My 38 favorite books of 2025
and 2024, since I didn't send it!
Hey buddies, here are the books I loved the most in 2025. 39 of them total, plus 20 additional special mentions, and a nearly complete list of what I didn’t finish. This also includes some books from 2024 since I didn’t do a list last year.
This year I read about 50 books. Most years I read closer to a hundred but this year, well, I have no idea what happened this year. Is it even still this year? Are we still counting years?
As usual, I’ve split them up into categories that make sense to me: [1] Non-fiction: addiction, anthropology, feminism, philosophy (the meat of what I tend to read); [2] Non-fiction: spiritual, self-help (side-meat); [3] Non-fiction: lit, memoir, poetry (tertiary meat); [4] Fiction (ummm…I didn’t read any fiction which I only realized while compiling this); [5] Older/notable (books I read in 2024 that deserve recognition; I didn’t send a list last year); and [6] DNF, or Did Not Finish. I like including what I didn’t finish to normalize not reading what’s not for you.
Lastly, I’ve been thinking about sharing how I read (in general and for research) along with how I research for my books and this newsletter (annotate, collect quotes, organize information, plus a bit of my writing process). If that’s something you’d be interested in, let me know and I’ll write it.
Lastly lastly: While I don’t use affiliate links in any other case, I do use them when compiling booklists, especially since they tend to take hours. If you find value in this list, please consider purchasing through one of the links.
xxHol
Non-fiction, Addiction, Anthropology, Philosophy, Feminism etc.
1. What is Wrong With Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything | year. 2025 | author. Jessa Crispin | A tour of what happened to men in the wake of their non-response to feminism, traced through Michael Douglas films over time; one of the most brilliant books I read all year.
2. Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves | year. 2025 | author. Sophie Gilbert | This is the best book I read all year. A heartbreaking overview of what happened to girls who came of age in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, years shaped by teen-celebrity objectification and sexualization, reality-TV humiliation cycles, hyper-sexualization (music vids, etc.) early-internet pornification, and the advertising machinery that sold all of it back to us as empowerment. It gave me an entirely different and chilling perspective on my high school and college years and reveals how many steps we took backwards and how that long cultural arc delivered us to this moment of fully normalized toxic masculinity.
3. Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires | year. 2023 | author. Rushkoff | This book changed me so much and was responsible for this article and many decisions I’ve made about how much I need, accumulation, wealth, and community.
also has a great newsletter.4. People of the Lie | year. 1998 | author. M. Scott Peck | This wasn’t the best book but it did give me some ideas that won’t leave me alone, like how evil exists, and our refusal to acknowledge or look at it directly is what allows evil to bloom like mold.
5. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion | year. 2013 | pages. 528 | author. Jonathan Haidt | While JH is a controversial figure and a lot of stuff exists out there calling out his work and bias, this was one of the best books I read in the past two years that totally shifted how I think about morality.
6. The Science of Weed: An Indispensable Guide to Cannabis | year. 2024 | author. Godfrey Pearlson | An essential for anyone who uses weed or thinks they understand it. Pearlson lays out how little we actually know about modern high-potency products and cannabis in general. I was genuinely shocked reading this book how little is understood about cannabis, and how much use is mushrooming (for instance, daily weed smokers passed daily drinkers for the first time in modern measurement, and Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome (CHS), a condition in which heavy or long-term users develop cycles of severe vomiting, has become so common it was just added to the DSM).
7. Society of the Spectacle | year. 1967 | author. Guy Debord | For the nerds and something that has helped me think about this particular point in time differently. Here’s a podcast that summarizes it.
8. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds | year. 2017 | author. adrienne maree brown | What I said about it in this book roundup: I had this book for years and tried to read it and couldn’t, at first because it felt like a personal attack (I couldn’t hear about how deeply problematic charismatic leaders are while I was still trying to crush being one) and then because I just could not get into it. I tried so hard. I thought it about it all the time. I moved it around and put it in different book piles. But then a month ago in whatever post-election fugue I was in, I picked it up and couldn’t stop. The best way for me to describe this book to you is that it’s my actual operating guide for this moment—it is the answer to the questions I have. Read this if you believe love is how the story ends, you’re burnt out on performative activism/ cancel culture/ post-modern deconstruction /pessimism/colonialism/ capitalism (all the isms), and looking for a no-nonsense guide on how to navigate multiple post-apocalyptic scenarios with grace and a love ethic.
9. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism | year. 2024 | author. Yanis Varoufakis | What I said about it in this roundup: I’ve read many books on what comes after capitalism and this one takes the cake. Yanis suggests we are already beyond capitalism, in what he calls a new kind of feudalism (Technofeudalism!) where we all pay rent to a handful of wealthy landowners, except in this modern case the real estate is digital and the landlords are Elon, Mark and Jeff. The gist is that the wealth gap is growing, that money that flowed into the markets post-2008 was essentially siphoned out of the economy by the wealthiest and turned into super yachts, leaving the majority of the world impoverished and blaming one another and not the five fucking men who own and manipulate all of it. Read thi if you want to stop getting dopamine hits from frictionless online consumerism but need a better case for it. Related content: This podcast that summarizes the book.
10. Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World | year. 2023 | author. Naomi Klein | What I said about it in this book roundup: [Recommended] for her specific arguments about why the real conspiracy is capitalism, and how until enough of us internalize that idea we’ll continue to remain polarized and blame many people caught under the heel of the same system (think about how the recent assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO brought shared outrage from both sides of the political divide—this was in part (IMO) because the guts spilled out and everyone had to talk about it; instead of it being Obamacare/the left is stealing your money, United is.) In my discussion of the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO (bottom of this newsletter), I wove in some of her ideas from this book because they were spot on. I can’t recommend it enough. Read this if you want to understand this moment in the broader context of social media, technology, and capitalism or why your formerly liberal friend voted for DJT and got hot for Joe Rogan.
11. The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning | year. 2012 | author. Iain McGilchrist | From this 2024 booklist from
. This book was so good! About moving away from abstract/hierarchical to enmeshed and relational; a short 30 page book that will potentially blow your mind.12. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism | year. 2023 | author. Robert Chapman | A tour through the history and machinery of “normal”; how standardization, psychiatry, industry, capitalism, and the social sciences engineered an imaginary benchmark of human behavior, then disciplined us by treating it as real. I underlined 1/3 of it.
13. Beyond Addiction: How Science and Kindness Help People Change | year. 2025; 2014 | author. Jeffrey Foote; Carrie Wilkens; Nicole Kosanke | The best book that exists for family and friends of loved ones experiencing addiction. I wrote the foreword for the 10th anniversary edition.
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14. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness | year. 2024 | author. Jonathan Haidt | Again, this book has been massively criticized; still, I found a lot within it that made me think differently and act differently and the overall impact of my reading it to be positive.
15. Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind | year. 2024 | author. Mike Jay | A book about the very weird departure we took in the 20th century into how we conceive of drugs, drug use, and drug users, and the legacy of that departure.
16. Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight‑Loss Drugs | year. 2024 | author. Hari | A book about Hari’s (author of Chasing the Scream) use of Ozempic while researching the impact of Ozempic/GLP-1s. I thought it was great.
17. Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment in America | year. 1998 | author. William White | An actual textbook that traces the entire addiction treatment and recovery movement. I underlined 1/3 of it and took 80 pages of notes…
18. Queer Ecologies | year. 2010 | author. Bruce Erickson; Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands | Similar to Du Bord and McGilchrist, a reorientation of how we imagine nature itself, showing how Western ideas of the natural were constructed through heteronormativity, hierarchy, and control. And in the same way Debord and McGilchrist argue for the real and relational and embedded over the abstract, symbolic, and simulated, this book exposes how our ecological imagination was flattened into ideology, and queers it up again.
19. Metamodernism (Brendan Graham Dempsey) What I said about it in this booklist: This one is hard to talk about without immediately worrying I’m putting you to sleep. I need you to know the words METAMODERNISM or SPIRAL DYNAMICS are awful boring words that sound like a corporate seminar but that are actually representative of some of the most fascinating frameworks that exist in explaining human behavior—from why we get addicted and recover to why masks became a political symbol to why half the country feels like they are living an entirely fucking different reality. Understanding human and cultural development models (like Piaget, Wilber, Loevinger, Maslow) has been foundational to my work—I’ve studied them since 2014 and it would be fair to say most of what I write about is somehow either influenced by or rests on my knowledge of them. And of all the books I’ve read on them, this one is one of the easiest to understand and the one that has the most relevant cultural examples, and is most specific to this exact point in time. (I recommend this piece by that summarizes the book.) Read this if you’re ready to stop being mad at everyone for being where they are at, and want to be part of a solution that takes into account that we live in a global society with many cultures and people at vastly different stages of development.
Non-fiction, Spiritual, Self-Help
20. It’s Not You | year. 2024 | author. Ramani Durvasula PhD | What I said about it in this booklist: Because of all these intersecting factors—my sensitivity, my cyclical nature, my family dynamics, my undiagnosed neurodivergence, my relational trauma and fawn response, my history as both scapegoat and “identified patient,” my addiction patterns, my deeply ingrained belief that everything is always my fault—I’ve come to understand myself as a classic target of narcissistic abuse. This book names what recovery spaces often mislabel as codependency, “bad boundaries,” or “self-sabotage,” reframing these behaviors as predictable responses to specific relational conditioning. Dr. Ramani writes with clinical precision but profound compassion for those of us who’ve spent years wondering why we attract the same painful dynamics, why we’re perpetually “too sensitive” or “too much,” and why traditional recovery advice about boundaries never quite sticks. This isn’t about demonizing anyone—it’s about understanding how certain personality types exploit trauma histories, neurodivergent traits, and people-pleasing patterns to create predictable cycles of harm. Essential if you’ve ever felt like the common denominator in every relationship disaster, or if you find yourself constantly apologizing for taking up space.
21. The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist | year. 2017 | author. Debbie Mirza | Same as above, this is a book for targets of narcissistic abuse. This and It’s Not You saved me.