2025: a year of challenge and change
I didn't set a reading theme for 2025, but one found me anyway. A lot of these reads were about understanding people -- why groups behave the way they do, how childhood shapes adults, how we talk to each other badly and sometimes well. Somewhere between Lindsay Gibson on emotionally immature parents and Jefferson Fisher on having better conversations, I think I was trying to find some footing.
Recommendations of the year
Full of surprises and impossible to summarize/categorize. A book about chaos, connection, and the very human urge to impose order on a world that doesn't promise meaning. I finished it feeling more human and more grounded.
A very timely read in a politically tumultuous year that quietly triggered a (semi) personal existential crisis. It reframed freedom not as something you are given, but something you actively practice and protect. It made me more conscious of responsibility, not just rights.
Funny, chilling, heartbreaking, and powerful all at once. What stayed with me is how violence permeates history and continue to manifest in different forms today. It's not monstrous, it's bureaucratic. I was reading history, but it didn't feel that distant
2025 full reading list - link
James — Percival Everett
All Fours — Miranda July
Why Fish Don't Exist — Lulu Miller
Rejection — Tony Tulathimutte
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World — Parmy Olson
Tribal: Mastering the Cultural Codes That Drive Human Behavior — Michael Morris
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI — Ethan Mollick
Revenge of the Tipping Point — Malcolm Gladwell
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents — Lindsay C. Gibson
Careless People — Sarah Wynn-Williams
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century — Timothy Snyder
Authority: Essays — Andrea Long Chu
On Freedom — Timothy Snyder
The Anxious Generation — Jonathan Haidt
Men Explain Things to Me — Rebecca Solnit
The Next Conversation: Argue Less, Talk More — Jefferson Fisher
The Women — Kristin Hannah
How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy's Guide to Silencing Women — Zoe Venditozzi
美国路人 — 刘骁骞
如何从敌人身上获益 — 普鲁塔克
books read
20
top genres
Non fictions: Society, politics & power, AI & technology, Psychology
date wrote
12/29/25
.other writings
