| 41. Courage is Calling *– Ryan Holiday | |
| What I learned: | |
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I don’t know if there’s a lot that I can learn from this book at this point, having read it so many times. I still wanted to continue the tradition of reading it at least once a year, though, to finish the year on a high after the disappointment of the book below.
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| 40. The Denial of Death – Ernest Becker | |
| What I learned: | |
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I’m sure there’s an audience for this book, but I’m not a part of that. I tried hard to power through and understand it, but it just goes too deep into psychology for my mediocre brain. It’s basically a textbook, and I never liked textbooks.
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| 39. Co-Intelligence – Ethan Mollick | |
| What I learned: | |
| The point of this book is to make you understand that you can use AI tools in a sensible way that helps you do better work (hence the co-intelligence title). It’s written in 2023, so it’s still pretty relevant, somewhat useful and, for the most part, quite optimistic about our prospects… at least until the end, when the author warns about all the ways AI is likely to cause trouble to humanity. | |
| 38. How to Be Perfect – Michael Schur | |
| What I learned: | |
| This one, like the previous one, is about moral philosophy, which is such an annoying subject because, according to it, there’s basically no way to do anything that’s 100% right. I really liked this book, though. It’s written by the guy who wrote for The Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99 and The Good Place, so the humour is on point. Ironically I didn’t realise it was written by him when I picked it up, but given those are all shows that I love I thought it was a wonderful coincidence. | |
| 37. Moral Ambition – Rutger Bregman | |
| What I learned: | |
| The author wants this book to be an antidote to apathy to make you do more good than you are doing by showing you examples of people who made a huge difference despite being a single person. Does it work? Well, not for me, no. I still learned a bunch about historical figures who fought slavery and other issues, but I didn’t feel particularly inspired by any of it. | |
| 36. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century – Yuval Noah Harari | |
| What I learned: | |
| This book touches on so many topics that we should pay attention to (and be worried about) in the 21st century, from religion to big data and AI. Yuval Noah Harari is an incredible writer and thinker, and so there’s a lot to consider about the subjects he covers. The worrying part about it all is that this book was published in 2018 and some of the things he warns about have already happened or are happening right now, which is kind of scary because he also predicts what’s coming next… | |
| 35. Montaigne – Stefan Zweig | |
| What I learned: | |
| While I don’t regret reading this book, I’ll admit I expected it to be something else, and not just a biography of Montaigne. Which means I learned a bunch about Montaigne’s life without actually having read anything he actually wrote… I guess that’s the next step. | |
| 34. My Next Breath – Jeremy Renner | |
| What I learned: | |
| I’m not a big fan of Jeremy Renner or anything like that (I think I’ve seen like two of his movies), but here’s a guy who was literally almost dead and still managed to recover after breaking 38 bones, so his story is quite remarkable. The main thing you can learn from this book, apart from seeing that you can always beat the odds, is that when something happens to you, it doesn’t just happen to you, but to everybody who loves you and who care about you. So unless you are dead, you better remember that and act accordingly. | |
| 33. The Wright Brothers – David McCullough | |
| What I learned: | |
| It’s easy to take flight from granted in 2025. It might even be easy to assume that ‘inventing’ flight was a pretty straightforward affair. This book makes you appreciate what it took to make it possible: the work, the ingenuity, the perseverance, and the obstacles the Wright brothers faced in a time when people didn’t think flying was a thing for humans. It might be one of the best books I’ve ever read. It not only helped me learn about the evolution of flight, but also about what incredible people the Wright brothers were. | |
| 32. Wisdom Takes Work – Ryan Holiday | |
| What I learned: | |
| It’s such a great time to read a book about how to get wiser and see the effects of living under people who have no interest in doing it. I’ve loved the series on the four virtues, and I’m sorry this is the final book. It’s another great one, and it has the added bonus that Ryan Holiday destroys Elon Musk in it. So what’s not to love? | |
| 31. Good Days – Michael Rosen | |
| What I learned: | |
