Curtis McHaleThe 6 Best Books I Read in 2025 (Nonfiction + Fiction that Stuck)
In 2025 I got back to reading a book a week by finishing 53 books, after a few years of being busy and not reading as much as I had hoped. I know that a book a week is an arbitrary number, but when I get to read that much I feel like I’m doing what I want with my time, instead of doom scrolling.
Today we’ll go over 3 non-fiction and 3 fiction books that I’d recommend from the year.
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Non-fiction
Corporate Control
This was my hardest book to pick because I read a bunch of books about how the world has moved towards a world that isn’t there for the regular people living in it, but is there to serve rich people and corporate interests. Autocracy Inc. looked at how democracies are moving towards autocracies, and while it was published just before Donald Trump took office, it clearly demonstrates how the steps he’s taking are turning the US from a democracy to an autocracy that Trump wants to rule. At the Trough was a short book that took a look at corporate greed and the corporate welfare state in Canada.
But Corporate Control was a full treatment of the corporate welfare system that is run in Canada. Where businesses get massive subsidies to bring jobs to your city. But the projects rarely get finished, and if they do the jobs are usually far less than predicted, then the profits get funnelled to investors out of your city, and country, to enrich other communities.
In the midst of this we saw headlines of Stellantis withdrawing its construction of subsidized battery plants due to Trump’s tariffs after getting billions in subsidies from various levels of Canadian government to bring jobs to Windsor. Unlike previous times where corporations have bailed with government money to pad their profits this time the Canadian Government is going to enforce penalties by reducing tariff quotas. It remains to be seen if anything comes of the threatened legal action, but I’m happy to see the Canadian government having some backbone with corporations.
This, along with Dark PR show how deeply embedded all corporations are with government subsidies. They’re profits are often provided by taxpayers subsidizing parts of the business, so that those same taxpayers can pay for the product in a world where pricing is increasingly out of reach of many.
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
While the sexual revolution brought some good things, Louise Perry contends that many of those good things were for men and harm women in the long run. While it make look like freedom was won for women, it was mostly the freedom to enhance the sexual lives of men.
Much like Of Boys and Men, Perry contends that we shouldn’t worry about just women or how we can all be free, we should be working towards the well being of both men and women. This is a well being that is sometimes in tension, with both groups desiring things on opposite ends of a spectrum.
There is a strong push back against neoliberalism here, much like the current book club read Take Back the Fight, with the recognition that neoliberalism pushes ultimate freedom for all, which isolates us from each other as we each pursue our own ideal possibly at the expense of those around us. Yes it’s good to reduce the stigmatization of women that have sex with multiple partners, but that reduction has also promotes a sexuality that suites the likes of Hugh Hefner and other highly sexually active men at the expense of the well being of women.
Perry ends the book with some basic rules for sex that summarize her earlier arguments. First, take sex seriously. It’s not some throw away activity equivalent to brushing your teeth. It’s serious and should be entered into with serious thought about the long term impact any encounter may have on your life.
Otherwise, we need to stop the idea that violence in sex couched as BDSM is okay. If a man can hold an erection while abusing a woman, he’s not a trustworthy man.
Meditations for Mortals
This book helped me come to the realization that read later is mostly garbage. You’re not going to read it later, you’re just going to store the link and most people are going to feel bad about the continued increase in links they’re never going to read. That got me to change how I collect interesting links with regular deletion being a key factor to keeping the list down.
The big thrust of this book is that so much goes by us and we need to recognize that we’ll never get to everything that seems interesting. We should simply get to the stuff we get to, and let the rest pass us by.
In fact, most of your life is outside of your control, so stop worrying about all the stuff you can do nothing about. Let it go and control the few things that you can control.
With this realization you can start to spend your time on the things you enjoy, instead of what everyone else thinks you should spend your time on. While this sounds like the neoliberal ideal of the singular person focused solely on their gratification, Burkeman doesn’t push this idea. He does acknowledge that if you have kids you’re going to need to spend time doing things with them even when maybe you don’t want to. This time with your kids is a good thing. Burkeman is simply encouraging you to give up on all the stuff the wider culture says is important so you can focus on the few things that you find important.
Fiction
The Faded Sun Trilogy
No this isn’t a single book, it’s a trilogy written in the 1970’s that I’ve read the most out of any series I own. Part of that is because it’s not nearly as long as anything from the likes of Brandon Sanderson or Neil Gaimon, making it easy to read the series over the holiday season.
The Faded Sun is about the survival of the mri species, a humanoid warrior/adventurer that hires itself out to other species to help them explore. The mri have lately been in the employ of the regul, a merchant race that’s fairly immobile. As part of this employ the mri have battled humans and once the regul started seeing losses of regul they took over the battle and ordered hundreds of thousands of mri to death to save small assets they couldn’t bear to part with.
We pick the story up at the end of the war, where regul have bartered a treaty with humans for peace. The mri are now an unknown quantity and the regul are terrified they’ll take hire with humans going forward.
In the first book we watch the story unfold on Kestrith, a hard world that has reduced the mri to about a dozen people on world. Their last ship shows up with around 500 mri, the last mri out of the millions that set out from their homeworld to explore.
The second book is mostly bound to a single ship that has been cast through space back along the track of the mri exploration out from their homeworld. We realize that they’re hundreds of thousands of years old as a species. They’re exploration alone has covered this time, let alone the time they existed on their home planet before they started travelling. The lone human on their ship works to learn their exacting ways as he expends all that he his to help ensure the survival of the species.
The final instalment takes place on Kutath, the original homeworld of the mri. It bears a striking resemblance to Kestrith, and if anything is even harder. It’s mostly dessert, and while there are massive cities of unbelievable beauty, this is a mostly dead ancient world. Here we find the rest of the mri that are alive and finish the battle for their survival under the treacherous eyes of the regul, and the confused humans.
I loved the series yet again.
All Systems Red
I watched Murder Bot on AppleTV this year and enjoyed the story, I even found a high school theatre mate had a decent sized part in the show. This follows Murder Bot, a security bot that has hacked his governor module so he could go rogue and kill everyone if he wanted.
He saves his employers from monsters on the planet, and then from another on world expedition that is killing.
I enjoyed the dry humour of Murder Bot, and the slightly bumbling but loving scientists that break through is utter boredom and contempt with humanity to turn it into a machine caring for his employers.
My Friends
Fredrik Backman does it again, serving readers a tragic but also uplifting tail that brought me to tears. This was by far the one I thought was going to end in all tragedy, but had a strong light at the end of the tunnel as community was formed in the midst and via the heart wrenching tragedy found throughout the book.
You should read his other books A Man Called Ove and Anxious People both of which I can recommend highly enough.
#autocracy #readLater #scienceFiction #sexualRevolution
Curtis McHale
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