Favorite Reads of 2025
This year I read 26 books, and looking back, a pattern emerged: I’m fascinated by systems – whether that’s the game mechanics of a dungeon crawler, the organizational charts of tech companies, or the neural wiring of my own brain.
Three themes dominated my reading:
- The “Level Up” Mentality. From LitRPG series like Dungeon Crawler Carl and He Who Fights with Monsters to career guides like The Staff Engineer’s Path, I kept gravitating toward stories of progression. The throughline? Life and work are systems that can be mastered and optimized through intentional effort. (If you can’t tell from me reading the entire Dungeon Crawler Carl series in a couple months, I loved these books!)
- Mastering the Inner Landscape. Between Scattered Minds, The Anxious Generation, Feeling Good, and Taming the Tiger Within, I spent significant time exploring the machinery of the mind. These books offered tools (CBT, mindfulness, and frameworks) for maintaining emotional regulation in a chaotic world.
- Survival Strategy in High-Stakes Environments. Whether navigating alien-imposed death games or corporate inflection points (Only the Paranoid Survive), my books featured underdogs forced to outsmart larger, often corrupt systems (Empire of Pain). The lesson: strategy isn’t just about winning; it’s about adapting when the old rules no longer apply.
Turns out, I like reading about people who treat life like a game they’re determined to beat, one carefully chosen skill point at a time.