| This book is a bit like listening to your grandpa tell you stories about his life to use as metaphors for your own. Some of the stories you find really interesting and engaging, while others feel they are never-ending and you can’t wait for him to shut up. All in all, it’s a fun book on how to have good days more often. | |
| 30. When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi | |
| What I learned: | |
| This is a tough book to read. It’s beautiful, but it’s still tough to read. All I can say is that it’s a good reminder that we are all mortal. | |
| 29. Rest – Alex Soojung-Kim Pang | |
| What I learned: | |
| I don’t think that anyone who needs this book might actually read it, and everyone who might find the information in the book useful already knows most of it. The bottom line is that rest is key to producing good work, particularly if you are in any kind of creative job. There’s a chapter for every type of rest, from walking to working out, and about a million examples of famous people who achieved great things because they prioritised rest. So yeah, I’ll ask my boss if I can take a sabbatical… | |
| 28. The Usefulness of the Useless – Nuccio Ordine | |
| What I learned: | |
| I picked this up because my son started to read it, and I like to read the same books my children read because I think it’s a way great to connect. And well… it’s not a book per se, but an essay about how the arts (any kind, from poetry to painting) are valuable beyond their practical applications. To be honest, it’s not an easy or very entertaining read, as the author basically quotes lots of writers, artists or poets about how non-practical curiosity helps us in many areas. Which is a good point, but I feel you are better served reading, painting or writing poetry than spending too long with his book. | |
| 27. The 6 Habits of Growth – Brendon Burchard | |
| What I learned: | |
| I picked up this for free on Audible because I had nothing else lined up (I’m clarifying that because it has such an embarrassing self-help title). And well, it’s not a book. It’s just a bunch of motivational talks. Very American stuff. Not my cup of tea. | |
| 26. Die with Zero – Bill Perkins | |
| What I learned: | |
| This book has good intentions. The author wants you to live purposefully right now instead of waiting for some future day, and that includes spending your money now instead of later. I liked the idea of making bucket lists for every period of your life. Having said that, the book is extremely repetitive to the point where I felt it could have been a blog post. And second, you need to be in a pretty comfortable financial situation to live the way he suggests (and his net worth is apparently around $500 million). | |
| 25. Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are – J. Jennifer Matthews | |
| What I learned: | |
| Maybe I’m not smart enough to understand what this book is about. It feels like a bunch of philosophical riddles. At least it’s short, but yeah… dunno. | |
| 24. Four Thousand Weeks * – Oliver Burkeman | |
| What I learned: | |
| I’ve re-read this a few times, so I’ll just re-post what I wrote in 2022 when I first read it: Hope is a curse. To hope for a given outcome is to place faith in something outside yourself and outside of your current moment. To give up hope is to reignite the power that you actually have. We no longer have to hope; we just do the work, and in doing the work, we find meaning and purpose. This is supposed to be a book about time management, but it’s so much more than that. | |
| 23. The Fault in Our Stars – John Green | |
| What I learned: | |
| Yes, I went on a John Green reading spree… This is a fictional novel, so I don’t know if there’s much to learn from it, but it’s still incredibly moving and also made me cry. That’s two books in a row now. | |
| 22. Everything is Tuberculosis – John Green | |
| What I learned: | |
| I can safely say that I learned an awful lot about Tuberculosis with this book, basically because I knew almost nothing about it. I found it both incredibly moving (I may have shed a few tears) and also irritating to find out that the pharmaceutical industry is mainly to blame for Tuberculosis continuing to kill over a million people each year. | |
| 21. The Anthropocene Reviewed – John Green | |
| What I learned: | |
| I realise there’s some irony in reviewing a book about reviews, but here we are. Like I often do, I was going blind into this book, and I didn’t know what to expect, but gosh, did I love it. It’s full of dread and hope in the right amounts. I give this book five stars. | |
| 20. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe – Douglas Adams | |
| What I learned: | |
| I enjoyed The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy enough to give this a try when I didn’t know what to read, but somehow I didn’t find it as funny as the first one. I give it a meh. | |
| 19. Rewire – Nicole Vignola | |
| What I learned: | |
