2025 Round-up

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Here’s the 2025 round-up of my favourite books for the year, as well as an update on the website.

You can also check out previous round-ups for: 2024, 2023 and 2022.

Best books of 2025

Of the books I summarised this year, my favourite 3 were:

• The Book of Why by Judea Pearl. This was a clear winner for me. It’s not an easy read, but the ideas are incredibly powerful once you understand them. I’ve already used causal diagrams in two separate blog posts, and I think I would have struggled to communicate the same ideas without them.
• The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker. I feel like crappy gatherings need to shoulder a lot of blame for the ‘loneliness epidemic’ in modern society. Even if you’ve never thought of yourself as a “gatherer”, this is worth a read if you’ve ever tried to connect with people in a group setting. It will make you see how lacking most gatherings are and perhaps inspire you to try to improve them.
• The Art of Logic by Eugenia Cheng. This one squeaks in at #3 because, despite my various criticisms, I found the underlying ideas really useful and I’ve kept coming back to them over the course of the year.

The website

Summaries and blog posts

This year I only published 11 summaries—about half of what I published the previous two years. Blog posts were also down at 10, but half of these were high-effort posts I’m rather proud of, so I’m not too troubled by the reduced output there.

As usual, I read a lot more books than I ended up summarising (26 + 6 audiobooks). In fact, part of the reason I lost momentum with my summaries was that there were a few “duds” in a row that I didn’t feel were worth summarising (Work by James Suzman, Is Math Real? by Eugenia Cheng, and Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka).

Another reason for the slowdown was that some of the books I did want to summarise were rather dense and daunting to summarise. How Asia Works, The New Map and The Book of Why were all excellent books, but their summaries took me ages. There are a few summaries I have in the works that are also taking a while.

Finally, I also had personal reasons for publishing fewer summaries—I moved to another country, and started to spend a lot more time learning about AI and AI safety regulation. Given how quickly the field is changing, this type of learning hasn’t involved many books.

Visitors and subscribers

Google Analytics shows that my visitor numbers fell sharply in late October. I expect this is because of my reduced output, but I haven’t really looked into it. I also think the books I’m summarising these days are simply less popular than the self-improvement books I focused on in previous years.

Email sign-ups have continued to grow, though the pace has dropped off since March this year.

Closing thoughts

I was tossing up whether to even do a round-up this year, because I knew the site had slowed down a lot, and I thought that confronting the stats would just be depressing. But writing up this post has actually made me feel better. The drop-off in visitors feels very much “deserved” given my publishing has slowed, and the drop-off in subscriber growth has not been as sharp as I’d expected. So, yeah, thanks to everyone who has subscribed and stuck around!

Looking ahead, I don’t know if I will get back to my earlier publishing rates. Until April 2026 at least, other projects will take priority. After that, I still expect to focus on rather dense books that take longer to summarise. But I am exploring ways to embed AI tools into my workstream, which might help boost my output. The technology keeps getting better, and I do think there are ways to use AI wisely. However, I don’t want to sacrifice quality and the last thing I want is for my summaries or posts to “sound like AI”. So I’m exploring this carefully, and I’m not going to rush it.

Anyway, all the best for 2026!