Favorite Books of 2025
Four years ago, I learned to speed read, and it transformed my relationship with books. What had been 1-3 books a year exploded to 12-15. More importantly, I started to enjoy reading again. While I enjoyed reading before, it now became a source of inspiration and discovery that I looked forward to every day. In a world where social media and AI are increasingly telling us what to think and how to feel, books offer something rare: the freedom to choose our own journey and sit with our own reactions. They demand our attention, our critical thinking, and our willingness actually think about things in our own terms and in our own time.
This matters more now than ever. Our comprehension and capacity for deep thought are under assault. Not just by AI, but by the constant scroll, the algorithmic feeds, the manufactured outrage designed to keep us engaged but disconnected. Today, I see books is an act of resistance. It's a way to reclaim our attention, sharpen our minds, and remember that we can think for ourselves. It's a fundamentally human skill that no algorithm can replicate and no machine can automate.
The books I read this year reflect themes I care deeply about: who we are as people, how we connect authentically, how we lead consciously, how systems of power shape our reality, and how we might build something better together. All of them challenged me, inspired me, and helped me grow. Here are my favorites from 2025.
10. The Best Minds
I rarely pause for exceptional writing, but I continually remarked on it through The Best Minds. It was written in a way that my visual brain could picture the characters and the story itself. And the story. One of interest, hope, and tragedy of mental illness. I felt it all deeply. My one critique: it was a bit long. But perhaps necessary to paint a beautiful yet tragic picture.
09. Uncultured: A Memoir
I'd never heard of The Children of God (now The Family International), and within pages I understood why: this cult systematically abused (and perhaps still does?) children while hiding behind religion commune living. A story of darkness and abuse that somehow finds resiliency, hope, and success. My sense of wow was off the charts throughout.
08. Sociopath
The final memoir in my list offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a sociopath. Not as a villain, but through the author’s own journey to understand her condition in service of helping others. She reflects what it means to move through the world without typical emotional responses, exposing her inner world and impulses with open honesty. I learned so much about sociopathy from this book which softened my view on the condition, reminding me that even people we're taught to avoid (or fear) have their own struggle to be seen as human.
07. Talking to Strangers
Gladwell's exploration of why we so often misunderstand strangers hit me hard because it gets at the heart of why authentic connection is so difficult, and so important. Humans assume we can read people's emotions from their behavior. We can default to believing what others tell us, and we ignore the context that shapes how people show up in the world. These incorrect assumptions can cause massive problems in our lives, sometimes being deadly. This speaks to the work I do at Conscious Ground, bridging the gaps between people who see the world differently. This book reminded me that a first step in change is acknowledging that we don't know what we think we know about others. If we can approach strangers (or anyone) with curiosity instead of certainty, restraint instead of quick judgment, we create space for real understanding. That's the foundation of solidarity and collaboration.
06. There is No Place for Us
For a long time, I’ve rejected the idea homelessness is a problem of people not trying hard enough. This book shattered any remaining illusions I had about the "housing crisis" being a problem of work ethic. Goldstone details some brutal truths here: homelessness in America is a deliberate choice, engineered by private equity firms, corporate landlords, and policy loopholes designed to extract maximum profit from desperate families who work multiple jobs but can’t afford rent. This is manufactured disconnection at its most vicious: systems intentionally designed to keep people scrambling, isolated, and powerless. This book brings the receipts. It's essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what solidarity actually means: recognizing that if any of us have an enemy, it shoudn’t be each other. It's the systems profiting from our desperation.
05. Tiny Experiments
I found immediate agreement with this book’s premise: the way we measure goals increasingly creates anxiety, breeds toxic productivity, and traps us in a race toward destinations we never truly wanted. Tiny Experiments offers different approach: think like a scientist conducting experiments on your own life. Instead of fixating on an idealized end state (which you'll likely never reach anyway), find fulfillment in the learning itself: the exploration, the iterations, the discoveries in the space between where you are and where you think you should be. These ideas and frameworks became the foundation for much of my work in 2025. Shifting from outcome to process, from control to curiosity changed a lot for me. I’m not completely free of linear goals, but I look at most things quite differently now. I’ve also experienced the authors community work which is inspiring and supportive. Here’s to more experiments.
04. Red Helicopter
James Rhee did something radical when he took over bankrupt retailer Ashley Stewart: he led with kindness and math rather than traditional leadership norms. He brought heartwarming, intentional, forceful kindness that created goodwill, an asset never appears on finance records. His framework flipped conventional business wisdom: stop obsessing over the income statement and invest in a different balance sheet (relationships, trust, transparency). He made data accessible to everyone, rewarded collective ownership, and took better care of his employees while understanding and connecting with them. This one was so uplifting, reminding me that we can measure success differently. We can have human connection and collaboration that inspires while also being successful in business.
03. 1984
I've read 1984 previously, but it's never felt more powerful or urgent. In my opinion, it is well worth a re-read. Orwell warned us: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." It feels like we’ve never been living this more than right now. Algorithms curate reality, surveillance tracks our every move, and truth is whatever those in power say it is. "War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength" sounds like it was taken from today, not 1948 when it was originally completed . Those in power in this book didn't just control what people did, it controlled what they thought, making independent thinking impossible. Orwell's message never felt more important: question everything and think independently. Because the moment we believe what we’re told without a second thought, we’ve lost. I truly believe we can learn to to that again. We need to start with awareness of the systems manipulation all around us.
02. Enshittification
This one hit home for me because it gave voice to so many things I felt in recent years . The apps, services and platforms we use every day are getting worse on purpose. It's the trend of deliberate extraction we seem to be seeing in almost all walks of life recently. Google makes results worse so you search more times and see more ads. Your car spies on you. Amazon buries better and cheaper products in favor of ad-supported ones. Your printer rejects third-party ink. Facebook is now an ad and surveillance engine. This is the new business model needed for growth at all costs: trap you with network effects, then squeeze until there's nothing left. Providing one of my favorite book themes, Doctorow doesn’t just call out the problem, he also brings solutions. Enshittification is a choice made by systems designed to concentrate wealth and control. Thus, we can choose differently. The platforms want us to believe there's no alternative, which is the lie we need to confront first.
01. Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Connect
Based on my love of understanding how humans connect with one another, Social quickly moved to the top of my list in 2025. Citing and leading multiple studies of how our brains react to social interactions, Lieberman painted a fascinating picture for me: our brains are wired for connection and collaboration from birth, spending every free moment thinking socially. Social pain activates the same neural circuits as physical pain. Rejection and isolation literally hurts. The data shows that our sense of identity evolved to serve group harmony, not individualism. The results of one study showed that social connection predicts happiness far better than money, yet we've built a society that ignores this fundamental truth. Another stat stayed with me: 25% of Americans now report having zero close friends, up from 10% in 1985 (and this book was released in 2013!). This information feels more important than ever and gave me hope that we can return to our human nature of helping each in life, and creating a better world.