| If you’ve ever blamed your brain for all your problems, this book hands you the owner’s manual so you end up without excuses not to update your thinking. And I think with enough practice, it can actually work. | |
| 18. The Dip – Seth Godin | |
| What I learned: | |
| This book politely tells you that maybe you’re not stuck in a heroic struggle – maybe you’re just wasting your time, and you need to learn when to quit, because it’s the only way to make progress. It’s not a bad theory, but it’s probably harder than expected to turn it into reality. | |
| 17. How to Argue With a Meat Eater – Ed Winters | |
| What I learned: | |
| Disclaimer: I don’t plan on arguing with anyone, not just about eating habits, but about nothing in particular. At this point, I’m done arguing, so if people want to believe that the Earth is flat, so be it (I may be paraphrasing Keanu Reeves here). So I didn’t read this book to defend my choices or to question other people’s. I just read it because sometimes I like to reconnect with the origin of certain values that I hold, and a book like this helps me do that. So in that sense, this book was worth it for me, even if there was not a lot to learn from it for me. | |
| 16. Steal Like an Artist – Austin Kleon | |
| What I learned: | |
| You don’t need to be an artist to find this book useful. You just need to be a person who creates any type of thing, whether it’s writing or painting, or whatever. It’s very short (you can read it in about an hour) and I found it super inspiring, like the other two books in the same series (although I read them in the wrong order. Duh!). | |
| 15. Keep Going – Austin Kleon | |
| What I learned: | |
| I probably don’t need to write anything about this book that I haven’t written about “Steal Like an Artist” or “Show Your Work”. It’s in the same vein. Short and sweet, and filled with inspiration. | |
| 14. Factfulness – Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund | |
| What I learned: | |
| I get it: things are better than we think, or than we are made to think. And yet, the book hasn’t changed the way I look at things. Granted, I might be a pessimist, but also it was written before a pandemic, before more wars, before the latest US election… I don’t think the world can be fully understood through data, which I feel is what the author tries to do to convince you that things are better than ever. If you don’t already think that things are better than ever, this book is unlikely to change your mind. It might give you some perspective, but if you still think that the world is mostly ruled by selfish idiots, that’s probably not going to change regardless of how much data you are shown about how poor countries are not that poor anymore. | |
| 13. Show Your Work * – Austin Kleon | |
| What I learned: | |
| If you ever have any sort of creative ambition – whatever that is, and no matter how big that ambition is – this is a book that’s full of inspiration. It’s short and sweet, and chances are it will make you feel like sharing more of your work and thoughts on the internet. | |
| 12. The Hidden Life of Trees – Peter Wohlleben | |
| What I learned: | |
| I love trees. I think they are underrated and deserve a lot more love than humanity is currently giving them. So naturally I wanted to learn more about them and I thought I would enjoy this book. Somehow, I didn’t, and I found it quite tedious. Maybe it’s because I listened to the audio version, or because it’s translated from German. There are plenty of interesting bits in it, but somehow it reads like it’s not that well-researched outside of what the author knows as a caretaker of a beech forest in Germany. | |
| 11. Self-Compassion – Kristin Neff | |
| What I learned: | |
| What’s not to like about a book that teaches you ways to be more compassionate with yourself? I don’t think anyone needs to understand too much about the psychology behind it to try to treat themselves with more kindness and reap the rewards. If nothing else, the book is a good reminder to treat yourself better all the time, something some of us struggle with quite often. | |
| 10. Tiny Experiments – Anne-Laure Le Cunff | |
| What I learned: | |
| I really like the premise behind this book: The things you do are just experiments, and if you fail or feel burnt out, then it’s okay, because you move on to the next experiment. It takes some effort (what doesn’t?) to internalise the message and have it at the front of your mind when you are struggling with something, but I found it’s worth trying because it can prove incredibly helpful. | |
| 9. The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle | |
| What I learned: | |
| I honestly avoided reading this book for a long time, even when it was mentioned in so many of the other books I’ve read over the years. There’s something about the title that makes it sound a bit too much like spiritual self-help nonsense, and I already feel a little bit guilty about reading so many “self-development” books. But then my daughter asked me to buy it for her because she wanted to read it, and I decided that it would be a nice thing to share with her, and so I caved in and read it. And, well, it wasn’t for me. It’s exactly the spiritual self-help nonsense that I feared. It’s about seven hours of the author telling you that you are overthinking and that nothing but the present exists, and I get it, but for some reason, it becomes obnoxious and preachy. Probably the main reason is that the entire book is worth about one sentence: Live in the present. | |
| 8. Time Surfing – Paul Loomans | |
| What I learned: | |
| This is a productivity book. I don’t really like productivity books, or maybe I have read enough of them to find there’s really nothing much to learn from reading yet another one. And this was the case with this one, which takes a “zen approach” to being productive. That is, do less and focus on one thing at a time. | |
| 7. The Obstacle is the Way * – Ryan Holiday | |
| What I learned: | |
| Having read this book about five times, this latest one was the time when it probably had the most impact on me because of some personal circumstances, that is, losing my job. As that happened, I started to internalise the main idea behind the book: every obstacle is an opportunity. And that’s how I decided to see it, and it helped a lot in reinforcing the idea that change, even when it’s not triggered by your own decisions, can be the source of something very positive for you. | |
| 6. Not the End of the World – Hannah Ritchie | |
| What I learned: | |
| I personally believe that you don’t have to be optimistic or pessimistic about the state of the world in regard to climate change and the future. I believe in just doing the right thing because it’s the right and because it’s my duty, and that’s that. This book is an attempt to take an optimistic outlook on the whole situation and, well, if you need that sort of hope, you might enjoy the read. The way she presents it, however, feels pretty weak to me. She argues that we should be optimistic because there’s never been a better time than this, and because things are improving all the time. Except, to me (at least in terms of climate change) it’s as if past generations were driving towards a massive cliff in a beat-up, noisy, uncomfortable, old truck, and the author argues that now we are driving in a super smooth, super comfy Mercedes. The end result is the same, though: We are still driving towards the cliff and, although we may be slowing down a bit, we’ll eventually hit the end of the road and have a catastrophic crash. | |
| 5. A Poison Like No Other – Matt Simon | |
| What I learned: | |
| This book is just bad news. There’s no two ways about it. Micro and nanoplastics are EVERYWHERE, and you might think “Yeah, I know”, but I didn’t know how bad it was until I read this book. You are eating and breathing plastic every day, and it’s all bad for you, as you would expect. And the worst news is that there’s no stopping this anytime soon because plastic is everywhere. So by the end, I ended up wondering who this book is for, and the honest answer is that I don’t know, because probably not a lot of people need to learn that much about microplastics given that there is no escaping them. | |
| 4. Think Again – Adam Grant | |
| What I learned: | |
| The premise of the book is a very simple concept: to rethink your ideas and beliefs. Basically, whenever you think you are right about something, think again, because very often (or always), you don’t know what you don’t know, also known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. And that’s about it, really. Do you need to spend some seven hours reading the book to come to that conclusion? Probably not. Then again, maybe I’m wrong. | |
| 3. Ultra-Something – Brendan Leonard | |
| What I learned: | |
| Unlike other books about running I’ve read in the past, this one can probably be appreciated exclusively by people who run, especially if you run ultras, and especially if you are a fan of Semi-Rad. I can’t say there was much to learn for me, but I really enjoyed the running anecdotes and humour combined with random scientific facts and historical references. | |
| 2. The Daily Dad * – Ryan Holiday | |
| What I learned: | |
| I’ll just copy what I wrote below: I read this book every year now. It’s one page per day for 365 days. It takes about a minute a day, and a couple more if you spend a bit of time meditating on the topic you just read about. What’s not to love? What’s there to learn after having read it for like four years in a row? Well, everything, really. | |
| 1. The Daily Stoic * – Ryan Holiday | |
| What I learned: | |
| I read this book every year now. It’s one page per day for 365 days. It takes about a minute a day, and a couple more if you spend a bit of time meditating on the topic you just read about. What’s not to love? What’s there to learn after having read it for like four years in a row? Well, everything, really. | |
(*) Re-reading