Reading in 2025: A Year of Cyberwar, Consciousness, and Familiar Comforts

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With 2025 just behind me, it feels like a good moment to look back at what I read. As usual, the list is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, comfort rereads and long-overdue titles finally crossed off the list.

Nothing this year was truly life-changing, but several books were quietly excellent—and a few were notable for less flattering reasons. The most interesting pattern was not any single winner. It was the number of books that led directly to other books, reopening old interests or sending me down an entirely new line of inquiry.

Counting every separately listed work, including novellas and graphic albums, I read 40 titles in 2025:

  • Fiction: 21
  • Non-fiction: 19

The balance was close, although the non-fiction left the strongest overall impression.

Highlights and Lowlights

Best Non-Fiction

Andy Greenberg — Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers

This was the standout book of the year. Sandworm is both gripping and unsettling, and it made me reconsider how much modern society depends on digital systems that are largely invisible until they fail—or are deliberately attacked.

Reading it after the July 2024 CrowdStrike incident and Cloudflare’s November 2025 outage reinforced the point from another direction. Neither disruption was a cyberattack. Both demonstrated how a flaw inside one deeply embedded service can spread far beyond the organisation responsible for it.

Close behind was Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate, which remains a masterclass in business journalism and corporate absurdity.

Most Disappointing Non-Fiction

Sam Parnia — Lucid Dying

This was not a terrible book, but it was deeply frustrating. The subject—consciousness during cardiac arrest and the boundary between life and death—is fascinating. I found the book too willing, however, to move from limited clinical evidence and reported experiences towards broader conclusions that the evidence did not yet seem able to carry.

The strongest sections describe resuscitation research and the experiences of survivors. The weaker sections blur the line between an open scientific question and an answer that has already begun to emerge.

Cover images: Sandworm by Andy Greenberg, published by Anchor Books; and Lucid Dying by Sam Parnia, published by Grand Central Publishing. Used here for purposes of review and commentary.

Best Fiction

Steven Brust — Tsalmoth

Nothing in fiction completely overwhelmed me this year, but Tsalmoth was consistently enjoyable and rewarding. Together with Lyorn, it restored some of the spark I associate with the earlier Vlad Taltos novels.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric novellas, The Physicians of Vilnoc and Masquerade in Lodi, belonged on roughly the same podium. They were quieter and less surprising, but carried by the ease with which Bujold makes intelligence, decency and conversation feel dramatically sufficient.

Most Disappointing Fiction

Laurell K. Hamilton — Circus of the Damned

This was the book that most clearly exposed the gap between what I remembered and what was actually on the page. The action and horror still have some force, but the dialogue felt stilted, the characters thinner than memory had preserved, and the pacing so frantic that the novel often seemed to be trying to outrun itself.

The early Anita Blake books retain a certain charm, but this reread was more archaeological than pleasurable.

Best Reread

William Gibson — Neuromancer

Returning to Neuromancer reminded me how sharp, dense and influential it remains. Some of its imagined technology has dated, but its atmosphere has not. Even after four decades, it feels more modern than many novels written long after it.

Cover images: Tsalmoth by Steven Brust, published by Tor Books; Circus of the Damned by Laurell K. Hamilton, published by Ace Books; and the twentieth-anniversary edition of Neuromancer by William Gibson, published by Ace Books. Used here for purposes of review and commentary.

Oddities, Influences and Reading Chains

The oddest book of the year was probably Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. It was not bad—just deeply strange. It did not remain with me in the way Ubik, which I read in 2024, had done, but it was unmistakably Philip K. Dick in both the best and worst senses.

Several books also acted as gateways to further reading. John Strausbaugh’s The Wrong Stuff led directly to John Drury Clark’s Ignition! and helped push A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith towards the top of the pile. It also moved Eric Berger’s Liftoff higher on my reading list.

Sandworm made Kim Zetter’s Countdown to Zero Day seem like the obvious next step, although I had not reached it by the end of the year.

Sapiens and Homo Deus gave me something close to the wide-angle pleasure I remember from Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything: the exhilaration of being shown a great many connections at once, even when some of the individual claims deserve more caution than the sweep of the argument allows.

The book that had waited longest was Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine. It had been on my list since I read Snow Crash roughly a decade earlier. Finally reaching it was satisfying not only because the book was interesting, but because it completed a small chain of curiosity that had remained open for years.

Complete Reading List

Titles linked below lead to reviews or reading notes elsewhere in the Journal.

Dan Abnett

  • Xenos
  • Malleus
  • Hereticus

Susan Blackmore

  • The Meme Machine

Steven Brust

Lois McMaster Bujold

  • The Physicians of Vilnoc
  • Masquerade in Lodi

Jim Butcher

  • Death Masks

Bryan Burrough and John Helyar

  • Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

Bryan Caplan

  • The Case Against Education

Harry Cliff

  • Space Oddities

Aubrey Clayton

  • Bernoulli’s Fallacy

John Drury Clark

  • Ignition!

Daniel C. Dennett

  • Consciousness Explained

Philip K. Dick

  • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

William Gibson

  • Neuromancer

Andy Greenberg

  • Sandworm

Dashiell Hammett

  • The Maltese Falcon

Yuval Noah Harari

  • Sapiens
  • Homo Deus

Laurell K. Hamilton

  • The Laughing Corpse
  • Circus of the Damned

Sabine Hossenfelder

  • Lost in Math

Erik Hoel

  • The World Behind the World

Sam Kean

Sarah Monette

  • A Theory of Haunting

Thomas Nagel

Sam Parnia

  • Lucid Dying

Anthony Price

  • The Alamut Ambush

M. R. Sellars

Anil Seth

  • Being You

Ola Skogäng

  • Mumiens blod
  • De förlorade sidornas bok
  • I dödsskuggans dal

John Strausbaugh

  • The Wrong Stuff

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

  • Soonish
  • A City on Mars

Martha Wells

Closing Thoughts

2025 was not a year of dramatic literary revelations, but it was a thoughtful and productive reading year. The non-fiction in particular left me with more questions than answers, which is usually a good sign.

More than anything, the year reinforced how much I enjoy following threads from one book to the next. Cyberwar led towards the history of cyberweapons. Space exploration led towards law, settlement and infrastructure. Science fiction led back towards consciousness, memes and the problem of minds unlike our own.

A reading year does not necessarily need one masterpiece that rearranges everything. Sometimes it is enough for each book to leave behind a question interesting enough to open the next one.

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