So far in 2025, I’ve read 36 books and written one. Here are my favorites.

(I’m mostly writing this for myself for future reference purposes, but I’m sharing it as perhaps you’ve got a few bibliophiles on your holiday list!)

Business books

I read a lot of business books, and there are two business books that I wouldn’t shut up about this year and raved about to almost every founder I came across.

No Bullshit Strategy, by Alex H. M. Smith (2023)
Good for: founders who know they should know more about strategy but don’t know where to start

For a long time, I’ve been looking for a recommendable book on strategy. There are plenty of good books on strategy, but mostly written from a business school perspective.

The typical indie founder does not want to spend time they could spend coding reading about P&G in the 90s and wondering how the heck that is going to help them grow their business.

This one is the winner. It’s short, actionable, and with absolutely no extra fluff. I guarantee you’ll be full of ideas after reading it — and you can probably finish it in one night. (I did.)

The Pricing Roadmap: How to Design B2B SaaS Pricing Models That Your Customers Will Love
Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt (2023)

Like No Bullshit Strategy, this one is to-the-point, actionable, and full of useful frameworks and diagrams to help you visualized how to price your products.

But what made it really stand out is that there’s an entire chapter devoted to a pricing interview (!), complete with a script (!!) and a suggested format for your slides (!!!).

Obviously, I had to take it for a spin. It just so happened that the reason I was reading the book was I was trying to figure out how to price a new product—and competitor price levels and models were all over the place.

The pricing script and framework it worked beautifully. It was so, so helpful to have a framework for discussing pricing models with a customer, and I made sure to recommend it in the updated edition of my own book.

Non-business books

While I read a good amount of business books, they’re only a small percentage of the books I read. I usually read about history, politics, and economics, with a little bit of fiction sprinkled in here and there. Here are my top 5 non-fiction of the year.

Non-fiction

I’m an inveterate non-fiction girl, and my absolute favorite kind of non-fiction is narrative non-fiction. It will therefore come as no surprise that my top two for the year are both narrative non-fiction: non-fiction with a compelling story, fast pace, and rising action like fiction.

If you’ve read Erik Larson’s captivating narrative non-fiction books — his Demon of Unrest (2024), about the run-up to the American Civil War, and The Splendid and the Vile (2020), about Churchill during the Battle of Britain — you’ll love Say Nothing. I simply couldn’t put it down. It’s a capitating story about a widowed mother of 10 who was kidnapped during the Troubles.

It absolutely sucked me in. Not only is the story captivating, the way it’s written is masterful. I wish I could write like this.

It’s important to note that this is just one (harrowing) story from the Troubles, and has an outsider’s distance from the conflict. That led me to want to read more about Ireland, which leads to my next recommendation…

But before we get to that: another non-fiction genre I’ve come to really enjoy are personal histories. This is history written with the author as part of the story: not a memoir, but not ostensibly-neutral history, either. Kant said that we can never observe something truly objectively, and what I love about personal histories is that they accept this head-on. The historian and their life experiences are part of the history.

To quote the Irish historian Paul Rouse from episode of The Rest Is History: “The beauty of history lies in its complexities, in its contradictions, in the absurdities of the things that happen…I always think, when you get somebody who presents you history neatly wrapped up in a box, it just makes me run with fright from it because it ordinarily is crafted in a way that is just simply wrong.” That’s what I love about the two books below: they present the complexity of history and how that intersects with the act of presenting it.

3. We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland
Flintan O’Toole (2022)
Good for: People interested in the history of modern Ireland, especially people with Irish roots (like me!)

Back to Ireland. Reading Say Nothing made me realize how little I knew about Irish history, and this book immediately sprang to mind. I’d known about it for years—even bought it for a friend for Christmas a few years ago.

It starts with the author’s year of birth, 1958, and traces Ireland’s development since: years of economic troubles, emigration, the Catholic Church, the Troubles, JFK, and so much more.

