Twelve books. After the slow recovery of 2024, that's a number I'm genuinely pleased with — the best count since 2022. The pattern I've noticed across these posts is holding: reading volume correlates almost entirely with deliberate structure. This year had more of that, especially on the audiobook side. Long drives, early mornings, and a concerted effort to swap screen time for listening time made a real difference. The Doc Ford binge across three months didn't hurt either — once you're back in a series, momentum does some of the work for you.

What was my breakdown of genres for the year?

In reviewing the books I read this year I found I read 12 titles. They were broken down in the following broad genres:

Entertainment - 33%
Non-fiction - 25%
Biographies - 17%
Business - 17%
Self-improvement - 8%
Computing - 0%

Books I've completed in 2025:

February

  • A Hacker's Mind (Audible) – Bruce Schneier expands the definition of hacking far beyond computers to argue that any complex system of rules has vulnerabilities — and that the rich and powerful have always exploited them. Tax loopholes are hacks. Gerrymandering is a hack. Financial instruments designed to fail in slow motion while insiders cash out are hacks. Schneier's core thesis is that hacking has historically been a tool of the outsider, but it increasingly belongs to whoever has enough money and lawyers to find and exploit the gaps. The "how to bend them back" section at the end is thinner than you'd want, but the reframing of how power actually operates is worth it on its own.

March

  • Salt River (Doc Ford #26) (Kindle) – Two threads running in parallel: Doc is quietly selling off the Spanish gold he recovered at the end of Caribbean Rim, a side enterprise that attracts the attention of a corrupt former IRS agent and a Bahamian customs official looking to cut themselves in. Meanwhile, Tomlinson reveals that he spent some years as a sperm donor, and his now-adult biological children have tracked him down through genealogy websites — at least one of them with intentions that aren't purely sentimental. The buddy dynamic between Doc and Tomlinson carries the book more than the plot does, but that's been true for most of the series.

April

  • One Deadly Eye (Doc Ford #27) (Kindle) – A Russian diplomat disappears while Doc is tagging great white sharks in South Africa, and the Bratva — Russian organized crime — decides Doc must know something. They follow him home to Dinkin's Bay Marina, arriving just ahead of the deadliest hurricane to hit the Florida Gulf Coast in a century. The storm provides the structural backdrop for the whole novel, and White wrings a lot of tension out of the twelve hours before, during, and after the eye passes over. One of the better entries in the series in years — the hurricane sequences are genuinely good.

  • The Heat Islands (Doc Ford #2) (Kindle) – An early-series entry that has Doc investigating the suspicious death of a fishing guide who was about to expose a land-grab scheme on Sanibel Island. White was still finding his footing with the Doc Ford character here — less spy thriller than the later books, more straight Florida mystery — but the coastal setting and the environmental subtext are already well-developed. Worth reading in sequence if you're working through the series, but it doesn't demand it.

May

  • Cues (Audible) – Vanessa Van Edwards's guide to the signals humans send and receive in social and professional settings. The central framework is a charisma matrix built on two axes: warmth and competence. Projecting one without the other creates problems — all warmth reads as a pushover, all competence reads as cold and unapproachable. The book covers nonverbal cues, vocal patterns, word choice, and visual presentation, with research from Van Edwards's behavioral lab backing most of the claims. Practical, accessible, and the kind of thing you immediately start applying to Zoom calls.

June

  • Who is Government? (Audible) – Michael Lewis assembled a group of writers — including Dave Eggers, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and John Lanchester — and gave each of them a simple assignment: find someone doing an interesting job for the federal government and write about them. The result is eight essays profiling civil servants who are largely unknown and doing consequential work: the former coal miner who has spent decades making mine roofs less likely to collapse, the IRS investigator who thinks in terms of crime thrillers, the official who turned the National Cemetery Administration into the best-run organization — public or private — in the country. Originally published as a Washington Post series during the 2024 election, the book lands differently now, with DOGE having laid off or fired thousands of federal workers since it went to print. It reads as an elegy as much as a profile collection.

  • Killing Floor (Jack Reacher #1) (Kindle) – The first Jack Reacher novel, which introduces the character in a small Georgia town where he stops randomly and immediately gets arrested for a murder he didn't commit. Reacher is a former military police major with no permanent address, no phone, no ties — he travels by bus with nothing but a folding toothbrush, and his response to most problems is a combination of tactical thinking and overwhelming physical force. Lee Child's plotting moves fast, the dialogue is stripped down and efficient, and Reacher himself is either exactly your thing or isn't. Apparently he is mine — this is a series I'll be coming back to.

July

  • Multipliers (Audible) – Liz Wiseman's research-based framework for understanding why some leaders make the people around them smarter and more capable, while others — often unintentionally — diminish them. The core distinction is between Multipliers, who believe intelligence is expandable and create conditions for others to think and act at full capacity, and Diminishers, who hoard decision-making and inadvertently suppress the team. Wiseman introduces the "accidental diminisher" — the well-meaning manager who micromanages or rescues too quickly — which is probably the most useful concept in the book for most readers. A staple of leadership development that earns that status.

September

  • What If? (Kindle) – Randall Munroe, the xkcd cartoonist, answers absurd hypothetical questions using actual physics, math, and science. What would happen if you pitched a baseball at 90% of the speed of light? What if everyone on Earth jumped at the same time? What if you tried to build a periodic table using actual elements arranged in the correct positions? Each answer starts from the real question, follows the math honestly wherever it leads, and usually ends somewhere deeply strange. Smart, funny, and the kind of book that makes you feel like you're learning something while barely noticing.

October

  • Liar's Poker (Audible) – Michael Lewis's first book, written in 1989 from the inside of Salomon Brothers during the bond trading boom of the 1980s. Lewis was hired out of Princeton onto the trading floor with no particular qualifications and watched, often baffled, as the mortgage bond market was invented and then ran rampant. The characters are vivid — John Gutfreund, the CEO who played liar's poker for a million dollars before breakfast; the various traders operating under the logic that if you weren't making money you were costing money. The culture Lewis describes, where new employees were called geeks and hazed until they either hardened or quit, led directly to the dynamics that caused the 2008 financial crisis. An essential book for understanding how Wall Street actually operates, and easy to read on its own merits.

  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Audible) – A return to this one — I read it in 2024 (the Kindle version) and came back to it on Audible in 2025. Lencioni's leadership fable about a new CEO trying to get her executive team to function is still the best entry point to the framework: absence of trust leads to fear of conflict, which leads to lack of commitment, which leads to avoidance of accountability, which leads to inattention to results. Hearing it again rather than reading it landed differently — some of the patterns are easier to recognize in actual conversations when you've listened to the dialogue rather than read it.

November

  • Burn Book (Audible) – Kara Swisher has spent thirty years covering Silicon Valley for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and her own media ventures, and Burn Book is her account of what she saw and how she thinks it went wrong. She was there for Netscape going public, for the rise of Google and Facebook, for the parade of founders who convinced themselves that their personal ambitions were aligned with making the world better. The book is part memoir — her career arc, her family, her health — and part reckoning, as she traces how the industry went from genuine idealism to something harder and more cynical. The audiobook version is particularly good because it sounds exactly like her podcast voice, which is to say: direct, opinionated, and funnier than you'd expect given the subject matter.

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