These are the best books I read in 2025

Philosophy, Reading / /

I love to read.

What a beautiful gift—the ability to read. To be rewarded so vastly for a few hours of your time and attention.

It almost isn’t fair how easy it is! Open a book, let your eyes move over the lines, and bam—the world’s wisdom is yours.

What a beautiful gift a good book is.

The pages… the sentences…

The words.

One after another they chip away at our ignorance—our discontentment—and return us at once to stillness. We breathe a sigh of relief.

The stories.

One after another they pile up, pushing us away from the center of the universe, expanding our world as we’re brought down to size. We’re humbled and empowered. We become fearless.

How life-changing a good book can be. What a beautiful life we can build from them. (I keep a growing list of my favorites, which you can view and bookmark here.)

I read around 70 books this year, and many of them were among the best I’ve ever read. There were some that I couldn’t stop talking or thinking about, so I had to put them in a list and recommend them to you. These are the books that most changed the way I think, taught me something invaluable, and pushed me to be a better person. I have a feeling they’ll do the same for you.

An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork by Etty Hillesum
One of the best discoveries I made this year was the writings of Etty Hillesum. How had I never heard of her?

Etty was a Dutch Jew living in Amsterdam when she began her diary—at her therapist’s urging—nine months after the Nazis took over the Netherlands. She was 27 years old. Two years later, at age 29, she would be murdered in Auschwitz, along with her family.

This book is made up of those diary entries and letters. Within them, we witness a startling personal transformation that unfolds over just two years.

In the early pages, we meet a young woman in emotional chaos: boy-crazy, prone to self-indulgent daydreaming, keenly aware that she spends too much time gazing at herself in the mirror. But as time passes, something remarkable happens. She begins to transform—spiritually, emotionally, philosophically—all in the face of unthinkable horror.

It’s as if the bleaker her circumstances became, the stronger her spirit grew.

While stationed with her family at Camp Westerbork, Etty describes walking beside the barbed-wire fences and feeling… joy. She wasn’t delusional. She understood what would likely happen to her. Yet that awareness did not lead her to despair. In fact, the opposite occurred: she fell more deeply in love with life.

And here’s the thing—she could have gone into hiding. She chose not to.

Defying her friends’ pleas, Etty refused to hide from her persecutors. “She didn’t want to desert her parents, but more than that,” Carol Lee Flinders writes, “it just felt morally wrong to her that anyone would concentrate on personal survival who could be reaching out lovingly to others instead.”

Friends even recall failed attempts to “kidnap” Etty and put her into hiding. Convinced she didn’t fully understand the danger she was in, Klaas Smelik—the writer to whom she would later entrust her diaries—once grabbed her in an attempt to pull her to safety. She wriggled free, stepped back, and said, “You don’t understand me.” When he admitted that he didn’t, she replied: “I want to share the destiny of my people.”

In that moment, he knew there was no hope of “rescuing” her. She would not allow it. Besides, she argued, what did it matter if she went—or if someone else did?

And this was a woman who had everything going for her! She had family and friends, a law degree, ambition, curiosity, and a full, vibrant inner life.

Yet she would not run and hide—not when there were so many people right in front of her she could help.

I could go on and on. Whenever someone asks me if I’ve read anything good lately, this is the book I talk about. Do yourself a favor and read it!

(And if you want an even deeper dive into Etty Hillesum, I’ve read and recommended Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed by Patrick Woodhouse, Enduring Lives: Living Portraits of Women and Faith in Action by Carol Lee Flinders (the section on Etty), andThe Jungian Inspired Holocaust Writings of Etty Hillesum: To Write Is to Act by Barbara Morrill, and the textbook, Reading Etty Hillesum in Context.)

Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday
Not only is this one of the best books I’ve read this year, it’s one of the best books I’ve read, period. It’s also my favorite book in his virtue series.

This book is about the most important kind of knowledge there is: knowing what’s what. What’s worth pursuing. What we should avoid. What we can ignore. What we should never ignore.

Lots of people are smart—but how many have wisdom? Lots of people know facts, but how many can think with nuance? How many people really know themselves? (Self-awareness, he argues, is the rarest thing in the world.)

“Think of the people,” he writes, “who […] miss out on life because they are chasing immortal fame.” They convince themselves that their job is so important they don’t have time for contemplation, or even an hour with a good book. They check their work emails well after they’ve logged off for the day. They do things that could have gone without doing.

“Wisdom is knowing that what you do is important…but that it’s not that important.”