I particularly appreciated how he articulated the complexity of his and other Irish people’s feelings about The Troubles, and found it to be an enlightening follow-on to Say Nothing that gave me a much more complete and nuanced picture of the conflict.

4. The Discovery of Britain: An Accidental History
Graham Robb (2025)
Good for: People who are interested in the history of Britain (sorry, I don’t have anything better)

The other personal history I really enjoyed this year also happened on the British Isles, though this time on the other side of the Irish Sea.

I enjoyed Robb’s France: An Adventure History (2022) a few years ago, where he went through French history region-by-region on his bike, and I was excited to learn that he had a new book out.

I went to the UK three times this year, and each time, realized I knew even less about the country and its inhabitants—which is a dangerous thought for me, as realizing I don’t know something means my curiosity is about to kick in. As a result, I read a lot of books about Britain this year, particularly this fall as we prepared for our mini-road trip from Cambridge => York => London. Several were enlightening (Stuart Maconie’s books on the North), one was horrible (Bill Bryson’s), but Graham Robb’s was the one I enjoyed the most.

Robb is honest and unsparing in his presentation of history, but perhaps unique among those who are unsparing, he is also unsparing towards himself. He openly, and frequently, considers the biases he introduces as an observer because of his own background and class. One of the things I learned about Britain when my reading about it had just started, was that “class is to British society what race is to American society.” So many things clicked into place after learning that. After reading this, it would seem unthinkable to read anything about Britain where the author did not take their own socioeconomic background into account.

5. Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany, by Harald Jähner (2024)
Good for: People who are interested in German history; people who are panicked about the rise of fascism

If you, like many people in the last year or so, have developed a sudden interest in early 1930s Germany, this is the book for you.

It charts Germany’s dramatic fall (after WWI) and rise (in the 1920s) and fall again (in the 1930s). Harald Jähner has such a beautifully vivid and human way of presenting history. Rather than seeming like the black-and-white, dour, personality-less people that they’re often presented as in history classes, Jähner shows the vibrancy, diversity, and liveliness of 1920s Germany. It only makes the fall to the Nazis that much more tragic.

I would be remiss not to mention Jähner’s Aftermath, which is about Germany immediately after WWII. It’s absolutely fascinating but was a 2024 read for me, so doesn’t make this list.

Honorable mention

Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe, by Rory McLean (2019)
Good for: people who are panicked about the rise of fascism

I love Rory McLean’s travelogues. This one is a journey through the rise of the far-right in Europe, and even takes McLean to pre-Ukraine War Russia. It’s definitely of its time, and you can feel the shortly-after-Brexit stress running through it. What’s kept me thinking about this book is an unexpected narrative of another person’s journey that recurs throughout it. I unfortunately can’t share more without giving it away, but as I read the news, I find myself thinking of that person and their story often.

Fiction

I don’t read much fiction, and I wish I read more of it. But the problem I have is that non-fiction so easily leads from one topic to another: reading one book makes me realize I don’t know as much about x related topic as I’d like, so I go find a book on that, and that book answers one question but gives me more, and before I know it, I’ve been accidentally researching the same topic for three months.

I find myself with a question, like “Why and when did people stop having servants?”, and then it leads me to one book, which leads me to another, which leads me to another. That question led me to do an accidental survey this spring on the evolution of women’s work in 20th century Britain: Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, Lucy Lethbridge (2013) => Jobs for the Girls: How We Set Out to Work in the Typewriter Age, Ysenda Maxtone Graham (2024) => Nice Work (David Lodge, 1988) (but not in that order, as it was an accidental survey).

So I find myself gliding happily from one non-fiction book to the next, one question after another. I occasionally read fluffy fiction as a palate cleanse in between, but I do wish I read more literature, as it is reflective and human in a way that non-fiction rarely is. It gets me feeling more than it gets me thinking, and sometimes I need that. I did manage to squeeze in a handful of fiction books this year (more than last year, I’ll note), and here are my favorites.

