas, not merely technological ones.” In the book, Musk spends a lot of time running around urging people to be hardcore. And although he repeatedly loses the respect and trust of people who could help him achieve his own goals, many people do their very best to meet his high standards. Indeed, Musk does seem to have a sort of genius for convincing very smart and driven people to ignore their family, their health, and their other interests in order to pursue his own vision. Since he seems profoundly unlikable on the page and screen, I assume he is very charismatic in person, as least when he chooses to be.

Is Musk himself hardcore? He certainly works very long hours, much longer than most people could manage. Beyond that, it’s hard to see that he really is. Some of the examples in the book are jaw-dropping, even if you already knew the outlines. Prior to his purchase of Twitter, Musk failed to sign an NDA or do basically any due diligence. So he couldn’t even look at Twitter’s financial projections until it was too late. People negotiating with Musk “could hardly believe their luck. They knew they were dealing with a slippery character and angled for an agreement that placed all the legal risk on the buyer”. Musk starting talking about “due diligence” after he signed the deal. “But the period for due diligence was long gone.” (For people following this in real time, the best commentary was surely Matt Levine’s.) At one point post-purchase, Twitter staff tries to explain the company to Musk as he listens respectfully and asks probing questions. But the thoughtful questions are hardly redeeming in context: “And they [the Twitter employees] recalled that when Musk and his bankers went and pitched potential investors on backing his acquisition of Twitter, leaked presentation decks reported by the media said that Musk’s company would bring in $12 billion in annual advertising revenue, more than double its current clip, by 2028. If he was just learning how Twitter kept the lights on, what were his figures based on?”

The authors of the book don’t even pretend to be dispassionate about their subject. They repeatedly describe him in unflattering ways: “. . . Musk needed to vent and [posting] was his way of throwing his toys out of the crib when he didn’t get what he wanted”. Or: “And while Musk posted like a twelve-year-old off his Ritalin . . .”. Or: “They’d appeased him, plying him with reams of data like a mother offering different pacifiers to a fussy toddler”. And so on. I am sure that many wealthy people in tech dismissed the book and its reporting as just more hostility from reporters, ones whose day job is (damningly) at the NYT—if they noticed the book at all. But looking back at the dysfunctional, chaotic, failure of DOGE, there is no book or reporting I know of that would have better prepared someone to predict how it would go. Wealthy tech haters of the NYT would do well to chew on that (they won’t).

George Szirtes’s The Photographer at Sixteen was an account of his mother’s tragic life, an exercise in imagination and empathy. This was worth reading but did not quite live up to my expectations, and I didn’t hold onto my copy for further rereading. A very young (pre-famous) David Bowie makes an unexpected cameo at one point.

Moving on, I read Carlo Rovelli’s little Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. They were indeed brief—to brief to really teach much, I think.

Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference was published several years ago, but for some reason seemed to get a flurry of attention in 2025. Several people I know were all reading it and recommending it to each other. The author was a negotiator for the FBI and the book promises to teach you some of his tricks. I don’t think I learned too much from it because I already have a pretty worked out (and overlapping) view of negotiation. What I appreciate about Voss is his emphasis (even in the most adversarial of negotiations) on empathy and building understanding.

I finally read Tetlock and Gardner’s Superforcasting. I also didn’t learn much from this book, but I think the reason for that must be that I had already absorbed so much of it by osmosis from other people I read. It’s had an enormous impact on some corners of the internet that I frequent. The basic idea is that a lot of experts are very poor at predicting the future; that most predictions people make don’t effectively operationalize the issue in question so are too vague to even assess; that in fact it is possible to do better or worse at prediction over time; that doing it well matters; that some people (usually non-experts!) do in fact do it well pretty consistently; and that we can learn from them how to do it better. These are all excellent points, in my opinion, and so-called superforecasters do indeed have much to teach the rest of us. So even though I didn’t encounter any new ideas here, it was nice to see them all pulled together, and am happy to recommend this book.

Caleb Campbell’s Disarming Leviathan: Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor is not my usual fare. I’m an atheist raised by atheists in Canada, who has only lived in the U.S. in left-liberal places (or at least, moved in left-liberal circles in those places). So my direct (knowing) contact with Christian Nationalists is basically nil. And my view of Christianity is something like bewildered incomprehension, so I was not in the target audience for a book squarely addressed to Christians. (I found the book via Seumas MacDonald’s substack, which I found via MacDonald’s wonderful online courses, when I studied Latin online during the pandemic.) I read the book because although I don’t have any (knowing) daily contact with Christian nationalists, I am very much at the mercy of their political choices. And I was curious to hear the author’s strategies for dealing with people who start from what seem like shared premises and end up in a terrible place.

Campbell describes Christian nationalism as “a movement that calls Christian followers to take government power at all costs to advance their preferred way of being in the world”. Christian nationalism “is a false gospel, a leader-driven movement seeking power and influence by indoctrinating its followers, preying on their fear, and leveraging their religious devotion.” It operates like a cult and encourages us/them thinking. He finds it unChristian and admits to feeling a lot of anger and disappointment with friends and members of the Church who fall into this way of thinking. Campbell makes the point that the best attitude for him to take to it is to see Christian nationalists as his mission field. Some missionaries travel to exotic locations and learn foreign cultures, but there is also value in seeing your own culture and its foreign mindsets as a legitimate (and difficult!) mission field as well.

The first part of the book was not very useful to me, though I suppose necessary. It is devoted to characterizing the mission field so that readers understand what they’re dealing with. He describes Christian Nationalism in some detail and tries to distinguish it from Christian conservativism. I could quibble here and there with some of his descriptions, but this was mostly preaching to the converted (modulo all of our background differences of opinion).

