The 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.

• Purchase Corporate Control

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.

• Purchase The Case Against the Sexual Revolution

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.

• Purchase Meditations for Mortals

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.

• Purchase Kesrith
• Purchase Shon’jir
• Purchase Kutath

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.

• Purchase All Systems Red

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.

• Purchase My Friends

When Worry Is Real, Action Isn’t Optional

This is going to be my last post for the year. I’m taking a break to work on a bigger piece. We’ll start January 2026 by reading Take Back the Fight. If you want to get all my book content join the book club. Have a great holiday.

Last week I wrote about a reading year that left me with a bunch of worries for the state of the world. From democracies using the playbooks of autocracies, to tech billionaires running government via influence, to the loss of shame and truth. There isn’t much to be happy about.

But progress isn’t linear. When we look where we are now compared to the sweep of history, or even a few hundred years, the last few decades have been the most peaceful and prosperous in history. Yes, some demographics have taken far greater shares of that prosperity than others, but overall the world is doing reasonably well. I haven’t had to protest for basic rights like generations before me did, but that seems to be changing and it’s time to step up.

Let’s look at some possible solutions to all the issues going on.

Loss of shame and truth

I recently heard in a podcast that Canada may be to blame for the politician’s lack of shame that runs rampant today. It was Rob Ford that was embroiled in a crack scandal and his response was basically that this was who he is and what of it. Did future politicians watch this happen in real time and decide it was a viable tactic when they saw Rob Ford continue on with little in the way of real consequences?

It’s only gotten worse since then, with elected officials being unrepentant and convicted criminals. When these same politicians are caught lying, they turn it around and take the playground position of opposition saying in effect, “I know you are but what am I”?

They grab a tactic from the autocrat, flooding the market with more lies about their accusers so that people start to think that everyone is corrupt so why even bother.

It often feels like the lack of shame has come as a backlash to cancel culture. When you can have your career and life ripped apart because you did something insensitive 10 years ago, when it wasn’t seen as insensitive, why not just wear your behaviour out in the open. Own it and double down to tell people you don’t care what they think.

The few people that are honest about their prior behaviour and work to change don’t get a break. They’re told we can never believe them or they’re simply faking change and their life is now defined to the world by that thing they said in their youth.

When we lambaste a politician for changing their opinion, we’re teaching them to double down even if they have new information that might make a difference.

Instead of defining someone’s value by something they did, we need to give people room to change. I know if the internet was around and I had posted some of my beliefs in my 20s online, I’d have been cancelled even though I find them reprehensible now.

Loss of competition

In Dark PR Grant Ennis talks about how corporations frame the narrative to their benefit. When a business gets a tax break or favourable land use codes we don’t call it what it is, a government subsidy1. We normalize car crashes by calling them accidents and jaywalking was invented by car companies so they could own the road.

To stop the stranglehold companies have on us we need to stop subsidizing them and call it what it is, an industry of corporate welfare. Most government subsidies used to entice corporations to move manufacturing vastly overstate the benefit provided, but worse is that they more often outright fail2. Then, at least in Canada, the profit from a successful government subsidy end up heading out of country, deposited in the hands of shareholders who spend the money and are taxed where they live.

The single biggest step we could take to increase competition and stop companies from ruling our lives is to stop subsidizing them. If they have to invest their own money, they don’t have that same money to lobby politicians. They will have to work harder to get laws past that help them at the expense of their users.

That’s going to take organization though. Not just a one and done protest, but a concerted effort by many citizens to push the politicians already in the pockets of business to repeal pro-business laws, and enact laws that hold business accountable for the grift they’ve been pulling on consumers.

Loss of our attention

Our complete lack of attention is possibly the easiest one for us to fix on an individual level by changing how we interact with technology. For a long time technology was fun. Each new release gave us more autonomy over our lives and what we could do with our time.

Now each new release of a phone is merely an incremental upgrade in speed of a device with little that serves users. Operating systems like Windows have moved from helping us get work done, to pathways for Microsoft to sell us more ads in the operating system we already paid for.

Apple is no better with ads for their movies being pushed to users and constant red bubble nags faking urgency, but really just wanting users to pay more monthly for yet another service that will increase Apple’s bottom line and juice shareholder value.

For many of us it no longer feels like our devices serve us. They don’t get out of our way and let us do our work, or enjoy our lives. They are pathways to corporate profit.

If I had a tool in my shop that was a pain in the ass to use all the time, that sometimes didn’t work until I had updated it, that wanted me to pay for a subscription again, and became obsolete every few years, I’d stop using it. My hammer is still as functional as it was 15 years ago when I purchased it. I pick it up and use it, then put it away once the job is done.

It’s time to start treating our devices like this. Pick up your phone for the task you need it for then put it down again and walk away from it. Don’t think about it again until you have a job that requires its use.

The Self-Made Success Myth

As I said last week, Social Darwinism is a disproved economic theory that says the strongest get rewards and get to spread their genes. This belief has led to the thought that meritocracy is the end-all be-all of success. The best will rise and the rest will fail, because they deserve it.

If you find yourself thinking that you’re self-made, ask who paid for your food when you were a kid? It wasn’t you.

Who pays for the roads you drive on? Yes you contribute, but it’s not you.

You also don’t pay for the schools in your city, or the full electrical infrastructure.

That one teacher/adult that believed in you when you were down has credit with your success.

If all these other people around you, and services provided by government made you who you are today you’re not a self-made success. Yeah you probably worked hard, but if you said that you went to private school so yes your family did pay for school, that means you already started with a silver spoon in your mouth. You started with far more chances to fail than someone without resources.

Your success is more likely a result of luck, and that you could fail 100 times without losing the roof over your head. Someone living pay cheque to pay cheque can’t fail 100 times, they may not even be able to fail once. They have to get it right and bring money in so that they can eat and have shelter. They can’t take risks, because they have nothing to fall back on.

Start by recognizing that, and then when you hear someone say they were “self-made” change the words to “succeeded on the back of lots of money” because that’s almost always the case. Elon Musk succeeded on the back of his dad’s emerald mine, despite what Musk claims.

When you hear these claims, take a moment to check on them. Yes some people really did come from nothing and fought hard every moment to even get a shot and then became successful. Far more are like me though. My dad worked at IBM and made good money until about the time I moved out. Then he was laid off and never found a similar job. Today he’s working class, but I grew up in a white collar home, with the largest house in a ’90s suburb of Toronto.

I’m here because my parents could afford to spend the money on most of what I wanted to try in my youth. They paid for the start of my schooling after high school, it was only after my first year that I was truly on my own and had to pay my way.