Blood Brothers is fiction, but barely. It’s based on Haffner’s experiences as a social worker and journalist in early 1930s Great Depression Berlin. It was a sensation when it was first published in 1932—and was quickly banned and burned by the Nazis in 1933. (If that isn’t a ringing endorsement, I don’t know what is.)

I don’t quite know how I came across this one, but I went on a “journalists embedding with unhoused and underpriviledged populations in the first half of the 20th century-ish” theme last winter: George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives (1890), Jack London’s People of the Abyss (1903). All of them were eye-opening and equal parts horrifying and illuminating.

But this one… this one hit differently. Perhaps because it’s fiction, there’s more emotion in it. I found myself really rooting for the characters, and I haven’t been able to get them out of my head—especially since they were based on real people, and the author paid the ultimate price for bringing their stories to the public: Haffner himself was disappeared by the Nazis in 1937, and all of his writing, stored at his publisher’s office, was destroyed. It was only rediscovered and republished German in 2013, and in English for the first time in 2016. Trust me—this one is worth your time.

Welcome to the Monkey House
Kurt Vonnegut (1968)
Good for: People who want to be able to dip in and out of a book without having to remember storylines

A few months ago, a friend mentioned that they’d enjoyed The Outsider/The Stranger (Albert Camus, 1942). Then, one of my favorite podcasts, The Rest Is History, did a book club episode about it a week later, so I was like, “Alright, I guess I really should read this book.” It was short enough to read on a plane ride, and I enjoyed how vivid the writing was (though “enjoyed” seems like a weird word to use about a book where the main character is guittonined at the end). I disagree with the perspective of the book, but that’s besides the point, as it got me thinking and talking about philosophy, a topic I haven’t really thought much about in about a year.

I’m generally on board with existentialism and absurdism—there is no one right answer for the meaning or purpose of life, and the universe is irrational and meaningless—yet I disagree with The Outsider in that I don’t see that as necessarily depressing. (I’m told Camus takes a non-depressing view in other books, but it’s hard to interpret that book’s POV as anything but depressing when the main character realizes this and then gets guittonined.) Perhaps I read too much Vonnegut at a tender age, but I instead choose to find what humanity and humor I can in the absurdity of the world.

And that thought is what led me back to Vonnegut for the first time in over 15 years. It’s funny how he’s one of my favorite writers, yet I hadn’t touched any of his books in such a long time. This collection of short stories started out as I expected, with stories like “Harrison Bergeron,” showing Vonnegut’s skepticism towards government and technology alike and which I hadn’t read since high school.

But it quickly reveals a softer, more tender side of Vonnegut, and that really surprised me. I kept expecting the sweeter stories to take a sharp left turn into the dark…and they didn’t. I find myself thinking back to “Who Am I This Time?” and “More Stately Mansions”, which are both stories about the power of love in an absurd world. I genuinely didn’t expect to be touched by his writing, and I’m so delighted by that.

(By the way, if you did want a Vonnegut take on the themes of The Outsider, Mother Night is the ticket. They’re a great pairing: both ask deep questions about the importance of intent and free will, have unlikeable protagonists who commit serious crimes, and the plots catapult them towards their judgement and death.)

The Vermont Plays
Annie Baker (2012)
Good for: People who like straight theater that portrays everyday life

I love when a piece of art—music, writing, visual art—is so wildly different than anything else I’ve ever come across that it bends and confuses my brain. It’s a deeply satisfying, exciting kind of confusion.

That’s how I felt the first time I read one of Annie Baker’s plays (The Flick, 2013). Her dialogue is so realistic that it’s uncanny and almost a bit unnerving. No other playwright I’ve come across is able to capture everyday speech and topics so well. It’s so refreshing, so different, and it’s made me a big fan of her work.

This is a collection of her early plays (before The Flick). It’d been sitting on my shelf for probably a year or two, and I finally opened it up this year—only to wonder why I hadn’t done so sooner. Her writing leaves me speechless for how realistic it is, and I love feeling that kind of awe.