Reading kept me sane in 2025. Between two young children, a hectic travel schedule, and an industry in the throes of transformation, books were the constant. These aren’t all the books I read this year, and not all these books were published in 2025. These are just the ones that stuck with me.
Non-Fiction
- Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee
- Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang
- The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant by Tae Kim
- The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple
- Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary
Fiction
- There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
- Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman
- The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Non Fiction
Building the Modern World
One strand of my non-fiction reading this year was understanding how the modern technology ecosystem actually functions. Not the startup mythology or the investor narratives, but the physical reality of how complex devices get designed, manufactured, and shipped.
Reading Apple in China made me realize just how complex the supply chains and manufacturing capabilities required to build devices like iPhones are. Images of Apple engineers spending days and weeks on assembly lines, fine-tuning machines and processes to build the slab of metal and glass in my pocket, stayed with me after I finished the book. McGee’s observations of colorful characters like Foxconn founder Terry Gou gave me an appreciation of the Chinese entrepreneurs who invested alongside Apple, giving us the modern electronics industry.
Breakneck by Dan Wang was an excellent companion piece. Wang contrasts the “engineering-focused” approach of China against the “litigation-focused” approach of the United States. Wang walks factory floors and rides high-speed trains while making a sustained argument about how countries build technological capacity. His comparison of how the two countries approach intellectual property and innovation is particularly sharp.
Tae Kim takes a different approach entirely in The Nvidia Way. Where McGee focuses on systems and supply chains, Kim writes biography. The book is as much about Jensen Huang as it is about Nvidia’s history and culture. Kim traces how Nvidia came to dominate the PC gaming industry before pivoting to AI and the datacenter. The Nvidia story is optimistic: a company that nearly died multiple times, led by an intense and sometimes abrasive founder, that happened to build exactly the right technology at exactly the right moment. If you want to understand why AI development has accelerated so dramatically, understanding Nvidia’s journey helps.
Many Journeys
Another strand of my reading was history. I’ve had a long-standing interest in Indian history, and William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road offered an unexpected view into pre-Mughal, pre-Islamic India. Dalrymple traces how Indian ideas, religions, and material culture spread across Asia and shaped civilizations from Indonesia to Japan.
Perhaps the most interesting part of The Golden Road was Dalrymple’s telling of the Chinese monk Xuanzang’s journey to India to collect authentic Buddhist scriptures. His journey is the basis of Journey to the West, a story that I also enjoyed reading this year. I think Xuanzang’s journey is as interesting and full of intrigue as that of Tang Sanzang in Journey. The India Xuanzang visited was chaotic, with the old Buddhist empires falling apart and the emergence of Hindu and soon Islamic empires. This theme of journeys undertaken in times of chaos is something I came across repeatedly in my reading this year.
Tamim Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted allowed me to fill in the blanks of my own education. In small-town India, the history of Islam is either the glory of Akbar or the tyranny of villains like Timurlane. Destiny Disrupted provided a much wider view of what was happening in the Middle East: the slow fading of the Byzantine empire, the emergence of local powers in Arabia and Central Asia, and the many wonderful characters who play central roles in the spread of Islam.
Next year, I plan to focus on early-medieval Europe and South America.
Fiction
Existential Dread, Cosmic Horror, and a Tender Love Story
I read less fiction than I normally do this year. The three books that stayed with me span genres: science fiction, horror, and literary fiction.
I love science fiction, and qntm’s There Is No Antimemetics Division hit all the right notes. An engaging plot, elements of both hard science fiction and cosmic dread, and a non-linear narrative that rewards attention. The premise involves a secret division of a shadowy organization that fights entities which cannot be remembered. The horror isn’t in the monsters; it’s in the systematic erasure of the knowledge that monsters exist.
Christopher Buehlman’s Between Two Fires is set in a France ravaged by both the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death. It also has a demonic infestation. Thomas, a disgraced knight, and Delphine, a young girl who may be a saint, journey to a demon-haunted Avignon. Buehlman’s prose is excellent, and his depiction of fourteenth-century France feels genuinely medieval rather than cosplay.
Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a sprawling and beautifully written love story that is also an incisive study of the immigrant experience and an evisceration of upper-class Indian values. The book layers trauma upon trauma: the partition generation still processing displacement decades later, the loneliness and alienation of immigrants far from home, abusive relationships that distort both parties. And yet it remains, at its core, a love story. It’s a hard book to summarize because Desai’s sentences do so much work.
Navigating Chaos
The theme connecting these three fiction books only became clear to me after I finished them. Thomas and Delphine journey through a France that is literally going to hell. Quinn, the protagonist of Antimemetics, repeatedly confronts horrors that erase themselves from memory, forcing her to rediscover threats she has already defeated. Sonia and Sunny navigate changing countries and cultures while growing from passive, somewhat spoilt twenty-somethings into adults with agency, forced to reckon with inherited and inflicted trauma alike.
Each book finds its protagonists in a chaotic world that seems to be coming apart. They cope, they fight, they sometimes fail. The rules keep changing.
I don’t think my fiction choices were accidental.
My Year in Reading
Reading The Nvidia Way and my fiction picks in the same year created an interesting tension. Kim’s book is a story of technological optimism. Jensen Huang bet on parallel computing when the market didn’t exist, nearly bankrupted his company multiple times, and emerged as the most important hardware supplier for the AI revolution. It’s inspiring. It suggests that talent, persistence, and technical insight can build something transformative.
My fiction picks suggest a different mood. The world is confusing. Threats are hard to identify and harder to remember. The rules keep changing. You navigate as best you can.
Both feel true to me. I work in technology. I’ve spent this year helping teams adopt AI tools and watching the capabilities expand month by month. The optimism is warranted. And yet the speed of change creates its own kind of vertigo. The skills I’ve built over two decades may or may not transfer to whatever comes next. The existential dread in my fiction choices probably reflects something real about how I experience this moment.
Note
My love of reading manifested as QuietReads this year, an AI-powered reading tracker I’ve been building. Using it to track and discuss books like The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny with its AI assistant deepened my appreciation for what Desai was doing. Building something that helps me think about what I read has been its own kind of pleasure. I look forward to working on it in the new year.
