Unfortunately this past year has not been a good year for reading. Where in 2024 I managed to read 56 books, last year I did less than half of that landing at 25 books. The truth of the situation as to who I read so little is that I really tried to focus on something else for 2025. That goal was developing and releasing SaaS (software as a service) app. I ended up spending every waking free minute behind a computer working on it. We will see if 2026 can be a better year for reading, or if it again gets put on the back burner.
As for the books I read I began the year finishing off the last book in the Slow Horses series and having to wait all year for the next one (Clown Town) to be released. I then suffered through A City on Mars, a book on which I found the writing to be so pretentious that I could barely get through it.
I finally tackled the Lord of Rings trilogy. I was always afraid that it would be way to verbose, like Game of Thrones at it’s most verbose multiplied by 20x. Surprisingly aside from maybe the first 100 pages of the Fellowship of the Ring it wasn’t that bad. Have to also say it was pretty surprising with some of the differences from the films.
Night of the Grizzlies was a great read, it’s another book from Ryan Holiday’s reading recommendation email newsletter, Ryan has a pretty good track record in recommending books I have enjoyed.
Chip War was an interesting read about the coming showdown between the United States and China over control of micro processors. Perhaps at times a bit too much American propaganda, China bad / America good. The book opens with the threat of China invading Taiwan, interestingly enough as I type this the United States has just overthrown another country.
No Beast So Fierce by Edward Bunker was a good read, and the Pines trilogy by Blake Crouch was also a pretty interesting read.
Lastly I closed out the year with a bit of Arthur C. Clarke and read both Rendezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey, both of which I enjoyed.
- Bad Actors – Mick Herron
- A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? – Kelly Weinersmith
- The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien
- Dream Story – Arthur Schitzler
- The Two Towers – J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Return of the King – J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Holographic Universe: The Revolutionary Theory of Reality – Michael Talbot
- Night of the Grizzlies – Jack Olsen
- Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Crucial Technology – Chris Miller
- Guerrilla Warfare – Ernesto Che Guevara
- Spring Snow – Yukio Mishima
- The Old man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
- No Beast So Firece – Edward Bunker
- War is a Racket – Smedley D. Butler
- Pines – Blake Crouch
- Wayward Pines – Blake Crouch
- The Last Town – Blake Crouch
- Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
- Why Socialism? – Albert Einstein
- Nausea – Ed Kurtz
- Contact – Carl Sagan
- Clown Town – Mick Herron
- Penso quindi gioco – Andrea Pirlo
- Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
- Who Owns the Future – Jaron Lanier
- 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke