My Favorite Books and Audiobooks of 2025 ⭐

I love to read and 2025 was a big year for books, especially technology industry books. Here’s what my year in reading looked like.

? Books

I read e-books semi-exclusively through Kindle and usually on my iPad Air.

? Favorite non-fiction title

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee is the best and most important book about the personal computing industry in at least a decade. It’s well-researched and well-written, and it unfolds like a whodunit murder mystery in which Apple CEO Tim Cook is revealed over time to be subservient to the Chinese government while undermining his company and country in a manic bid to maximize profits at all costs. It’s such a big deal that I wrote a full review and this book will be heartbreaking to anyone who actually believed that Apple was somehow better than the rest of Big Tech or was in any way patriotic. It may be the most important industry book ever written.

? Favorite fiction title

Never Flinch by Stephen King

That Stephen King is somehow still cranking out books this good is astonishing, as is his late-career turn to crime fiction. This is another book centered on Holly Gibney, the quirky character who first appeared in Mr. Mercedes, still a favorite, and while some of the mannerisms are getting a bit tired, I pretty much can’t get enough of this universe.

? Audiobooks

I listen to audiobooks semi-exclusively in Audible, and I still have an Audible Premium Plus subscription.

? Favorite non-fiction audiobook

Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment by Jason Schreier, narrated by Ray Chase

In Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, Jason Schreier documents over 30 years of history in engaging fashion. I’m steeped in the lore of our industry, but this was a story that was mostly new to me, and one I eagerly consumed over a long weekend. And though I didn’t make the connection until I was almost done, this is the third book I’ve read by Mr. Schreier. His previous titles, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made and Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry, are terrific reads as well. He’s been covering the video game industry since 2010 and to unravel this history, he interviewed over current and former Blizzard employees. I recommend it highly.

? Favorite fiction audiobook

Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, narrated by Thomas Harris

This audiobook isn’t new, nor is the original written version. And it’s not even new to me: I first read Red Dragon over 35 years ago and bought the Kindle version in 1999 (!). But this book, which is a prequel to the more famous Silence of the Lambs and is nearly the same story but with a different protagonist, remains one of the all-time great crime thrillers. I bought the audiobook version when I discovered it was read by the author: His narrations of Hannibal (book three in this series) and Silence are among my all-time favorite audiobooks, and this measures up nicely.

? Non-Fiction: Industry books

Apple Confidential by Owen Linzmayer. This book is so old I owned it originally in paper form, but I picked it up on Kindle when I saw there was a recent second edition update. It’s nothing special, but I like to have as many industry book references as possible.

The Apple Revolution: Steve Jobs, the Counterculture and How the Crazy Ones Took over the World by Luke Dormehl. I can’t recall how I found this book, but I suspect it was tied to the above book. I also can’t remember much about it, as I don’t think there was anything new in it for me. Eh.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. This book made headlines earlier this year because Facebook/Meta tried to block its publication. It’s an outlier from an industry book perspective in that a lot of it is about how terrible the people are at Meta/Facebook, and they are terrible. But there’s a good history of how the company changed for the worse there, and the last chapter is especially explosive. So it’s worth reading. ?

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow. This book is a collection of everything the author has written on this topic since he coined the term, but expanded and organized. As Doctorow wryly observes, we’re living in what he calls the Enshittocene, an age of sick, collapsing, abusive, and outsized platforms, a Great Enshittening in which platforms are no longer valuable because they bring together buyers and sellers but because they betray them both. Enshittification is the defining term of this age and I strongly recommend this to everyone. Read my full review. ?

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares. This is alarmist nonsense you can skip without hesitation. I’m stupider for having read any of it. ?

The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft Kindle Edition by Dean Carignan, JoAnn Garbin. Is absolute garbage, ignore this. ?

iWar: Fortnite, Elon Musk, Spotify, WeChat, and Laying Siege to Apple’s Empire – An Enthralling Saga About Tech Moguls Battling to Break the Walled Garden and Control the Digital Economy by Tim Higgins. This book is a mostly chronological account of multiple overlapping efforts by app developers, would-be competitors, and antitrust regulators to tear down the abusive mobile app store policies enacted by Apple and, to a lesser degree, Google. It’s worth reading, as it provides a measured and non-biased accounting of the events of the past several years. But it delivers no new revelations, and the history was still unfolding, so it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. The author should have waited: Since the publication, Epic Games defeated Apple and Google in decisive fashion, setting the stage for the end of junk mobile app store fees forever.

