My 10 Best Books of 2025

I read for the same reasons most everyone else does.

To start with, I enjoy it. There’s nothing better than getting lost in an engrossing story, or rooting for someone as you read their biography.

But mostly, I read because I want to learn. To paraphrase what Munger once said, there are lessons worth billions inside a $30 history book. I want to absorb as many of those lessons as I possibly can.

In fact, this entire newsletter is pretty much me regurgitating things that I’ve read over the years. I sift through mountains of materials and discover the best of the best. I then add it to my investing (and life in general) framework, and viola! I’ve grown as a person.

Or, at least, that’s the idea.

My reading was down a little bit this year, but I’m still pretty confident I’m in the top 1% of the population. As I’m writing this, I’ve read 43 books in 2025, and I’ll add a couple between now and the end of the year. Call it 45.

At least that was higher than 2023, when I read 41 books. But it has nothing on 2024 (53 books) or and was slightly less than 2022 (46).

I kept track of pages read for the first time this year, and I got oh-so-close to 20,000.

So, yeah, I read a lot.

For the last few Decembers on Twitter I’ve done a thread on the top books I read over the last year, but I find that just isn’t enough space. So I decided to move it onto the ol’ newsletter. And hey, it just might help some of you with Christmas ideas for that certain reader on your list… or for yourself.

So let’s get right to it. Here are the top 10 books I read in 2025.

The first five

(Note: these are Amazon links. I’ll get paid a small commission if you click through and buy. All referral dollars are immediately reinvested into more books)

10. The Fifties - David Halberstam

I discovered historian David Halberstam in 2024 and immediately put about four of his books onto my to-read list. I really enjoy contemporary history, and his books are about some of the more fascinating topics of the last 50-100 years.

The Fifties is a history of perhaps the more transformative decade in the history of the western world. So many of the inventions we take for granted today were first developed during the decade. It also gave us today’s welfare states, huge advances in medicine, fast food, the birth of the Cold War, and even the invention of the birth control pill — a little something that changed society in massive ways in the 1960s and 70s, too.

It’s long — the paperback checks in at nearly 900 pages — but the stories are divided into just a chapter or two, so they zip by quickly.

9. All the Presidents’ Money - Megan Gorman

No, this isn’t the book about how Biden secretly got rich as President, which (almost) shares a title with this one. Megan Gorman’s book is much more fun.

What she does is dives into the financial background of each of America’s 47 presidents and pulls out a few lessons that we can all learn about our money. The overarching message is pretty simple — that when it comes to money, most presidents stress about the same kinds of things we do.

You’ll learn how George Washington married a wealthy widow (with slaves!), and yet still constantly worried about cash. How Thomas Jefferson died so broke that a lottery scheme was concocted to help pay off his debts. And how Harry Truman wasn’t nearly as poor as history makes him out to be.

It combines money and history, together. What more could you want?

8. Source Code - Bill Gates

I know, I know. It’s not cool to like Bill Gates any longer, especially after he’s been linked to a certain person and their infamous island. It was also revealed that he maybe wasn’t so kind to his now ex-wife.

But still, I couldn’t resist. I’ve always been fascinated with the former head of Microsoft, and I wanted badly to read just how he created the behemoth. Sure, other books exist on the topic, but I needed to hear it from the man himself.

The result was a book that is equal parts entertaining and sad. You’ll laugh at some of the hijinks Gates got himself into, and cringe as he makes the same predictable mistakes as the rest of us. And, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be just a little bit jealous of the man’s natural intelligence and tenacious work ethic. It’s no wonder he became so successful.

Speaking of biographies of polarizing figures…

7. Elon Musk - Walter Isaacson

Let me get this out of the way early:

I cannot stand Elon Musk. I think he’s a terrible person who would be the laughingstock of some small town in South Africa somewhere if it weren’t for his vast intelligence — and a whole lot of luck.

Despite feeling that about the world’s richest man, I still read his biography. And, if anything, my opinion of him actually got worse. The book highlights a lot of people he treated terribly on his way to success, and he never even gave these people a second thought after he used them for his own selfish gains.

I dislike the guy immensely. And yet I was endlessly fascinated with his biography. I could barely put it down.

A lot of biographies become how-to books for me. But this one is the exact opposite. It’s a reminder of what not to do, and how some sacrifices just aren’t worth it. Musk is the archetype of how I don’t want to live my life, and I think there’s value in identifying that.

6. Buffett and Munger Unscripted - Alex Morris

There are a lot of Buffett “experts” out there who don’t know the first thing about the greatest investor of all time. They recycle the same quotes, trot out the same half dozen lessons, and proclaim themselves knowledgable.

