I read 23 books in 2025. That sounds like more than it is — about two a month, and some of them were short. Here are the ones that stayed with me.
Technical
Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Kleppmann. My third read of this. I keep finding new things. This time I read the replication chapter immediately after a production incident involving a lagging replica and it hit differently. The chapter on linearizability is one of the best pieces of technical writing I’ve encountered.
The Architecture of Open Source Applications (Vol 1) — Various. A collection of essays by practitioners about real architectural decisions. The LLVM chapter and the nginx chapter are worth the whole book.
Database Internals — Petrov. Denser than Kleppmann. Excellent on storage engines and B-tree variants. I’ll need a fourth read before I feel like I understand the distributed consensus section properly.
Non-technical
The WEIRDest People in the World — Henrich. Long. Dense. Completely changed how I think about why institutions look the way they do and where our intuitions about fairness come from. I argued with this book for three months.
Deep Work — Newport. I’d avoided this because it felt self-helpy. A colleague insisted. He was right. Not about the prescriptions — those are too rigid — but about the diagnosis. The part about attention residue is something I think about every day.
Norwegian Wood — Murakami. The novel. I’d only read his surrealist work before. This was quieter and sadder and better than I expected.
The poetry
I read one collection this year: What the Living Do by Marie Howe. It is a book about grief and it destroyed me in the best way. I read it in two hours on a Sunday and spent the rest of the day being unable to talk to anyone.
Read it.