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the best of the best of the best books of 2025

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thegreatestbooks.org aggregates 41 “best of” lists. Here are the first 5 that catch my eye:

  • #7: Death Of The Author by Nnedi Okorafor. “After losing her job and facing family pressure, Zelu writes an experimental science-fiction novel about androids and AI in a post‑human world. As her book takes on a life of its own, the boundaries between her fiction and her reality begin to blur, forcing her to reckon with love, loss, and the power of stories.”
  • #10: King Of Ashes by S. A. Cosby. “Roman Carruthers returns to his Virginia hometown after his father is badly injured and discovers his family is in deeper trouble than he expected: a brother owing dangerous money to criminals and a sister determined to uncover the mystery of their mother’s disappearance years earlier. Using his financial skills and ruthless determination, Roman must confront old secrets and new threats to protect his family before everything unravels.” [I suppose just because I have a Virginia hometown. One assumes we are not talking about suburban DC here.]
  • #11: Abundance by Ezra Klein. “Abundance argues that many modern shortages—from housing and workers to clean energy and chips—stem not from conspiracies but from a failure to build and adapt: past rules and fixes have become obstacles to new solutions. Klein and Thompson examine political, regulatory, and cultural barriers across sectors and call for a mindset and institutions that prioritize construction, scaling, and practical problem-solving over preservation and restraint.” Well, that is not really how I summarized the (reviews and summaries I have read of) the book. But looking back after some time, many of the themes ring true to me. As a political agenda, it does not. The Democrats’ recent harping on the word “affordability” seems much more likely to hit the political mark.
  • #13: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami. “In a near-future world where dreams are monitored, Sara is detained by a government agency after an algorithm predicts she will harm the person she loves. Held in a retention center with other women whose dreams are used as evidence, she faces shifting rules and prolonged confinement. A new arrival unsettles the facility’s order and sets Sara on a path that forces her to confront the surveillance systems controlling her life.” Some obvious similarities to The Minority Report by Phillip K. Dick. Which was a neat story so why shouldn’t talented sci-fi authors continue riffing on the general idea.
  • #15: Tilt by Emma Pattee. “Annie, nine months pregnant, is at IKEA when a major earthquake devastates Portland. Cut off from her husband and without phone or money, she must cross the chaotic city on foot. Along the way she encounters danger, compassion, and an unlikely ally, while confronting fears about her marriage, career, and impending motherhood as she tries to reach safety.” Sure, the author is using the disaster as a back drop for character development, I am sure. But a Pacific Northwest earthquake/volcano/tsunami disaster is a scenario we hope won’t happen anytime soon, but could happen anytime.

Longreads #5 stories

Longreads.com publishes a “top 5 stories” post every week. “Sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, always thought-provoking, they all have a certain je ne sais quoi that makes them special—something you’ll want to share with a friend.” Sometimes there are some real gems here that you wouldn’t pick up anywhere else (well, they are all from somewhere else, but often sources I would not otherwise stumble across.) Well friends, here are a few that caught my eye.

  • How We Lost Our Minds About UFOs – The author goes through the entire history and comes down firmly on the skeptical side. Weather balloons, experimental aircraft, and Cold War propaganda.
  • What Really Caused the Sriracha Shortage? – This is about the sauce made in California with the rooster on it. I include this because I want to make a public service announcement. Sri Racha is a province in Thailand known for spicy sauces that they put on seafood. There are many varieties, and virtually all are tastier than the mass produced pasty substance from California. They are not generally advertised, but some are exported. I recommend “Sriraja Panich Hot Chili Sauce”. Check your local Asian grocery outlet and see what you can find.
  • The Last Stand of the Call-Centre Worker – This is a human interest story, but it goes into the unfolding AI takeover of customer service. It has some interesting numbers: 800,000 call center employees in the UK, 3 million in the US, 1.5 million in the Philippines, and 17 million globally. This is going to decrease as AI takes hold. I’ll just say, the new AI systems are going to provide much better customer service than the absurd automated systems we have dealt with over the past several decades (“listen carefully as menu options have changed”), which allowed companies and governments to just pretend they were providing customer service when actually they were just providing less service and forcing customers to waste their own time trying to serve themselves (kind of like self checkouts now that I think of it, but these are also improving).
  • Would You Clone Your Dog? – Well, this one is about dog cloning. It’s pretty routine at this point. They remove eggs from the dog someone wants to clone (so only females can be cloned at this point?), fertilize them or trick them into thinking they’ve been fertilized them somehow, and implant them in another female dog who has the clone puppies.
  • I Drove a Cybertruck Around SF Because I Am a Smart, Cool Alpha Male and The Most Polarizing Thing on Wheels – I haven’t been in one but I’ve certainly seen them. I grudgingly admire a company having the guts to make a real thing that looks science fiction future-y and sell it to real people in the real market. It shows some imagination.
  • Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business – Apparently there are little doggy bags of human poop still on the moon.
  • Living In A Lucid Dream – Lucid dreaming is certainly interesting. Supposedly almost anyone can learn to do it.
  • ‘It Wasn’t Sexual in Any Way!’ 50 Years of Streaking – By The People Who Dared to Bare All – One guy has streaked at 583 public events.

ProPublica most-read stories of 2024

Here are a few stories from ProPublica that caught my eye:

Longreads reader favorites

Longreads.com readers like some weird, occasionally morbid stuff apparently, most of which does not appeal to me personally. The only one that really stood out to me is I was Hypnotized as a Teen. Was it Dangerous? Basically, the verdict is that medical hypnosis is definitely a real thing, and there is overall agreement that stage hypnosis is at least partially real. People can’t be hypnotized against their will, apparently, but once they agree to it at least some people lose control to the hypnotist and do not remember details of the experience.