Meanwhile, they’re out there spelling the man’s name with one T.

The fact is Buffett quotes have become a little bit like bible verses — they get butchered and used in situations that belie their original meaning.

Which is why Buffett and Munger Unscripted was such a breath of fresh air. Morris takes a simple concept — quoting Buffett and Munger’s thoughts on all sorts of topics, as said at various Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings over the years — and organizes it well enough that you can easily find their thoughts on things. You can flip through and get their opinion on everything from Costco to the amortization of intangibles.

What I found was both men stayed remarkably consistent, even after decades. It’s just nobody was really listening in the 1990s.

Read this, and The Snowball, and you’ll know more about Buffett than 95% of people on Twitter. And 99% of regular people. Plus, you’ll learn a ton.

The top five

To make it into the top five, a book has to:

1. Change my life in some positive way or

2. Be so ridiculously entertaining that I couldn’t put it down

Each of the books in this year’s top five meet those criteria.

5. Bitter Brew - William Knoedelceder

Bitter Brew is a tale of beer maker Anheuser-Busch’s tumultuous history, a company which has dominated America’s beer market for more than a century. It chronicles the company’s humble beginnings in St. Louis, how the Busch family came to control the company, and ways the company made it through tough times — like prohibition in the 1920s.

But mostly it’s a history of the Busch family, consisting mostly of the eldest sons who came to run the company. These guys generally knew beer, but oh did they screw up most everything else. You’ll laugh, you might even cry, and I promise you’ll be entertained. The Busch family is a special combination of smart and dysfunctional.

4. The Power of Habit - Charles Duhigg

This book caused me to take a deep look at my own habits, and what I found was a lot of what I was doing just wasn’t working towards my long-term goals.

I spent too much time mindlessly scrolling social media, especially in the morning.

I’d eat snacks in the afternoon because I was bored, not because I was hungry.

After reading The Power of Habit, I was able to realize why I was doing these things, and make changes that improved my life. I deleted Twitter from my phone, which was a massive help. I switched up my afternoon snack with a little walk and then a beverage.

And what I found was that, slowly, I was able to change these habits into something more constructive. I still spend too much time on Twitter and I still sometimes reach for a snack when I’m bored, but these are enemies I’m conquering. And it’s all thanks to this book.

3. Manhunt: The 12-Day Search For Lincoln’s Killer

This one is a real page-turner.

In 1865, while attending a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in one of the most infamous murders in the history of the world.

Everybody knows that Booth killed Lincoln. But don’t know a thing about Booth. And virtually nobody knows what happened next, which is a hell of a story.

Booth managed to slip out of Washington and escape into the countryside. The largest manhunt in history almost immediately came after him, but he was able to hide out for almost two weeks. He also got surprisingly close to escaping for good.

You’ll love this one. I could barely put it down.

2. Retail Disruptors - Jan-Benedict Steenkamp and Laurens Sloot

Y’all should know by now that I’m a bit of a grocery nerd, so this one is right up my alley.

Retail Disruptors chronicles the growth of the hard discount grocers in Europe, detailing everything from the history of the various chains to a fairly detailed look at how their business plan differs from a traditional grocer. It’s a fascinating look at the pros and cons of the business, and it makes a pretty compelling argument of how these companies will continue to grow and take market share away from their more traditional competitors.

It’s incredibly in-depth, too. I spent a bunch of time working in the grocery industry, and I think I know the space pretty well. And even I learned things, especially about how the hard discounters work.

1. The Reckoning - David Halberstam

I told y’all that I really liked Halberstam.

The Reckoning is the story of the American versus Japanese carmakers in the 1950s through 1980s, as told in the struggle between Nissan and Ford.

As the book starts, Ford is an absolute behemoth and Nissan is a mess. The latter can barely afford to invest in equipment after Japan is still reeling from the aftermath of World War II, while Ford has so much extra money that it has layers and layers of middle managers who are only important in the eyes of their families.

Slowly, over a couple of decades, Nissan quietly improves while Ford mostly spins its tires. Meanwhile, Ford (and its rivals) are slowly dying a death of a thousand cuts as unions ask for a larger and larger piece of the pie, and managers eschew real innovation for making cars bigger. Gas mileage? Nobody cares about no stinking gas mileage!

Sure, it’s a book about cars, but it’s not really about cars. It’s a book on losing the lead and competing against hungry, upstart competition. You’ll enjoy it even if you couldn’t give two craps about internal combustion engines or bumpers.