The Books I Read in 2025

Love/hate this book. I love the content: it helped me a lot to frame my own behaviour toward my son. I know what I do well and what I don’t do well. So in a way this is a life changing book since it clearly feels like I’m “immediately” a better parent. The best part of this being it gives you a framework for thinking about your relationship with your children more than “random” advice.

The hate part: it’s not very well written. There’s a lot of repetition and the organization of the book is very frustrating: many chapters about the problems and then finally a long chapter about solutions. A structure with self containing chapters would work much, much better. Also, there’s a final chapter about kids and tech and, while I understand why this was added after the book was written, a much better approach would have been reframing the content in the light of the modern world (I do understand this is a whole new book).

The book has a strong argument on radical flank theory and climate change. I felt it was not well organised reading it. Some parts read like a rant, others like a blog post. Having said that, good content, worth read.

What’s really missing from this book is targets. Yes the book deals with billionaires but, in the context of climate change, you just can’t ignore US imperialism, the military industry, and colonialism.

First of all, Lenin is an amazing writer. Some of his sentences are remarkable.

It’s an unfortunately depressing reading though since, to be honest, his core definitions apply perfectly to our anthropocene age. With the added “bonus” of climate change. Some very smart people, like Lenin, have been trying to tell us for a long time we’d end up in this horrific times. Collectively, we’re just not listening.

A very confused book.

While the core idea is very powerful the book executes very poorly on it. The first part of the book is riddled with examples from some TV series (how is that even remotely a good idea?).

The second part is where things go very badly, very quickly. Varoufakis is so immersed in his european perspective he offers an incompetent, inaccurate, and frankly infuriating analysis of the China-US relationship. I’d skip.

This may have been the most interesting book I read from Mahbubani. Especially because I think it’s the one with more flaws. While Mahbubani is clearly not drowning in western propaganda, he still makes insane arguments (“the US has done more good than bad” lol). And in this book it happens a lot. Having said that, still highly recommended reading.

And yes, the question is rhetorical.

Writing a page turner on a such a subject has got be very hard to do. So far the best book I found to recommend people that still believe in “there’s good sides to capitalisms and international institutions”.

The last part of the book, unsurprisingly, is the most depressing. I appreciate the author willingness to instill some hope into this fight but it didn’t have that effect on me.

All in all, highly recommend book.

Top book

Among the absolutely best writing I’ve ever come across. It’s obviously a painful read but you really shouldn’t miss it.

Top book

This may be the first political book written by a white man I completely agree with. In fact, top book just for that. But there’s obviously more to it, I learned about the year 1840 and gained one more connection on the colonialism is capitalism is climate crisis map.

Top Book