2025 Retro

The first half of 2025 went great in terms of my reading. I started off the year strong with some fun reads and the momentum just kept me going for a while. I liked the fact that in hindsight my book choices were so weird, random and have no clear rhyme and rhythm. Some of the weird and wonderful books I liked were

• No Presents Please (book review)
• Don’t Tell Me I Can’t (About an enterprising home schooled kid from rural Utah who builds a ranch and more)
• In Service of the Republic (Incredibly good public policy book)
• The Scaling Era (book review)
• The Inner Game of Tennis (It’s not about tennis)

Now coming to things that went bad for me this year. Understandably, I struggled to make time for reading in the last quarter since I was balancing (or struggling to balance more appropriately) work and a hectic semester of study (I really should have planned this better). Another pattern I noticed was I saw myself slipping into spending more time reading light-weight substack articles and tweets over long-form substantive books (or articles) I wished to read. I really started off the year, hoping to write more book reviews ¹, that didn’t happen too. My general observation has been, I enjoy writing book reviews and this feeds into a feedback loop of getting me to read more books.

Another big shift for me in 2025 that seemed to unexpectedly and adversely impact my reading habit, was my sudden reliance on LLMs at work. As much as they are useful and helpful and superfast, I believe they degraded some primitive skills in me that made reading enjoyable. I really felt my attention span fall this year, there are also these transferable skills of reading codebases and PRs which translated to reading, which suddenly I feel like I don’t have. I hope in 2026, reading builds back a lot of mental stamina (and also a BS detector) amidst the general trend of LLMs everywhere.

All in all, I read a total of 15 books this year (against an easy-peasy goal of 12) and hope to have a much more fruitful reading 2026.

My Goodreads 2025 retro

2026 Pursuits

It’s silly to make a plan to “read”, but my sense is that just writing and putting out a short note (that you don’t hold yourself to strictly) where you reflect on and think about how you want the next year to go is useful (at least to me).

So here goes—I want this year to be a colorful contradiction, just like last year. Some books I’ll read deeply, others I’ll let flow. If something’s a slog, I’ll abandon it and move on. I’ve got pulp fiction and spiritual non-fiction both on the horizon. Old favorites to reread and new authors to explore. I want to hold myself to writing more book reviews this year. But most important of all: just have fun.

My Goodreads 2026 shortlist