Table of contents
In 2025, I read 15 books with a total of 5659 pages (averaging 16 pages per day).
Fiction
ISAAC ASIMOV’S FOUNDATION SERIES
This trilogy is the precursor to Dune and Star Wars and all other big Sci-Fi works. It is based on the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but in space.
In the far future, humanity spans the whole galaxy, but the empire is crumbling. Too much administration and bureaucracy make governing all the planets almost impossible. In the outer parts of the galaxy, people start to rebel and disassociate from the empire.
A scientist comes up with a method to predict the behavior for large societies and through his work predicts, that the empire will fall and the galaxy will see an era of barbarism, despair and famine that lasts for 25’000 years. But he constructs a plan on how to speed up this progress, so that the dark ages only last for a 1000 years. He initiates a colony called «The Foundation», with the goal to preserve all existing knowledge so that future generations won’t have to figure out everything from the start again.
This is a great space opera with lots of intrigues, twists and plans within plans. This is the exact kind of story I love and I have read all three books in three days.
Recommended? Yes, if you like world building and big ideas and care less about individual characters.
Altered Carbon
by Richard K. Morgan
Cyberpunk space detective hunts the bad guys.
Meh. Too many boring characters without much cohesion. Had no idea where the story was going and what it was all about. The story twists felt random and far-fetched.
The world building is cool, but the story is not enough, I have no desire to read the following parts. I abandoned the series.
Recommended? No
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY’S FINAL ARCHITECTURE SERIES
- Shards of Earth
- Eyes of the Void
- Lords of Uncreation
Another trilogy by Adrian Tchaikovsky, who meanwhile is my most-read author.
I expected a great space-opera told over three books as they sound and look really epic. In the end, it was a good story overall but not really epic. The genre is more action-adventure like.
There is this small pathetic-looking man who never sleeps and also does not age. His name is Idris and he is a war hero who fought the Architects when they attacked the earth by remodeling it like clay. Idris does not fight with raw firepower, but with his mind. He is gifted with a special ability where he can expand his mind and reach out to other beings.
50 years after the war, he is no longer relevant. With his rowdy crew he flies through the universe to salvage stranded space ships and sells them for scrap.
On a job in deep space they find a ship that looks strange. It looks like it was remodeled by an Architect. Are they returning?
Recommended? Yes if you want something easygoing that still has some deeper parts. But do not expect much mystery or mind-bending ideas.
The Iliad
by Homer
This book is often regarded as the first substantial piece of European literature. It was written/spoken in 9341 HE.
I already knew most of the story from movies, the time I played “Age of Mythology” as a kid, and from the book “Ilium”, which I’ve read in 2023.
It is an epic story, but it takes a moment to get into the language. There are an absurd amount of characters and names and all the relatives of those characters which are named once and then never play a role in the story again.
My edition came with a literary analysis and some historical context, which was interesting and helpful.
I did not like the ending, it was too abrupt and made me question if my book was complete or not 😂.
Recommended? If you like history or greek mythology, yes, read this book! A lot of ancient greek mythology is still living in our language today and it is interesting to figure out these origins.
The Odyssey
by Homer
This is more or less the sequel to “the Iliad”. The story focuses on Odysseus and how he journeys back home after the war of troy.
We also get to find out what happened to other characters from the Iliad, so it is nice to get a kind of conclusion to the Iliad’s sudden ending.
Once again, there are lots of points in the story which you will have heard about before in media, in pop-culture references, or in our language.
Recommended? Yes, if you liked the Iliad.
Diaspora
by Greg Egan
This book has an amazing first chapter, it is called “Genesis” and describes the perspective of a piece of software that slowly learns and gains consciousness to then become a full AI.
For the rest of the book, I was probably just too dumb 🙂.
I got the notion that it is really clever and references a lot of ideas from different literature and is very abstract and mind-bending.
In the far future, there are three kind of beings:
- Fleshers: normal people that refuse to merge with technology
- Gleisners: robot body with a human mind aka cyborgs.
- Polises: AIs or digital people that live in virtual cyberspace
The book shows how these “humans” live different lives and still interact with each other (as polises can for example cross from cyberspace into the real world), and it examines what it means to be human.
It is interesting, but very abstract and dryly written.
Recommended? If you are hardcore, yes. If you are normal, no.
Non-Fiction
ATOMIC HABITS
by James Clear
To get shit done, you need to build good systems instead of just relying on discipline.
This book shows you how to do it.
For detailed information, read my Book Notes Post about Atomic Habits.
Recommended? Yes, I think its hype is justified, I think everyone can get something useful out of this.
Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the Next 100 Years
by Ian Goldin & Robert Muggah
A book with maps (mostly the whole globe) and some data on it and then it talks about the data in various chapters (technology, climate, politics, culture, health, food… and many more).
It is good, not great. I can’t remember too much.
It is not that well written and a bit boring sometimes, I expected more interesting maps and a kind of history and fun anecdotes.
Recommended? Not really. If you are a geography nerd and like maps, look for another book.
Man’s Search for Meaning
by Viktor E. Frankl
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
Viktor Frankl was a jewish prisoner in the WWII Nazi concentration camps.
He talks about the horrors he had to endure and how people were treated like animals and tortured to death.
He describes how he survived the camp by having something to live for, which helped him to endure every stroke of fate he encountered.
This psychology of having a meaning in life and it’s effects on our mind was a theory he developed. He called it “logotherapy” (logos = meaning).
While the first part is more of a narration about his live during WWII, the second part focuses on his logotherapy approach and how it can help people to find meaning in their lives.
Things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes – within the limits of endowment and environment – he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
Recommended? Yes, this is a horrible yet wonderful book. I especially liked his thoughts about the meaning of suffering.
Das Biologie Buch
My seventh book from the «Big Ideas Simply Explained» series.
There were some interesting chapters, but it is still one of the less interesting sciences for me.
Also the book felt cheap because there are lots of typos. This is strange because the other books were not as bad quality-wise.
Recommended? No, find a better book for biology.
Clean Architecture
by Robert C. Martin
This is a programming book on how to build a good software architecture.
Main take away: business Rules are the center of your system and they are where your company creates value. Everything around it is decoration. Your business rules should not be dependent on any other components, they are the core component that all others should rely on.
Some of the metrics stuff is interesting but seems pretty impractical and I will probably never use this in my professional life.
Still, it helped me to gain some insight by making me compare the architectures of the different systems I worked on in the past.
Recommended? If you work in IT, it is a nice entry to get an overview over IT architecture.
2 Comments
Interesting blog post. What was your favorite book?
Hi Luca,
Fiction: Foundation
Non-Fiction: Man’s Search for Meaning