In doing all this, they miss the whole point of life: happiness. Not pleasure or comfort, but the deeper happiness that comes from doing the right thing, for the right reasons, in the right way, at the right time. The happiness that comes from truly knowing what’s what.

And this kind of wisdom takes constant effort. Famed basketball coach George Raveling, Holiday writes, “wakes up each morning, sits on the side of the bed, and gives himself two choices. ‘George,’ he says to himself, ‘you can either be happy or you can be very happy.’”

“Wisdom is happiness. Happiness is wisdom,” Ryan writes. “This is not a tautology. No one would be happy not fulfilling their potential, and yet, can one flourish without joy and happiness?”

This is another book I could go on and on about. It’s that good. Do yourself another favor and read it.

Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman
I didn’t think I would like this book. I assumed it would be another familiar argument about how we should stop chasing money and things and start caring more about making the world better.

And yes—it is that book. But it’s also so much more. It’s genuinely inspiring and eye-opening. Even my wife, Courtney—who typically blasts scream core while she cooks—turned the music off each evening so I could read it out loud until we finished it.

The thought experiment that made philosopher Peter Singer famous goes like this: suppose you’re on a walk and see a child drowning in a pond. You want to jump in and save the child, but then you remember you’re wearing a pair of brand-new, super expensive shoes. Jumping into the pond would ruin them. What do you do?

Obviously, you save the child. Pose this question to anyone and the answer is always the same. What kind of question is that, anyway?

But Singer argues we do the exact opposite all the time. The money we spend on things we don’t need could save so many children’s lives.

One of the stories I loved was that of businessman-turned-philanthropist Rob Mather. After finding the success of a corporate career deeply empty, he wanted to put his energy toward something that actually made a difference. But what? He wasn’t interested in a vague gesture or a symbolic cause—he wanted to take on a problem that was massive, yet solvable. He found malaria.

In 2005, malaria was killing 3,000 children every day. That’s the equivalent of seven jumbo jets full of children going down. It’s almost impossible to fathom. Could one person really do something about that?

As it turns out, malaria has a surprisingly simple and inexpensive solution: mosquito nets treated with insecticide. So Rob decided he would raise money to provide them.

But this raises an obvious question. If curbing such a deadly disease is really that straightforward, why hadn’t someone already done something about it?

That’s one of the many questions Bregman urges us to sit with. Even the tiniest effort on our part, he argues, can make an extraordinary difference. “You can be your average exec in your average company one day and then take the lead in fighting one of the world’s deadliest diseases the next.”

Mather went on to found the Against Malaria Foundation, which has now “raised more than 700 million dollars and distributed over 300 million mosquito nets to 600 million people.” Because of this, the daily death toll has dropped from the equivalent of seven jumbo jets to fewer than three.

In one village in Uganda’s West Nile region—where nearly half the population had suffered from malaria in the preceding months—Rob’s foundation distributed 50,000 mosquito nets. A man from the village later walked six miles to dictate a message through the Red Cross to Rob, letting him know that malaria no longer existed there. The disease had been completely eradicated in his village.

It’s such an inspiring and timely book. Courtney and I loved it.

More books that made this year of reading especially rich:

Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change by Ben Austen
This was so moving and well-written I remember holding it to my chest after reading certain passages.

Company K by William March
This is phenomenal and I wrote about one of my favorite stories from it here.

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick
This was essential to understanding Chat GPT and how to use it as a creativity partner.

Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo
I underlined or starred something on almost every page.

Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus
I read this to better understand Charlie Kirk and his motives for saying the things he said. (By the way, this is another benefit of reading good books: so you can hear messages like Charlie’s and not think they’re normal.)

Epictetus: The Complete Works Robin Waterfield
Literally incredible. It’s like a cleanser for your mind, washing away the mental weeds and tuning your thoughts to the sound of reason.

Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer
I finished this recently and Oh. My. Gosh. It is so, so good.

Narrowing down the above list was tough, so here are other books I read this year and loved:

Philosophy as a Way of Life by Piette Hadot, 1984 by George Orwell,The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson, Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed by Patrick Woodhouse, The Art of Slow Writing by Louise DeSalvo,Fahrenheit 182 by Mark Hoppus, Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul by Barry M. Andrews, Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Still Writing by Dani Shapiro, Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor,Writing My Wrongs by Shaka Senghor, The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey, How To Think Like Socrates by Donald J. Robertson, Enduring Lives: Living Portraits of Women and Faith in Action by Carol Lee Flinders, The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X, The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule, How To Be Caring by Shantideva, Lincoln on Leadership by Donald T. Phillips,The Courage To Create by Rollie May,History Matters by David McCullough, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback by Seth Wickersham, Socrates by Paul Johnson,With the Old Breed by E. B. Sledge,A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst, New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton, How To Be Caring by Shantideva, and Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer.

