📚 Year of books 2025

Bit late this year as I’m only posting this in April, but here are the reviews I wrote for the (12) books I read in 2025. For each book I read, I try and write a short (often scrappy) review as a way of remembering what I learnt from each book. I’ve also started writing more notes on books while I’m reading them, but those are more private.

The following has been extracted from a short script I reused from last years post, to export all of my reviews made in 2025.

The Lean Startup #

5/5 ⭐

I “read” this book as an audiobook, but I feel this does not do it justice, and I would have benefit more with a physical copy for later reference. The book repeats itself a bit, but has some valid case studies of companies who have benefitted from some of the “lean startup” approaches. Principally, the methods of “innovation accounting” seem to be key for ensuring a project is actually capturing a market fit, without wasting too much effort on untested hypotheses.

Eric mentions some other concepts that interest me, namely the concept of keeping known “innovators” on innovative work, with the assumption that some are better suited for the implementation, scale up, or maintenance types of work/management. This could perhaps explain the rarity of founder/ceos lasting much beyond the initial starting phase.

Interestingly, in the epilogue Eric notes on the general unproductive nature of modern business enterprises. Focusing on the wrong metrics, spreading themselves too thin taking too long on too many projects that are ultimately doomed for failure lead to higher than required rates of failure.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men #

4/5 ⭐

Fundamentally a brilliant book to reshape your perspective on gender issues, from a bottom up approach. I’m not convinced all case studies mentioned are as simple as stated, but the root problem is indeed a lack of gender disaggregated data.

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection #

4/5 ⭐

(not provided)

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions #

3/5 ⭐

It took me 9 months to finish this book. Why? On one hand, almost every page is covered in a stream of factoids, which I’ve either read before elsewhere, or seen elsewhere in this book! On the other hand, this book is effectively a collation of small articles + accounts from climate activists from around the globe, with a connecting piece written by Greta in-between sections of the book. This format was interesting for about the first hundred pages, but after a while became a bit of a slog to read through, with the last 40 feeling like repeats of the first.

Whilst this isn’t the most flattering review, I want to make it clear that I agree with the majority of the book. Some suggestions are a bit delusional (yes, the richest nations must spearhead fossil fuel replacements through technological improvements, but pay reparations? That’s just not practical), but the overwhelming majority of the book is quite reasonable, if a little alarmist.

A Philosophy of Software Design #

4/5 ⭐

Overall a brilliant collection of strong opinions that I generally think are good to follow, or to at least consider and oppose meaningfully. A similar resource for this is grugbrain.dev, a personal bible for me.

It’s very much a theoretical book for those with the luxury of time though, as allocating time for a good design is inherently expensive, something that unfortunately must be traded off with implementation work. John coins a term “tactical tornadoes” for those who go around improving systems quickly, rather than holistically. I believe this is somewhat childish, as anyone can and must become this persona in times of need.

Overall I would recommend the talk John gives at Google instead of this book (find it on YouTube), as it provides much of the same core principles (deep interfaces, etc) in a more engaging and concise format.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications #

4/5 ⭐

(not provided)

Taxtopia: How I Discovered the Injustices, Scams and Guilty Secrets of the Tax Evasion Game #

5/5 ⭐

(not provided)

The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies #

3/5 ⭐

(not provided)

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future #

4/5 ⭐

The “engineering state” vs the “lawyerly society”, an accurate portrayal of china and the US. Dan Wang’s analysis of these two superpowers cuts pretty deep, and isn’t very forgiving for either one. I agree in general with the principle diagnosis, but there isn’t a whole lot more detail other than that. I’m also not entirely sure I agree with the final remarks that china is unable to compete technologically with the USA, I fear that lead is being eroded quickly.

Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure: Top Gear, Grand Tour and Twenty Years of Magic and Mayhem #

5/5 ⭐

Obviously impossible to fault a deliberate nostalgia trip.

Appendix #

I just reused and slightly modified the script from last year’s post - no point wasting good LLM tokens on something already done!