Books I Read in 2025

Way back in 2019 I developed an Apple Shortcut, GitHub Action, and bespoke custom website for posting book reviews as I finished books. All I had to do was find the ISBN, add my commentary, and the Ruby script took care of the rest.

Then I didn’t utilize it. So back to an end-of-year reflection style roundup of the books I read, with some pullquotes and commentary where available. This is not the order I read these books in. It’s just what’s coming to the surface as I search my notes and memory.

Make Time

I finished this in January. Practical and actionable ideas for taking ownership of your schedule and focus.

Highlight, laser, energize, reflect. Those are the anchors and I remember them after finishing, so that’s effective.

Ironically, it took an inordinate amount of time to read. Which I find funny, because it feels like a safe assumption that the target audience for this book is desperate to widen their thinning time margins. The recommendations were wordy and antidotes were unnecessarily frequent for my tastes.

Maybe that extended cut feeling is a testament to how well Jake and JZ made time for their highlight of writing. I’d have suggested they laser on editing a bit more. That’s merely my reflection.

Whatever the case, it’s clear the self ascribed Time Dorks had fun developing this system, and continue to have fun sharing it. Curiosity and small experiments are the underpinnings of this strategy, and that is a safe bet.

I would recommend this book, but who has the time?

Enders Game

I finished this on August 30, 2025. I don’t read much fiction, and this book reminded me why I should sometimes.

Even though he was free, he could not think of anything else to do.

Same, Ender. Same.

Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.

Many responses are based on the roles expected. Breaking out of these roles is where interesting things begin to happen.

Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization

A free book from Swarmia. The principles apply even if you don’t buy their SASS to implement it.

Beyond High Performance: What Great Coaches Know About How the Best Get Better

Coaching across three horizons

1. “How do I not get fired?” is boring, uninspiring, just a job.
2. “How can I be better than others?” is compeitive, achievable, and eventually jaded.
3. “What am I capable of?” is the growth mindset. Pursuing the things you care about in a safe environment.

High performers move from comparison with other to comparison with theirself and aiming towards their own values/desires. Makes sense, as comparison is the killer of joy.

A Philosophy of Walking

I walked as solitude a lot this year. I also took many meetings on the phone, while walking. This book came onto my radar right around the time I was doing so. It resonated deeply.

The body slowly advances, with measured steps, and that same tranquility gives the mind a day off. Relieved of duty by the automatic functioning of the body, it follows up its fantasies and projects itself into a labyrinth of stories.

Moving the body to move the mind. It works.

…he would arrange his life so that he no longer had to run or crawl, but could walk. 

You can build your life at a pace that works for you!

walking is an invitation to die standing up. 

Death is coming no matter what. Pick a posture!

that is why humility is not humiliating: it just makes vain pretensions fall away, and thus nudges us towards authenticity.

Running on empty

My counselor recommended this and it was a helpful lens for increased self understanding.

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

Technically I read this book in 2024. But I found it in my notes, so why not?

The book is basically these main ideas, with stories to support them.

Pseudo-productivity: The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.

Knowledge Work: The economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort

Slow productivity: A philosophy for organizing kwowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles

1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.

Principle #1: do fewer things Stripe to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small numbr of projects that matter most.

Principle #2: work at a natural pace Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conductive to brilliance.

Principle #3: obsess over quality Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term.

Under a pseudo-productivity regime, by contrast, such demands are more implicit and self-reinforced. You’re judged on how much total work you visibly tackle from a never-ending supply of available tasks, but no one is going to tell you specifically how much is enough—that’s up to you. Good luck!

It’s true that many of us have bossess or clients making demands, but they don’t always dictate the details of our daily schedules—it’s often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest taskmaster. We suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness with ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness.

Who: The A Method for Hiring

The one book I’d recommend if you ever have to hire someone. Don’t ask people hypotheticals about what they would do, ask them for stories about what they’ve actually done.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer

This book was excellent. Once you have the vocabulary, you won’t help but see stocks and flows everywhere you go.

