My goal in 2025 was to prioritize reading more than ever by minimizing my screen time and replacing TV, video games, and social media with reading. This strategy truly paid off: I read a record nine books.
Now, to the books.
On Writing by Stephen King
As a writer it’s a good idea to squeeze in a book “on writing” every once in awhile. It gives you a refresher on the foundations of your craft and some new insights you weren’t aware of. Last year I read “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser, which may be the greatest book ever written on writing.
Stephen King’s book on writing brings a unique element to the writing story that many other books lack. It’s an autobiography/writing guide hybrid. King pairs his writing advice with the experience that taught him the lesson. It’s incredible to enter the mind of the most excellent horror author and see him overcome adversity (like getting run over by a car) to become great at his craft.
I strongly recommend it to everyone, even if you aren’t a writer. His advice applies to all other creative endeavors.
George Washington on Leadership by Richard Brookhiser
I had this short George Washington book on my bookshelves for years, most likely from a thrift store book haul. I liked the hardback cover and it looked good on the bookshelves.
Unfortunately, it did not live up to the usual biographies and history books I read from great authors like Ron Chernow, David McCullough, and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Still, it is a good introduction to our first president and a good way to extract the main lessons he applied to his life.
It’s not a bad read, but I recommend Robert Middlekauff’s The Glorious Cause to witness Washington in all his glory.
A System for Writing by Bob Doto
This short ebook was a great companion alongside “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sonke Ahrens. It’s an excellent primer for building a Zettelkasten note-taking system. The Zettelkasten note taking system was created by Niklas Luhmann, a German author and sociologist. Instead of using the standard folders and top-down approach to organizing your notes, he instead would organize his notes by connections. This allowed his ideas to link with each other to generate new ideas. This system works great because it does the opposite of a standard note taking system. With standard systems, the more information you feed it, the more unorganized and complex it becomes, while slowly becoming more difficult to find the information you are looking for.
On the other hand, the Zettelkasten method improves the more you feed it. As it grows, more connections and ideas are generated. I was always skeptical of it and had difficulty starting (probably because I didn’t have enough data to feed it). This past year, I committed to my Zettelkasten on Obsidian and can’t keep up with the new ideas it generates. The Zettelkasten may not be for everyone, but if you try it out, at least give it a few months to grow with you.
If you are interested, I would recommend these resources:
A System for Writing was a good read that taught me new note-taking, writing, and reading lessons.
Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson
90% of my reading is non-fiction, but I do have a few favorite authors from my fiction reading days that I still keep up on.
Since its debut in 2010, the Stormlight Archive series has been one of my favorite epic fantasy series. Brandon Sanderson is an excellent writer, and this was another great addition to the series. I won’t go into it too much, but Sanderson is your man if you are interested in a good fantasy author that is constantly publishing new books.
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
My goal for the next few years is to work through my backlog of classics. After reading Gone with the Wind last year and now David Copperfield, I realized many of these classics are long! This is entirely understandable, though, because reading was the main leisure activity back then. There weren’t hundreds of different TV shows in production, dozens of movies being released every week, or video games and smartphones to keep us distracted. People probably wished books were longer to get their money’s worth.
The novel follows David Copperfield from childhood to adulthood. He perseveres through various hardships. It is a great coming-of-age novel, and Dickens does an excellent job creating an affinity between the reader and David. It is a fantastic read, and I understand why it’s considered a classic.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Widely considered one of the greatest novels ever written. My only quibble is that I wish I could read it in its native language. It would be disrespectful if I called it the greatest crime fiction ever written because it’s so much more than that. Dostoevsky pulls you into the mind of a man going through psychological warfare. The writing is incredible and almost made me want to throw my hands up and say “I can never be this good at writing.”
Alas, here we are still trudging along.
A book that genuinely merits to belong on the list of books to read before you die.
Hegel: A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer
Hegel is a well-known German philosopher whose writings have been discussed and argued for centuries by great thinkers and philosophers. However, his writing is notoriously difficult to read, and many intellectuals find it challenging to decipher.
Peter Singer does an excellent job guiding us through his works and extracting some of the key concepts from his ideas. I recommend this short book if Hegel’s ideas intrigue you and you want to learn more about his work.
On a side note, is there any German intellectual who Goethe didn’t influence? His name appears frequently in many of the biographies I read, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalist Club.
Tunnel 29 by Helena Merriman
One of the benefits of reading multiple books at once is the connections that are made. Tunnel 29 is a fascinating true story of the East Germans’ version of the Underground Railroad, where East Germans were smuggled into West Germany to escape communism. At the same time, I was reading the biography of Harry Truman, and the Americans were concerned over what the Soviet Union was doing in Berlin post World War II.
Merriman does an excellent job immersing the reader in a thrilling story while simultaneously teaching us a history lesson. I could not put this book down, and it was shocking to learn that the Berlin Wall stood for 28 years.
Truman by David McCullough
This is my proudest read in recent years. David McCullough successfully wrote an 1120-page turner biography on a simple man from Independence, Missouri, who made it to the Oval Office. I related to Truman in many ways, and my favorite character traits were his ability to stay calm under fire and never stray from his core values, even if it cost him everything.
Truman was thrust into the presidency after FDR died in the middle of World War II. Once president, he first heard of the Manhattan Project and had to make decisions that would affect the entire world moving forward.
As if that weren’t enough, he lost all the popularity gained from WWII by participating in the Korean War. Truman made all of his decisions based on right or wrong, with very little gray area, regardless of the consequences for his popularity, and that was what I liked about him most.
In hindsight, Truman’s popularity continues to rise in the annals of American history. He made difficult decisions that benefitted the country long-term, even if they were unpopular then.
My Best Month Ever
This is the first month I have read nine books, and I highly recommend eight of them. I am overjoyed that my system for consuming content continues to improve and that I am generally satisfied with the majority of the books I read. I have a difficult time reviewing fiction books without spoiling anything, so the most I can do is tell you if it’s good or not. Let me know if you have read or plan to read any of the books listed and what your thoughts on them were.
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