These ideas keep me grounded as the world speeds up

Creativity, Philosophy / /

Follow the trail long enough

Margaret Atwood doesn’t begin with a master plan.

She starts her novels with something small—an image, a voice, a scene—and lets the structure emerge as she writes.

She wrote two sections of her book Surfacing five years before writing the rest. To know everything in advance, she says, would be “too much like paint-by-numbers.”

Still, many writers, especially early on, try to leap ahead—writing too quickly, aiming for clarity too soon. But that’s a trap. “Rushing through writing is like rushing through life,” Louise DeSalvo has said.

Instead of sprinting to the finish, the best work often comes from moving slowly, clue by clue. “How long are we willing to wait to develop our most singular work?” DeSalvo asks. “Or rather, how long are we willing to work? Are we stopping short of when our work begins to sing its true song? . . . If it took Matisse seven years, or Eugenides nine, why do we expect important work from ourselves in, say, a year or even two?”

She recalls how her early drafts felt “constrained and safe.” Her characters were one-dimensional, the settings vague, the story overly linear. But she kept going. “Dissatisfied though I may be, it’s essential to continue working,” she writes, “for it’s only near the end of the process that I develop my singular voice.” She admits that it isn’t until her eleventh draft that she finally knows what she’s doing with a book.

It doesn’t have to be good right away. Just get started. Let the work simmer. Let it surprise you.

Because if we give ourselves time—if we follow the trail long enough—“we, too, might create a singular, authentic, powerful work of art.”

Well, sometimes that’s exactly the right method

Like Atwood, Thomas Edison didn’t start out with a grand plan.

Edison’s creation of the commercially viable lightbulb was the culmination of small discoveries. He followed those discoveries—trusting they would lead somewhere, even if he didn’t yet know where. As David McCullough often stressed, the people we read about in history had no idea how things would turn out. When we read history, we’re not reading people’s past so much as we’re reading what they were presently living.

In 1878, others were experimenting with incandescent light. “But [Edison],” Ryan Holiday writes, “was the only [person] willing to test six thousand different filaments—including one made from the beard hair of one of his men— inching closer each time to the one that would finally work.”

His success had little to do with intellect and everything to do with persistence.

“Nikola Tesla, who spent a frustrating year in Edison’s lab during the invention of the lightbulb, once sneered that if Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would ‘proceed at once’ to simply ‘examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.’ Well, sometimes that’s exactly the right method…”

While others despaired, Edison worked. He wouldn’t rush. He would trust the process. And he did it all without the hindsight of knowing how things would turn out.

No one will ask how long it took

George Pocock, the builder behind the world’s finest racing shells, was, as Daniel James Brown writes, “all but born with an oar in his hand.” Boatbuilding ran in his blood—both grandfathers were competitive boatbuilders, and his father built racing shells for Eton College. George carried that legacy forward, blending deep knowledge with an unmatched devotion to craftsmanship. At the peak of his career, he was supplying racing shells to nearly every elite crew program in the country—including the University of Washington, whose team shocked the world with their win at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

What set his shells apart was the patience and care he put into them. Pocock refused to rush, remembering his father’s words: “No one will ask you how long it took to build; they will only ask who built it.”

A student in a hurry learns the slowest

This is one of my favorite anecdotes in the phenomenal book Wisdom Takes Work:

“There is a story about a samurai warrior named Banzo, who sought an education in a hurry so that he could impress his father. Told by a great teacher that mastery would take ten years, he was aghast.

‘I can’t wait that long. What if I work extra hard?’

‘OK,’ the master said. ‘Thirty years.’

‘But I will do whatever it takes to make it go faster,’ Banzo pleaded.

‘In that case,’ the master said, ‘it shall take seventy years. A student in a hurry learns the slowest.’”

Books read this month

Reading / /

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen
I have eight journals and planners I use regularly. Nine if you count my commonplace book of notecards. (My wife, Courtney, likes to joke that I have to write reminders to remember to breathe.) I keep a weekly planner and notebook for work, and a personal weekly planner with a habit tracker for everything else. I keep a notebook on my writing desk and one on my nightstand. I keep a collage/travel journal and a one-line-per-day journal. And then there’s my most important journal: my morning pages journal.

