Books 2025

I had hoped that 2025 would be the year in which I start reading more books per year than I buy, alas. Despite not having reached the goal of outreading my purchases, I have finally managed to read slightly more than my disappointing average of ~3 books/year (2020-2024) and finished a whooping 7 books in 2025! Let’s get to it!

Completed

Termination Shock - Neal Stephenson

This book is very much in post-2000s Stephenson territory: very long, follows many characters who don’t seem to possess a common denominator until the very end all while twisting and turning in an unpredictable manner.

It starts out with Saskia, the Queen of the Netherlands, crash landing an airliner into a hoarde of wild boars somewhere in Texas. She is the one co-piloting the plane because this is an undercover diplomatic mission and the Queen can for some reason pilot her own aircraft. Perfect. Almost Hiro Protagonist levels of introduction (courtesy of Snow Crash). We eventually discover that she is visiting a billionaire who has had the crazy idea of mitigating global warming via Stratospheric aerosol injection of sulphur. The catch is that while this idea will allegedly work for the Netherlands, Venice, parts of China and some other places, it could result in detrimental droughts in other places, namely Punjab. This sets off a conspiracy thriller where multiple polarities emerge with both the private and the public; the global North and the global South, vying for their own perfect scenario to unfold. Not without a healthy amount of infighting within the groups themselves, of course.

Termination Shock is a well-researched 700+ page behemoth that ended up being a page turner despite presenting me with a complicated plot and many contemporary near-future sci-fi elements. 8/10 from me.

Seveneves - Neal Stephenson (re-read)

This one I’ve read once before around 2018. Back then it took me the whole year to get through and I ended up spacing out over the last third of the book. There is a famously ill-regarded tonal shift in its third part that had not swooned me either, at the time of reading. This time, however, it managed to captivate me cover to cover.

The premise:

An unknown agent collides with the Moon and shatters it. As the pieces begin to collide with one another, astronomer and science popularizer Doc Dubois Harris calculates that Moon fragments will begin entering Earth’s atmosphere. This, in turn, will form a white sky and engulf the Earth with a cloud of bolides. The atmosphere will heat up so much that the oceans will boil away.

The name of the event: the Hard Rain.

The deadline for the event: two years, give or take.

The outcome: everyone on the surface of the Earth is burnt to a crisp, crushed under a massive rock or dead of malnourishment in several days.

The planet then scrambles for survival by building out the International Space Station as far and as wide as possible. However, with the Earth’s space programs having been on the backburner for so many years, the far and wide is indeed not very far and not very wide. This new project is named the Cloud Ark and only about 1500 people end up being relocated to space. Not much at all, if you ask me!

This “premise” (or setup) part takes up roughly the first third of the page count. It serves to introduce the reader to the main characters who will end up on the Ark as well as the characters that end up perishing.

The second third is about what happens to the psyches of the inhabitants of the Cloud Ark as they watch the Hard Rain set their blue planet ablaze and the things that follow. Somehow, despite the Earth being gone, these several hundreds of survivors still manage to introduce old-world politics into their new worldbuilding. This unleashes many a problem and sets us up for the conclusion which is heavy spoiler territory and will not be discussed here.

There is one detour in the second part where some of the main characters set off to capture a mining ship that has gone adrift (in space, duuh!) with a comet attached. This one part was so incredibly intense that it could have been its own movie. If only someone would bother making one!

Anyways, to wrap up: my second read of this was a much better experience and raised the book to a 10/10. Definitely recommended.

Convenience Store Woman (Konbini Ningen) - Sayaka Murata

A short, weird and a very Japanese read. The plot follows Keiko who has been working in a convenience store for the past 18 years. Despite having graduated from college and not being “visually lacking” (in a Victorian society kind of way), she doesn’t feel like committing to a real career or finding a husband. This really unnerves Keiko’s family and friends: some worry that she will not have enough to sustain herself once the physical requirements of the work get to her; some are concerned that she makes the family look bad by not being normal, and some just become dreadfully uncomfortable around her.

I enjoyed some bits of it for the protagonist’s resolve not to behave “correctly”, but all in all, I didn’t find this book to be greatly enjoyable. It’s only 200 pages long so there’s that. 6/10

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - Nick Bostrom

Very dense and full of interesting ideas. Too dense for its own good.

Nick Bostrom explores the many ideas of how humanity could achieve superintelligence/AGI. The paths he ponders are not just those of computer AI, but also selectively breeding for intelligence over many generations, brain enhancements and full brain simulations. He presents each chapter in a way that subsequent chapters could build upon and thus weaves a tale from what intelligence is (understood to be now) to how it could be scaled to what dangers that would entail and how we could mitigate those.

It’s an enjoyable read as a thought-experiment, but somewhat dated when observing from where we are “now”, the now being completely consumed by our race to achieve AGI and thinking computers. My personal reason for reading it was that I wanted to read his Deep Utopia (2024) that talks about how to live in a solved world. 7/10

The Fellowship of the Ring - J.R.R. Tolkien

No need to ramble about this one for too long. You all know what it is even if you haven’t read it. This was my third attempt and I finally managed to “get it”. You’re a genius, Sir Tolkien, thank you. Will read the other two. 10/10

Against Identity : The Wisdom of Escaping the Self - Alexander Douglas

Many places present this one as a philosophy book, but I’d personally put it into the Self-help shelf. That might sound sacrilegious and off-putting to many, but I mean self-help in the best possible way this time.

Against Identity is about confronting your own bullshit about who you are and leaving liberated. It presents the definitions of self-identity from three different people who have lived in different societies (namely Zhuangzi, Dutch Enlightenment thinker Benedict de Spinoza, and 20th Century French theorist René Girard) and managed to draw roughtly the same conclusions. It challenges the reader to consider how subjecting ourselves to strict identiarianism causes a great deal of strife to us. This happens in our personal lives where we feel we should think as someone or be something so strongly that it devastates us as well as our public lives where polarization an tribalism leaves us forgetting that we have more things in common than we think. A great read that (hopefully) left me slightly wiser than before. 10/10.

The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman

Originally written in 1988 this book still holds up. It’s especially true after observing the big tech invent and reinvent the wheel of design all while falling flat on their faces while doing it. Norman’s key idea is that people usually want an outcome, not a thing, i.e. that they buy tools to drill holes, not because they want a shiny new Makita. The same thing applies to using stove knobs and computers. This paragraph had especially resonated with me:

The partnership of technology and people makes us smarter, stronger, and better able to live in the modern world. We have become reliant on the technology and we can no longer function without it. The dependence is even stronger today than ever before, including mechanical, physical things such as housing, clothing, heating, food preparation and storage, and transportation. Now this range of dependencies is extended to information services as well: communication, news, entertainment, education, and social interaction. When things work, we are informed, comfortable, and effective. When things break, we may no longer be able to function. This dependence upon technology is very old, but every decade, the impact covers more and more activities.

It gave me flashbacks to when Microsoft ruined the start menu or when cookie popups started to appear everywhere. And these are just obvious irritators in our every day (virtual) tools. There’s also the friction of performance caused by slow-loading webpages and apps, the move fast and break things mentality that ends up shipping products which interrupt or outright destroy our work, and also the designers who desire to indulge in the process of design for the sake of it rather than to achieve a purpose. This blog post is about none of those things, however, so I’ll stop here. Just read this, please, if you’re in the design/dev space. 10/10