Longreads #1 stories

A lot of the #1 stories are kind of depressing, to be honest. Here are a couple that caught my eye:

December 2024 in Review

In December I reviewed a number of “best of” posts by others, so this is really a roundup of roundups.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The annual “horizon scan” from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution lists three key issues having to do with tipping points: “melting sea ice, melting glaciers, and release of seabed carbon stores”.

Most hopeful story: I’m really drawing a blank on this one folks. Since I reviewed a number of book lists posted by others, I just pick one book title that sounds somewhat hopeful: Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Bill Gates recommended The Coming Wave as the best recent book to understand the unfolding and intertwined AI and biotechnology revolution. I also listed the 2024 Nobel prizes, which largely had to do with AI and biotechnology.

NYT best books of 2021

And continuing the “best books” theme, this year’s New York Times list is out. The only one that really catches my eye is When we Cease to Understand the World. This appears to be historical fiction somehow knitting together the 20th century’s great scientists and their ideas.

Other books mostly cover a variety of racial and multicultural topics that are interesting and good to know about, but I do not have time to learn about them in book form. There’s a new autobiography of Sylvia Plath, and I like and am saddened by Sylvia Plath, but I think I would rather spend time reading her original work rather than an autobiography about her. Just a random note since I was briefly talking about Margaret Attwood yesterday – when I think of The Handmaid’s Tale I often think of Sylvia Plath, and also Anne Frank, and also Frederick Douglas and other first-person slave narratives. All depressing, and all things everyone should read. The Handmaid’s Tale is at least a work of fiction although it seems quite real when you are in the middle of it, at least for me, and especially the audiobook version.

Planetizen top 10 books of 2021

Planetizen has its list of top ten urban planning books out. Here are a couple that caught my eye. I don’t know that I’ll actually read these – It’s not like I know everything there is to know about these topics, but I may know enough and be just bored enough to want to spend my dwindling budget of mortal reading time on other things.

  • Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. The case against car-dependence and for walkability. I’m 100% on board. It’s a long and exhausting fight. Also, the title is a bit insulting to engineers, who do not consider our profession an illness to be cured. I guess the point is to draw attention to the book. Well, engineers may not be the intended audience if you are going to insult us before we even open the cover.
  • Metropolis: A History of the City, Mankind’s Greatest Invention. I’m 100% on board with the idea that modern cities can be great places for human beings to live. It’s a long and exhausting fight (see above). This one looks interesting because it appears to be a comparative history of a number of famous cities in history.
  • The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is fiction, and definitely on my list. The reviewer feels that Mr. Robinson (he is neither female nor Korean, Kim being a fairly common British dude name at least in the past) “lacks the superlative writing chops of Margaret Attwood” and “some sentences are begging for an editor”. This surprises me, because this is certainly not Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel! Now I am even more curious to read it. I have always found Robinson a little challenging to read, but he has an astonishing imagination and is worth reading for this alone.

the best scholarly books of the decade

This is a late entry on the best books of the 2010s, but it included a number of interesting nonfiction books I hadn’t heard of. I don’t have time to sit down and read long non-fiction books these days (or really think in depth about anything at all) so these reviews might be as close as I get. Here are a handful I might read if I actually could.

  • “Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes (Verso, 2018). It is a thrilling and formidable intervention into contemporary discussions of sex work, and settles the debate in favor of full and immediate global decriminalization.” Let’s just go ahead and legalize gambling, drugs, and prostitution, tax them, tamp down the violence and move on.
  • Andrew Friedman’s Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia. “Though the intelligence industry isn’t always visible, one constantly senses its presence. Its rapid growth since the 1950s also created a prosperous, high-tech region whose’s centrality to U.S. foreign policy belies its idyllic self-image.” This is the actual deep state, in its original sense of the military-industrial-intelligence complex that influences so much of our country’s laws and policies to produce wealth and power for itself.
  • The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Okay, I’ve heard of this one. Haven’t read it but think I get the idea. Wanted to be seen reading a copy while on jury duty but didn’t have the guts.
  • Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Because tolerance and understanding is good.
  • Every Twelve Seconds – this is about what really goes on in a slaughterhouse. I admit it, my “meatless Monday” aspirations have slipped during the coronavirus shutdown.
  • James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth (Oxford University Press, 2011) “did more than any single book to shake up how I thought about British imperial history.” What could this have to do with me? Well, I am American and have spent time in Singapore and Australia, among other places.

best urban planning books of 2019

Planetizen blog puts this out every year. Here are a few that caught my eye:

  • Better Buses, Better Cities. I ride buses a lot. I wouldn’t mind knowing more about best practices in running a bus authority. I would miss them if they went away in my city, but I also know they could be a lot better. I’m talking to you, Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority.
  • Cities, the First 6,000 Years. It sounds like this book goes into ancient cities and how they functioned on the ground.
  • Choked: Life and Death in the Age of Air Pollution. Because it’s possible that if we tackled only one environmental issue in cities, this should be it. Solving air pollution would be a huge gain for public health in itself and would force us to make progress on a lot of other problems.
  • Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life. Because the pictures look really cool, and coming back from a European city and telling your friends in words how much better it is than our cities just doesn’t cut it. They just need to go there. But a book with really cool cartoons of European cities might be an affordable start.
  • Vancouverism. It’s about Vancouver. Actually, I don’t know that I am likely to read this. But I have heard good things, have never been, and would like to go. I’ve also heard that housing prices are a problem there. But I’m going to state the inconvenient truth: most U.S. cities are not that great. Cities that are great are in very short supply, and thus the wealthy bid up prices there until only they are able to live there. So let’s build more cities that are at least good.