Information contained in nature… allows us a partial reconstruction of the past…. The development of the meanders in a river, the increasing complexity of the earth’s crust… are information-stor-ing devices in the same manner that genetic systems are…. Storing information means increasing the complexity of the mechanism. —Ramon Margalef

Remember—all system diagrams are simplifications of the real world.

Everything, as they say, is connected to everything else, and not neatly.

If we are to understand anything, we have to simplify, which means we have to make boundaries.

We have to invent boundaries for clarity and sanity; and boundaries can produce problems when we forget that we’ve artificially created them.

the problem can be avoided upfront by intervening in such a way as to strengthen the ability of the system to shoulder its own burdens

missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction 

decision makers can’t respond to information they don’t have

the best policies contain feedback loops

don’t optimize something that never should’ve existed at all

Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Book Store

Robin Sloan’s blog lead me to Robin Sloan’s books. This was fun to read, and rekindled my interest in fiction.

The Nineties

Chuck frames the decade as the timespan between the falls of the Berlin Wall and World Trade Center. I have memories of both, and my formative years took place in between. Reading deep examination and critique of events I remember through a childhood–adolscent lens was just plain fun.

Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

The cold chain that powers our modern food supply is absolutely fascinating. Did you know that plastic bags aren’t just plastic bags, but are marvels of modern engineering to facilitate different vegetables breathing optimally to maximize shelf life? Details like this are littered throughout. The fact that I can opt to make guacamole 365 days a year, in the middle of Kentucky, is astounding. We’re living in the best timeline when it comes to optionality of vehicles to deliver calories and meet taste preferences.

The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices

The title pretty much says it all. Rituals are good, and they’re disappearing from common life, so we have to establish them on our own.

A Million Little Pieces

A story about addiction. A dive into wikipedia made it clearly unclear if this is autobiographical non-fiction, or a complete fiction, or something in between. It wasn’t particularly well written, but I kept at it with the fiction.

The New One Minute Manager

A simple framework for being a descent manager. Praise people when you catch them doing right. Redirect people when they’ve missed the mark. Get clear about outcomes you expect, than release folks to deliver on their own terms. A quick read, and I’m confident I’ll be re-reading it annually while I’m in management roles.

The Little Book of Ikagi

A small book on Japanese practices that can make your life better. I remember enjoying the quick read, but all the principles have fallen out of the back of my mind…so did it make a difference?

Serve Up, Coach Down: Mastering the Middle and Both Sides of Leadership

Middle managers get stuck when they’re not sure what there job is meant to be. The beauty of “serve up, coach down”, is that it doesn’t care about layers of management. Serve your boss and your peers. Coach people that report up to you. If everyone does this, you have a culture of service and coaching where information flows to meet the most important needs.

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

How Reed Hastings approaches systems of management at Netflix. Not sure how it actually plays out on the ground, but as ideals to aspire to, this is the kind of environment I want to work in. High talent density, high trust, few policies, and letting people own the decisions and the outcomes of those decisions. Focus on delivering wins rather than process adherance.

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

A great primer for anyone figuring out how to navigate the world with LLMs. Be the human in the loop. Accelerate your thinking. But don’t delegate it.

The Courage to Be Disliked

I read this in both 2024 and 2025 because it was that good. Sort out your tasks from other people’s tasks. Do your tasks without picking up other people’s tasks. You can change, and people won’t like it. But making sure people like you is not your task.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

I listened to this while walking. Fascinating memoir of a novelist who just started running one day. Perfect intersection of my interestes of writing and running.

Harry Potters 1, 2, & 3

The time has come to embrace the Wizarding World. I’ve written about how it didn’t take earlier in life. Having kids to read the books with has made the difference. We finished Prisoner of Azkaban while driving through narrow hedges in Exeter. We visited Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross while visiting London. We’re working through Hogwarts Legacy on Switch 2 presently. You’re a wizard, family.

That’s it

Back to reading!