The Best Books I Read in 2025

My best reads of 2025 were Man’s Search for Meaning, Tao Te Ching, The Little Prince, and Nexus. Four books, not six or nine — the shortest list I’ve put together for this series, and also the most deliberate. This was the year I read less and reread more, leaned on audiobooks during commutes, and let a few old, small books do more work than a shelf of new, thick ones.

Here’s the list, in the order I read them.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Frankl wrote this after surviving Auschwitz, and the book splits cleanly in two: first the account of the camps, then the theory he built from it. His argument is that the primary human drive isn’t pleasure or power, it’s meaning — and that even when everything is taken from a person, the freedom to choose their response to what happens to them is the one thing that can’t be.

I’ve read plenty of books about resilience that traffic in slogans. This one earns every word it uses, because the author is describing something he actually lived through, not something he read about.

Read it once, and you’ll likely read it again in a harder year.

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Lao Tzu’s eighty-one short chapters keep circling the same idea from different angles: the softest thing can overcome the hardest, and the leader nobody notices is often doing the best job. Mitchell’s translation reads more like poetry than scripture, which makes it easy to read in one sitting and impossible to absorb in one sitting.

What stayed with me was the repeated case for effortless action — doing less, but doing it in accordance with how things actually are, instead of forcing an outcome uphill.

Read a chapter a day rather than the whole thing at once. It resists being rushed.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, translated by Richard Howard

A pilot crashes in the desert and meets a small prince who has left his tiny asteroid to understand grown-ups, and along the way asks the questions grown-ups have usually stopped asking. It’s a children’s book only in the sense that children are still willing to take its questions seriously.

The line everyone quotes — that what is essential is invisible to the eye — earns its fame here, because the whole book is built to make you feel it rather than just read it.

Read it if it’s been a decade or more since the last time. It reads differently as an adult, and again differently as a parent.

Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari

Harari’s argument in Nexus is that more information has never automatically meant more truth or more wisdom — he traces that tension from the canonization of religious texts through witch-hunts and totalitarian regimes to the algorithms deciding what we see today. Information networks, in his telling, are built to create order, not to find truth, and those are not the same project.

I closed the year on this one deliberately. After three books about meaning, stillness, and simplicity, Nexus is the one that’s actually about the world I work in — data, systems, and the networks that move information at a scale no single person can audit.

Read it if you want the long view on why “more data” was never going to be the whole answer.

That’s my 2025 list — short, quiet, and closed out by a book about the very networks I spend my working life inside. What was your best read this year?