So it’s no wonder a book with notebook and paper in the title grabbed my attention. What’s funny is that, according to my notes, I first started reading this book in September—of last year. I’m not sure why I stopped, but I picked it back up again this October. This book is thorough. If you want to understand where notebooks originated and how they’ve morphed into one of the best pieces of technology the world has ever known, this is the book you want to read. “Use it enough,” Allen writes, “and a notebook will change your brain.”

How To Be Caring by Shantideva
I picked this up this month at Changing Hands bookstore as part of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, and loved it. I also bought and read How to Have Willpower. Some of my favorites from this series are: How to Have a Life: An Ancient Guide to Using Our Time Wisely, How to Do the Right Thing, How to be Content, How to Give, and How to Be Free.

Lincoln on Leadership by Donald T. Phillips
I came across this while browsing the shelves at Goodwill and decided to give it a shot. Wow, this book is good. It’s fairly short, but it manages to touch on some of the most important qualities that made Lincoln such a force: his relentless self-education, his strong sense of right and wrong, his ability to put the right people in the right positions, his gift of finding common ground with just about everyone, his otherworldly humility, and his sense of humor even in the most dire situations. There’s a reason he’s regarded not only as the best president we’ve had, but as one of the best men to have ever lived, period.

The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey
A good friend of mine recommended this, and one of my biggest takeaways—and this is something I’ve been thinking about—is the idea that we have two selves within us. One is anxious and controlling and judgmental, and the other is intuitive and natural and creates without fear. We have to let the second self take over, quieting the mind so we can perform at our best. Relaxed concentration—that’s the key. Not trying so hard. As Ray Bradbury warns in Zen in the Art of Writing (a classic), “Those who try hardest scare it [the Muse] off into the woods. Those who turn their backs and saunter along, whistling softly between their teeth, hear it treading quietly behind them, lured by a carefully acquired disdain.”

History Matters by David McCullough
Wow, what a gem! I bought this book because I love McCullough’s writing and was pleasantly surprised to find that much of it is about his writing. After his passing in 2022, his daughter and research assistant found and organized some of his best essays and speeches, including some that had never been published. It’s a beautiful book; the inside covers feature paintings McCullough himself created. I got something from almost every page.

Do the work, and let destiny take care of the rest

Life, Philosophy / /

“There are a million different versions, this is mine.”

For the first few years of his career, White Lotus star Walton Goggins would walk into auditions asking himself, What do these people want from me? “And I can tell you it brought me a lot of pain. A lot of pain,” he says.

But everything changed when he flipped the question. Instead of trying to deliver what he thought they wanted, he started asking himself what he thought the role needed. He thought, “You know what? I’m just gonna come from my heart, and this is my version of it. There are a million different versions of it. And if this is not the version they’re buying, at least I can live with myself at the end of the day. And I can walk away without expecting this job, you know? And that’s really where I found my salvation.”

It’s one of the hardest things to do: to pour your heart into something without thinking about the outcome.

But it’s how the best work gets made.

One of the most brilliant physicists to ever live had his biggest breakthrough when he realized the same thing:

“I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.”

After four intense years working on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, Richard Feynman accepted a teaching position at Cornell. Top universities were competing for him, offering higher salaries and prestige. Albert Einstein himself wrote, inviting Feynman to join the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

But despite the remarkable offers, he couldn’t accept. The years at Los Alamos had drained him. He was exhausted, uninterested in research, and couldn’t write more than two sentences on a scientific problem without losing focus. “They expect me to accomplish something, and I can’t accomplish anything! I have no ideas…”

Then he had a thought. The expectations attached to these offers were absurd—impossible to live up to. And because they were impossible, he realized, he had no responsibility to live up to them!

“It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.”

At Cornell, he decided to return to what had always drawn him to physics in the first place: fun. From now on, he would only work on problems that entertained him. “Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything . . . I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”

Within a week, he was working on a “fun” project, one a colleague questioned for its lack of importance. “‘Hah!’ I say. ‘There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.’ His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind that I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.”

This project of “no importance” led him to win the Nobel Prize.

Literally, who cares?

Before she became a household name, Elizabeth Gilbert had no connections in the publishing world. She knew full well that her writing might never make money. “It might never work,” she remembers thinking. “It didn’t matter. No way was I going to give up on my work simply because it wasn’t ‘working.’ That wasn’t the point of it.”

