While the world is burning down with quantum hype, this reformed quantum computing blog is now a book blog. Always has been. This year my links are affiliate links, I will maybe earn a beer if all you all click and buy something.
Books read in 2025: 56
My favorite fiction book of 2025:
Borges and Me: An Encounter by Jay Parini
My undergraduate literature thesis was on the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. I argued that Borges had the basic structure of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem spread throughout his stories. It’s probably no surprise that a partially fictionalized story (“novelistic memoir”) of a literature graduate student romping around Scotland with Borges is my top pick for 2025. This is a bit of a classic road novel mixed with a delightfully on point portrait of one of the unique writers of the 20th century.
My favorite “non-fiction” book of 2025:
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology by Lawrence Weschler
If you’re even in Los Angeles, I recommend a stop at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. The museum of what? Exactly. Maybe it’s past it’s prime, but David Wilson’s museum of unreality is wonderful. I enjoyed this book as the author attempts to track down what is real and what is not real in the museum, and finds himself lost on the boundary.
Did I re-read more Neal Stephenson again?
Yes I did. The entire Baroque cycle. If you want to nerd out on Newton and Leibniz and also like pirates, well this is your series.
I also reread Stephenson’s early ecothriller
Zodiac by Neal Stephenson
And yes there was even new Stephenson, the first volume of the Bomb Light series.
Polostan by Neal Stephenson
Did I read anything more sophisticated?
Classics?
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck contains the best opening paragraph in American Literature.
The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy. Stella Maris’s portrait of a troubled mathematician is stunning, I cherish having gotten to spend time talking with Cormac at the SFI. And this is why he was great to talk with: Two Years After Cormac McCarthy’s Death, Rare Access to His Personal Library Reveals the Man Behind the Myth
AI, AI, AI, and more AI?
Why yes!
More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker roasts the techno-billi-bros by simply repeating exactly the insane things they have being saying for decades. I miss the groovy technologists, buried now under piles of Reagonomics (which sounds like a comic, but is a actually a tragic.)
Vernor Vinge is the proclaimed inventor of the singularity concept, I read his short stories and a novel by Vinge, and was struck by how once one finds the singularity argument your world view seems irrevocably changed. And now I watch this happen to my friends, and am not sure how to intervene.
The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge by Vernor Vinge
The Peace War by Vernor Vinge
And then there is my runner up for book of the year, which will throw into the AI category because, well you should read the book (keywords: the ocean is amazing, the game of go)
Playground by RichardPower
Isn’t there an antidote for all this AI?
The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris which I found through an interview with the amazing song writer John K Samson made me think about the time when being a computer person made you a nerd, not a techno bro. Now we are living through another such transition, we will be the ones who remember the world before LLMs.
On Bullshit by Harry G Frankfurt who said that “bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are”. This reminded me of the time I lost my soul and worked for a bullshitting CEO. (I’d say I sold my soul, but the story is better than that, my soul was held ransom, but with a twist on the standard ransom stories, in my story you learn that you shouldn’t negotiate with bullshitters).
SciFi?
Yes, lots, some rereads, some new.
Adrian Tchaikvosky continues to be an author whose every new book I will read, all three of these were good reads
Ken Liu’s short stories and novel come recommended
I reread the three-body trilogy, it was about as I remembered it. Though maybe the third book was not as crazy as I remember, and the second not as badly translated as I remember.
Finally a non-fiction sci fi recommendation: a good history of the crazy early history of SciFi
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee
More SciFi
- From the Bob-verse author, very light reading The Singularity Trap by Dennis E. Taylor
- A Japanese novella about an a mysterious author, very Borges Harlequin Butterfly by Toh EnJoe translated by David Boyd
- Reread of a classic from my childhood, which would give it more stars than my adulthood, but that is an endorsement Ringworld by Larry Niven
- Making my way through the Murderbot Diaries, easy light reading
- Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
- Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells
- Exit Strategy by Martha Wells
- Reread of one of my favorites, though maybe I’ve read it too many times now The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K Dick
- An easy candy read The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
- On the border of SciFi, an easy thriller in a future dystopia, The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
- A friend recommended the Laundry Files series, so I read The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross. It was OK, maybe will try the next but not yet convinced (there are 14 books in the series!)
- Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer is one that just didn’t click for me, but others seem to love it.
Technology?
I do still work in technology, so
- A good book on software design: A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
- A surprisingly amusing NSFW book on coding: Old Coder Guy Book 1: Absurdity and Dubious Wisdom from an Accidental 30 Year Career in Technology by Eric Whitney
- These folks are nuts: The Money Trap: Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble by Alok Sama
- No really they are nuts: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams
- You want to be a better Rust programmer? I like books that try to tell you want the sane portions of a programming language are. Effective Rust: 35 Specific Ways to Improve Your Rust Code by David Drysdale
- Back when it was possible to make a video game nearly all by yourself The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993 by Jordan Mechner
- Finally finished the funniest book on compilers ever written Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom
Science?
- I don’t read as much popular science about quantum stuff, I feel I know a lot about the subject I guess, but I did really enjoy What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker
- All the fancy ideas, but it turned out what you really wanted was a good old mechanical clock Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
- Growing up a computer nerd, Artificial Life was one of my favorite subjects. Blaise Aguera y Arcas’s small little book reminded me of those halcyon days What Is Life?: Evolution as Computation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas
- If I were a young, I’d probably go into biology The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets by Thomas R Cech
- How to fraud, Bell Labs plastic transistor edition Plastic Fantastic: How The Biggest Fraud In Physics Shook The Scientific World by Eugenie Samuel Reich
- On the importance of forgetting The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory by Aleksandr Luria translated by Lynn Solotaroff
Unclassified
- Do you want to write a screenplay? I don’t, but found Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder amusing and maybe an explanation for the mainstream movie homogeneity
- I had high hopes for the articles in this collection, but this is the one book I would not recommend from this years reading The Philosophy of Ted Chiang edited by David Friedell
- This is set in Seattle, and I believe I have met some of the characters, an entertaining story and where I learned that since I had my appendix out this year I can be stationed in Antartica Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
- Everyone seems to love Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang, it’s a good read, but a bit trope-filled for my tastes.