Game Changer: Playing to Win at Xbox, EA Sports and Liverpool FC by Peter Moore. Perhaps best known for his time at Sega and EA, Moore also worked at Xbox from 2003 to 2007 and played a role in the creation of the Xbox 360. That’s why I bought this book, I pretty much couldn’t care less about the rest of his career, but that part of the book is surprisingly short and not particularly insightful.

This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. Many probably know that Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, but this book is particularly interesting because of the details he provides. And he has a plan to save it from the ad-riddled enshittified hellscape it’s become over the past decade or so. ?

The Valve Effect: An Independent Biography of Gabe Newell by Jon A. Rodriguez. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell is as enigmatic a character as exists in our world, and this past year I was surprised to see he had agreed to a video interview with an unknown YouTuber. The interview is terrible, but Newell is fascinating, and I briefly tried to learn more about the guy who never made Half-Life 3 happen for reasons that will never be acceptable to me. And there isn’t much. So I settled on this terrible, short, and self-published book. And wonder why there isn’t more.

Yield: How Google Bought, Built, and Bullied Its Way to Advertising Dominance Kindle Edition by Ari Paparo. I have been skipping through this one, mostly because I don’t care all that much about advertising or how it works as a business while I am very interested in Google and do need to understand how this company makes most of its money.

? Non-Fiction: Biography and history

Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain by Charles Leerhsen, narrated by Vikas Adam. I’m not sure why Anthony Bourdain is so fascinating, but he is. I think I’m just trying to understand how someone so talented and with so much going on in his life would ever purposefully end it.

The Fixer and The Chef: My Adventures With and Without Anthony Bourdain Kindle Edition by Zamir Gotta, Miriam Margala. Tied to the above, we have friends who know Mr. Gotta and they arranged a video call between him and me so that I could give him advice about self-publishing and whether it would make any sense for this book. So I played a tiny, peripheral role here, but the book itself is quite good, and worth reading if you’re a Bourdain fan.

Last Rites by Ozzy Osbourne, narrated by Ian Danter. I didn’t realize how important Ozzy was until his passing, and his final concert stands as a testament to his incredible voice and talent. As is his incredible catalog, and his fascinating life. I just wish Ozzy could have narrated this. ?

My Twenty-Five Years in Provence: Reflections on Then and Now by Peter Mayle, narrated by John Lee. Peter Mayle is sort of the Hemingway of the late 20th century, at least from a travel-writing perspective. And his early books, especially A Year in Provence (which led to a terrific British TV series), Toujours Provence, and the novel A Good Year (which was turned into a decent movie) were early influences at a time when I was starting to think about maybe spending part of my life abroad each year. As you might expect, this is an overreaching retrospective.

?‍? More fiction

Armada: A Novel by Ernest Cline, narrated by Wil Wheaton. The follow-up to Ready Player One doesn’t reach the heights of that book, but I like Wheaton as a narrator and the Ender’s Game-type story is decent.

The End of the World as We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand by multiple authors, narrated by Sean Patrick Hopkins, Adenrele Ojo. The Stand is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I’ve easily read it over a dozen times. So I was curious and perhaps nervous when I noticed that King authorized a sequel of sorts, a collection of short stories written by others. And it’s actually pretty good. As you might expect, there are some winners and losers in the collection, but some really work and feel like the original.

The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown, narrated by Paul Michael. The latest Robert Langdon (Angels and Demons, The DaVinci Code, etc.) is perhaps the weakest in the series yet. The writing style is really wearing on me now—so many adjectives! So many pointless facts about nothing interesting—and the location isn’t all that interesting. That said, the central mystery here is just as interesting as anything else from the previous books.

The Sword of Shannara Trilogy by Terry Brooks. I’ve referenced the original Sword of Shannara many times, most recently just a week ago, but I remember it well from my first reading, in the 6th grade, and how it was such an overt and embarrassing rip-off of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. What I don’t believe I’ve ever referenced is that I read its sequel, The Elfstones of Shannara, in high school and loved it, and I recall reading a particularly good scene out loud to friends at lunch in the cafeteria that year. Flash forward over 40 years, and the original trilogy was available for next to nothing on Kindle, so I gave it another shot. The first book is as bad as I remembered, though I always did like the idea that it took place in a post-apocalyptic earth with tiny remnants from the past popping up from time to time. And though I’m only about a third of the way through Elfstones as I write this, I’m happy to say that I can see why I liked it. And I’m looking forward to getting to that scene noted above. I don’t think I ever read the third book, Wishsong of Shannara, so we’ll see if I can get through that too.

? Previous book picks

You can find my most recent previous book/audiobook overviews here: 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.