What I Read in 2025
37 books on technocracy, place, and the slow forces reshaping our world—plus the three I'd recommend if you only pick three.
Hey friends, welcome back.
I’m happy to report that this year we welcomed a new little girl into the world, which led me to take a break from writing here. My goal for 2026 is to get back to writing in a more regular cadence, and I have a roadmap of what I want to cover, but more on that later.
Today, my goal is to write my annual year-end reading recap. I’ll give the list below, along with some annotations along the way.
If you only pick three books from my list for next year, here’s what I would suggest:
How to Think by Alan Jacobs
Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
Superbloom by Nicholas Carr
Here’s my full list:
Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss — This is one of those business books that people have been telling me about for years. I really appreciated the practical steps in negotiation that it gave. The labeling technique he talks about — using descriptions to disarm people — has been particularly useful.
The Grim Years by John J. Navin — This is a history of the settling of the South Carolina Lowcountry in the late 1600s, and as the name implies, it wasn’t a great time to be there.
How to Think by Alan Jacobs — Alan Jacobs has been one of my favorite public thinkers for a few years running, and his little book here about thinking was no exception. Recognizing that there is no thinking for yourself in that we are all social creatures is one of many takeaways I have from this one.
Arbitrary Lines by M. Nolan Gray — This was a pretty technical overview of land planning and zoning from a planner who believes we should abolish zoning. As someone who has followed these topics for a few years, I was skeptical, but I came out of this read thinking, ya know, maybe we should just throw the whole process out.
A Short History of Greenville by Judith T. Bainbridge — This was a very approachable history of Greenville, SC. I’ve been on a local history kick since last year, and as a practitioner of local politics, I think the politics of a place should be locally rooted — so having more context about what has come before here is important.
The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis — This was a history of the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose collective work on cognitive psychology and science changed many of the ways we think about thinking. Great background on how that research came about.
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli — This was a beautifully written meditation on the nature of reality from a scientific perspective. It also helped that Benedict Cumberbatch was the narrator of that audiobook version I listened to.
Zero to One by Peter Thiel — This brief reflection on how progress happens and the work to go from nothing to something was great as a look into the psychology of one of the most important thinkers of our time. See also where Peter Thiel hesitates for a really long time when asked if the human race should survive.
The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis — Reading this book came out of reading The Year of Our Lord 1943, mainly because the work of Lewis in this book is such a clear distillation of the battle for the soul of the West that the thinkers of that time believed they were engaged in.
The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien — The end of the series, which I started in 2024. What struck me in this one was the parallels between the way Tolkien concludes the War of the Ring and the ushering in of the end state of the World, and how slow and methodical it was. I don’t know if there’s something there about Tolkien’s views of our own world’s end, but it struck me.
The Year of Our Lord 1943 by Alan Jacobs — This was one of my favorite reads of the year, but also probably the one that someday I will need to go back through to catch the 80% of this book that went over my head. Jacobs is soaking in context about the rise of technocracy and what it does to our souls that is still as relevant in 2025 (and 2026!) as it was in 1943.
Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins — I’m a sucker for the Hunger Games books. As someone from East Tennessee who currently lives in the Upstate, the Appalachian echoes in Collins’s world have always been compelling to me. The idea of District 12 and that type of world keeps pulling me back.
Challenger by Adam Higginbotham — This was a history of the Challenger shuttle disaster, and everything that went wrong along the way to make that happen. The big lesson is the way super complicated systems will fail. They will. It’s just a matter of whether we put in the right safeguards to stop those failures from cascading.
Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum — This was one of my favorite reads of the year. Appelbaum tells such a compelling story of the importance of people being able to move around. The information alone, contrasting the way towns were run in Virginia vs. New England, was helpful without any other commentary.
The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen — Rosen walks through several different activities in life and how the digitization of the processes (handwritten letters to keyboards, for example) has changed the nature of the work we are doing when we stop using our hands to write.
Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green — I’ve been a big fan of John Green for years, so I honestly just read it because he wrote it. His reflections on the world feel truly genuine and kind, and this book was as thoughtful as ever about a disease that I honestly have thought very little about in my life. This book goes a long way at explaining why.
Revelation by G.K. Beale — Our church did a long study of Revelation that brought this one out, since it was the recommended companion commentary.
The Narnian by Alan Jacobs — After the intellectual haul that was Jacobs’s 1943 book, this one was a much more colorful picture of the life of one of the greatest thinkers about faith of our time.
The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel — This one was a bit of a deep dive into a subject I’ve not spent much time thinking about, but Postrel’s origins here in Greenville, SC along with her interview with Jonah Goldberg on his podcast about a year ago made me want to see a bit more about how she thinks. This was a good introduction to that world.
Confessions by Augustine — A classic I finally got to. Reading these classics, it is always interesting how the big thoughts that have redefined the Western world are just so subtly embedded in these works and seem almost unremarkable, unless you consider the time in which they were written. The way Augustine works out the concept of disordered desires — the idea that not everything we want conforms to God’s plan — is a pretty basic idea today in Christianity but was revolutionary at the time.
Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic by Nadya Williams — Williams was interviewed about her Cultural Christians book, and both were contrarian explorations from my perspective about some facet of Christianity. Her book here is looking at some throughlines between how the Roman world viewed people instrumentally and how our world does the same, with vastly different moral frameworks.
Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry — This was one of those classics that someone had loaned to me years back that I finally got around to, and it really hit home. His almost lyrical recounting of the way “the war” and “the economy” slowly ate away at the place Jayber called home was a much-needed reflection for me. The way growth and leverage are painted as these slow marching forces across the landscape is tantalizing to think about.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir — I love Andy Weir’s writing style, ever since I came across The Martian right when he had first published it. His technically accurate sci-fi really sticks with me.
Eastern Orthodoxy Through Western Eyes by Donald Fairbairn — This was a read inspired by my sister’s recent marriage into a Greek Orthodox family and my complete unfamiliarity with it. I found this extremely helpful, and the whole concept of the Western church as law-based vs. the Eastern church as community-based has stuck with me. The author walking through in almost a diagram fashion how the Western church’s account of creation, the fall, Christ’s work of justification that provided for our sanctification and toward our eventual glorification is transmuted in the Eastern church into something built on very different assumptions was fascinating.
Cultural Christians in the Early Church by Nadya Williams — This was the book that inspired the podcast I listened to, and her reflections on how in every age there are essentially people taking the faith “seriously” and others not as seriously is a good reminder that there is truly nothing new under the sun.
The Tech-Wise Family by Andy Crouch — Andy Crouch is such a good writer, and this was a very practical way to apply some of Crouch’s other works to a family.
My Fundamentalist Education by Christine Rosen — This one was more background reading for me, as I’ve found Christine Rosen to be a public thinker whose work I keep coming back to. Her wrestling with the way her fundamentalist education impacted her faith today was telling — she is clearly a person who is still deeply formed by this Christian and lowercase-c conservative upbringing, but has personally lost the faith because of it.
Start with Why by Simon Sinek — I read this one first years ago when it came out, but this was the first book in our reading for the Taylors Fellowship through Taylors TownSquare that I’m facilitating, so a re-read was necessary. This book felt very basic going in, but I do think Sinek’s focus on getting back to the core of ideas was helpful.
Superbloom by Nicholas Carr — This was a great read. Carr is one of those writers I’ve known I want to read more of, and this just confirmed it. His reflections on our current cultural state and how media have impacted it à la McLuhan are a great reframe of our current situation. A big focus of the book was the way the internet changes what we think should be private and what should be shared, and then the cost of airing out all our dirty laundry for everyone to read.
The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis — This was part of a deliberate Lewis deep-dive year. I intended to keep going into the rest of Narnia, but honestly, there were elements I was specifically interested in because of the other works of Lewis this year. The way the magician in the book exemplifies the technocratic practitioner that I’ve come to view as the boogeyman Lewis was working against was a good companion to those other reads.
Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath — This was the second read for the Taylors Fellowship, a re-read of a book I’ve read before. I use their SUCCESs paradigm frequently and it was good to go back to the source.
Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam — This one is the next book for the Taylors Fellowship, but I needed to re-read to get the questions to our group members before they read it over December and January. The themes that Putnam is exploring here were vital to our thinking about the current collapse of civic discourse.
Difficult Men by Brett Martin — This was a bit of an outlier, but I like reading some random things, what can I say? The narrative around the transformation of the TV and movie worlds that took place during this time was fascinating — the creative risk-taking to revive TV as a place where art could be done, to the point where far more “prestige” TV comes out now than cinema, opposite how it used to be. The reversal there is an interesting cultural phenomenon.
The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel — Housel is another of these guys who writes a lot, and I finally got around to reading one of his books. The way he described money was not completely foreign to me, but his practical insight in this one was great. His notion of reducing future regret was a very succinct way to memorialize that big concept.
The Pursuit of Happiness by Jeffrey Rosen — This was Rosen’s book, walking through the virtues that make up the historic notion of the pursuit of happiness that the founders were referring to. I think his bigger point is that we take that phrase almost to mean everyone doing what they want, but the founders had more in mind the idea that they wanted to create a world where people could pursue what would ultimately make them happy, which in their minds were the classical virtues. To unpack what that meant, Rosen took one of those virtues at a time and looked at the life of a specific founding father and how that virtue played out in their life. I thought it was a very compelling way to make the case.
The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman — I love a good meandering cultural collection of essays, and this book provided a lot of thought-provoking context on the decade when I formed my first memories. Some essays I enjoyed more than others, but as a first draft of history, I thought this one had some interesting reflections.
The Demon Under the Microscope by Thomas Hager — I’ve always been fascinated with how when people say things are worse than they used to be, we seem to be forgetting that people used to die of paper cuts. But I had never done any real reading on this subject, so this was a read to color in some details there. The whole situation pre-antibiotic seems terrible. The particular story of Calvin Coolidge’s son getting a blister on his foot and dying in the White House was fascinating — just a few years later and he would have been saved. Some of my interest here was specifically prompted by the great Netflix miniseries “Death by Lightning” which recounts the death of James Garfield and how he was not killed by the bullet but by the doctors using unsanitary methods to try to remove it.
As I mentioned earlier, I hope to be back early next year with some new explorations, but for now, thanks for reading, and see you again soon.