She understood that the reward couldn’t be external—it had to come “from the private awareness I held that I had chosen a devotional path and I was being true to it.” It had to come from the heart. It had to be fun.

“You might spend your whole life following your curiosity and have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end—except one thing. You will have the satisfaction of knowing that you passed your entire existence in devotion to the noble human virtue of inquisitiveness. And that should be more than enough for anyone to say that they lived a rich and splendid life.”

That kind of devotion changes everything. Work of any kind can be discouraging when we’re thinking about the results. With creative work, the doubt can grow louder—the fear that we have nothing new to say, that everything’s been done before.

But as Elizabeth Gilbert says, who cares? Literally, who cares? There’s nothing new. What is new is yourperspective and passion and the stories you tell. There are a million different versions; this is yours.

She once said she can’t understand how people can create something beautiful and then hide it for fear of being criticized. “She advises writers to send their work to agents ‘as much as possible,’” Louise DeSalvo writes. “And when the rejection letters come back, to ‘take a deep breath and try again.’”

Because it’s the writer’s job to complete the work; it’s the agent’s and editor’s job to decide whether the work is good enough to be published.

It’s your job to give your version, to have fun, to pursue the thing that lights you up. It’s your job “to write your little heart out,” Gilbert insists, “and let destiny take care of the rest.”

Books read this month

Reading / /

Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus
I had never heard of Charlie Kirk and, after the intense reactions from all sides of the political spectrum when he was tragically murdered, I needed a way to understand what was happening. So I read this 900-page biography about another guy I had never heard of—Bill Buckley, considered the father of conservatism. (Ryan Holiday recommended this. How does he always recommend the best books?) Before I read this book, I watched videos of Kirk’s debates and immersed myself in his social media posts and ideas. The more I watched, the more confused—and concerned—I became. How the hell was this guy so popular? More to the point, how could so many people agree with what he said? And how could a guy with millions of followers be so reckless (and reckless is a generous word) with what he said? “It should be legal to burn a rainbow or BLM flag in public,” reads one of his Instagram posts. He wasn’t trying to unite people. He debated topics not to get to the truth, but to win arguments. His game was to state his opinion—no matter how trivial or misleading or biased—and defend it at all costs. There was no nuance or concessions. It’s a tale as old as rhetoricians. While today we would call someone like this a demagogue, in ancient Greece he would have been considered a professional debater or sophist—people whom ethical philosophers like Socrates and Epictetus repeatedly warned against. Kirk’s playbook was almost identical to Bill Buckley’s, who spent most of his career looking for the next thing to argue against. Anyway, what I didn’t expect as I worked my way through the book was to find Buckley so likable. Buckley—who, near the end of his life, finally admitted that he was wrong about the Civil Rights Act, that federal intervention was necessary—was a complex guy. He seemed to be a good friend to everyone he knew, even the people he disagreed with. His social circle included gay men, and in the late ’80s, his wife, Pat, raised millions of dollars for AIDS research. In many ways, how he actually felt—at least, how he lived his life and treated others—wasn’t the same as what he claimed publicly. But then he wouldn’t have much of a platform, would he? It’s why we can’t fall for every smooth talker, why we have to keep thinking for ourselves, why we must stay on guard against dangerous rhetoric. Because not every confident voice is interested in getting to the truth.

American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback by Seth Wickersham
I love watching football, and this book on quarterbacking—what the position entails (it’s wild how much goes into advancing a football down a field), what it costs to be great, and what happens when you finally get there—is fascinating. It’s a look into the lives of some of the best QBs to ever play, like John Elway, Peyton Manning, and Warren Moon, as well as newcomers like Caleb Williams and Bo Nix. Really entertaining.

Upstream by Mary Oliver
This is a meditation on literature and what it means to her, what it means to live a creative life. I loved it, especially how she talks about absentmindedness being fine—being a good thing even. It reminds me of the saying: if you’re on top of everything, you’re probably not on top of anything. “It is six A.M., and I am working,” she writes. “I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written.”

Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday
I’m still working my way through it, but so far it’s his best book in the virtue series. This is the review I wrote on Amazon: Ryan Holiday’s books are the only ones I preorder without question. Not because he’s written like 16 best-sellers, but because what he says is always timely, timeless, important, and practical. And he’s always right. Not just in his arguments, but more importantly in what he chooses to talk about in the first place. It’s like he has a filter that takes his every experience and thought and turns it into something meaningful and educational. If you’re on the fence about buying this book—a book about wisdom no less by one of the wisest thinkers on the planet—you’re probably not very familiar with his work.

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