The second part of the book was more interesting to me. It goes through strategies for empathizing, listening respectfully, and provoking deeper engagement with faith in a way intended to sow the seeds of doubt in Christian Nationalism. He points out that we rarely change our minds because someone got off a good zinger at our expense or out-argued us. The author himself understands conversions, since he was himself a neo-Nazi skinhead as a teenager (!). There are some good examples in the book that would be useful to Christians having these tough conversations. I’m probably not the one to be having them—it’s too easy to dismiss a foreign-born atheist from within the Christian Nationalist world view. Christians, get to work on your friends and neighbours. We need you.

I worked on my French this year by reading Annie Ernaux’s La Place. Actually, I’ve been chipping away at this short book for years, often starting over and retracing my steps, but only pushed through and finished it in 2025. This is a great book for a beginner in French, because Ernaux’s spare style works well for new learners while also being stylistically interesting in its own right. The book is about her father’s life, so different from her own, and the inevitable distance between them. Recommended. I read a lot of other French this year (including news) but don’t seem to have finished any other books.

For Italian, I read the beginner book by Capilli, Le Avventure Di Paul A Roma. This did what was advertised on the tin: gave me a story to follow in Italian, with fairly simple vocabulary and notes. I’ve also already mentioned in another post Cuconato’s book on ontological commitment. I also read Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Altre Parole, her first book written in Italian. Lahiri (a celebrated writer in English) describes in this book her infatuation with Italian and her various attempts to learn it. She now lives in Rome and publishes mostly in Italian. This was just great. In addition to being a solid account of learning a language, it has a series of worthwhile reflections about her relationship with Bengali and English as well as Italian.

For German I read two similar beginner books, Klein’s Dino Lernt Deutsch and Richard and Rawlings’s Short Stories in German. Of these, I preferred the Klein, though all these beginner books seem to be pretty dull. The Richard and Rawling stories were strange and unsatisfying (though your ymmv—online the book seems to have some admirers). I read it twice to cement vocabulary and was just sick of it by the time I was done.

My Classical Greek reading group wrapped up Plato’s Gorgias in 2025 (we’re now onto Plato’s Protagoras). I’ve been reading and rereading the Gorgias since I took Brad Inwood’s wonderful seminar on the book in 1996(ish). It’s my go-to recommendation for people interested in Plato or even just in philosophy in general. (Get the Zeyl translation published by Hackett. It’s excellent.) I also read and enjoyed Seumas MacDonald’s Ὁ ἐπὶ Τροίᾱν Πόλεμος, a retelling of the Trojan war in basic Greek.

In philosophy, I’ve already mentioned Ney’s Metaphysics: An Introduction and Smith’s wonderful An Introduction to Formal Logic. I’m rereading Smith now, actually. Another fun introductory read was Papineau’s Philosophical Devices: Proofs, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Sets—I only wanted it to be longer. I read and enjoyed Greg Frost-Arnold’s Free Logic, but won’t say anything about it now, since I hope to write something about it in 2026 after I reread it.

I wrapped up my tour through Descartes’s philosophical work with The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume 3. This volume contains his correspondence. Why I do dislike Descartes so much? It can’t be the strange views, since I happily put up with Plotinus and other wierdos. It can’t be that he’s a jerk, since I’ve spent years reading Schopenhauer. Anyway, I’m still waiting for something to click here and to start enjoying Descartes. I did enjoy Gaukroger’s Descartes: An Intellectual Biography more than you’d expect considering the subject.

I read Feferman and Feferman’s Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic. I think I got enough of the life but would have loved even more of the logic—that’s a statement of preference not a knock on the book, which is after all a biography. Stewart’s Infinity - A Very Short Introduction was worthwhile and helped me take my first baby steps into this area.

I read two books back-to-back on the Vienna Circle: Edmonds’ The Murder of Professor Schlick and Sigmund’s Exact Thinking in Demented Times. Both were worthwhile, though I think I preferred Edmonds’s a bit more. Both books need to cover an enormous amount of ground quickly, which means compressed accounts of complex ideas. Sometimes this goes off the rails, mainly in Sigmund’s book. Sigmund’s gloss of Kant’s categorical imperative (p. 269) was very sloppy, for example. He collapses it into the single universal law formulation and then says “or, in simpler terms, ’Do X only if you like the idea of everyone doing X.” Look, I understand the author needs to cover a lot of ground quickly, but this seems worse than simply leaving it unexplained. The core of the universal law formulation is surely the maxim, which concerns the reason for which we act. The reasons for which rational agents act need to be universalizable in the sense that the maxims need to be consistent. But that doesn’t mean you should avoid getting a coffee at the shop because if everyone got a coffee at the shop all at once billions would be crushed to death. And here is Sigmund on Tarski on truth: “His idea mirrored the commonsensical correspondence theory of truth. For example, the statement ‘Fido is barking’ is true if and only if Fido is indeed barking. In this example, a higher-level statement—namely, ‘The following is true’—is applied to a lower-level statement—namely, ‘Fido is barking.’ Formally, this act linking two distinct linguistic levels requires a metalanguage, like those that Rudolf Carnap was developing at the time.” This seems very muddled. For starters (and only for starters), the two distinct linguistic levels don’t require a third level, the metalanguage. The higher of the two is the metalanguage relative to the lower. And the relationship between the correspondence theory of truth and Tarski’s convention T is much slippier than this.

Szabo and Thomason’s Philosophy of Language is an excellent introduction to the subject. It seems to be pitched at linguists, but it doesn’t actually require any special background in linguistics to be read and enjoyed.

Finally, I read Jody Azzouni’s Ontology Without Borders slowly while taking extensive notes. But this is such a rich, perplexing book that I’m not done with it and I hope to be writing about it and other work by Azzouni in 2026 so you’ll have to wait for that.