Books I read in 2025
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson. Not a very good book. If you understand signalling, you can skip this one.
Failure is not an option: Mission control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and beyond by Gene Kranz. The story of the space race told by the flight director of Apollo 11 mission. It is a different perspective, but it tells the same story as Michael Collins does. Very engaging. I did not expect to learn that the average age of controllers in the mission that went to the moon was 26 years old, and Kranz himself was 35, but I am not that surprised. It seems that many controllers were fresh out of college and came from normal universities, not ivy league ones. Young people, if motivated and given enough freedom and responsibility, are very capable of achieving great things. I suspect that many functions performed by controllers during the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo programs, are fully automated nowadays.
Clinical versus statistical prediction. A theoretical analysis and a review of the evidence by Paul E. Meehl. The first edition of this book was printed in 1954. The argument is very concise; statistical models, even very simple ones, are better than clinicians at predicting outcomes like recidivism in criminals, suicide and so on. The author reviews and discusses the evidence available at the time. I read this book because it was recommended on Entropic thoughts.
Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter. I heard about this book before, and I wanted to read it. Maybe some novel ideas when it was first written in 1997. The book tries to convey the importance of financial literacy and has some good points about living within ones means and the difference between assets and liabilities. The author created a game called CASHFLOW to teach this concepts. I do not agree with many things in the book, but one thing he got right is that your own home should not be considered an asset.
Make time. How to focus on what matters every day by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. A different approach to personal productivity.Longer review. Scott Young mentioned this book on his blog.
The happiness project by Gretchen Rubin. The author embarks on a 12 month project to improve her happiness. She devotes each month of the year to a different area. She plans in advance and makes several resolutions for each month. The idea is original, and she does increase her happiness, but it feels like tweaking at the margins. She already has a job she loves that affords her with total autonomy in her everyday, good health, a good marriage, adorable kids and no money troubles whatsoever (her husband works in private equity and her father in law was a former Goldman Sachs CEO). So if your foundations for happiness are already in place, a useful book to be more mindful and appreciate what you already have, if you are still figuring out the basics, trapped in a job that you hate or a bad relationship, I don’t know how much this book will help you. I enjoyed reading it anyway.
First impressions. What you don’t know about how others see you by Ann Demarais and Valerie White. Fine book about how to present yourself to other people. The book devotes a lot of pages to small talk. It is also useful to understand people that may come across as antipathetic.
How to talk so kids will listen & listen so kids will talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. It is apparently a well known book about parenting. I found that it gives good advice and I wish I had read it ten years ago. The illustrations feel dated and so do some of the examples. I don’t know if there is a more recent edition. The book could be shorter, the most helpful ideas are presented at the start. The afterword was totally unnecessary.
Pseudowork. How we ended up being busy doing nothing by Dennis Nørmark and Anders Fogh Jensen. Why do we spend so much time at work doing so little? Longer review.
No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Chris Baty. On how to tackle a big creative project in a month.
The seven principles for making marriage work. A practical guide from the country’s foremost relationship expert by John M. Gottman, PhD and Nan Silver. Reading this book I recognized myself and my partner. The author has studied many couples and claims to both predict divorce with high accuracy and also offers guidance in how to improve your marriage, specially if it is going on a downhill trajectory. All couples have arguments, but it is they way they argue what separates happy couples from unhappy ones. Being in an unhappy marriage increases stress and can shorten life expectancy by four to eight years. I understand that some of the claims by the author are disputed by other researchers, but I found the book interesting nonetheless.
How Proust can change your life by Alain de Botton. I read “Kiss and tell”, de Botton’s previous book, when it came out. I enjoyed it, but somehow I missed reading “How Proust can change your life” in spite of it being quite a phenomenon at the time. I am glad I finally found time to read it.
Forty ways to look at Winston Churchill by Gretchen Rubin. I guess the title is inspired by Thirty-six views of mount Fuji. As Hokusai depicted mount Fuji from different locations, seasons, and weather conditions, so does Rubin tell Churchill’s biography from different perspectives and with different focus in forty chapters. The book is irregular, and some of the chapters are better than others. Due to the format, the book cannot get into much depth on the subject, but it manages to paint a nuanced portrait of Churchill anyway. Churchill’s life and character are so extraordinary, that any book about him must be at least a little bit interesting. I am simply amazed at his energy. Even considering that Churchill had servants and aids, it is incredible that he found time to do so many activities and engage in so many hobbies as he did. Of all his interests, the one that surprised me is bricklaying.
The numbers game. Why everything you know about soccer is wrong by Chris Anderson and David Sally. About the use of statistics to understand football. Review
Stumbling on happiness by Daniel Gilbert. We fail to predict how future events will make us feel. We should ask other people instead. Review
Los jardines de la casa Sorolla. Biografía de una obra de arte by Enrique Varela Agüí. Joaquín Sorolla was a successful painter when he decided to build his house in Madrid in 1910. The house was to have three gardens and a patio. Sorolla was very engaged in the design of the gardens. The book documents the process from 1910 when Sorolla bought the plot to 1917 when the last garden was completed. Sorolla was traveling a lot during the building of the first and third gardens. He wrote letters home inquiring about the progress or giving instructions, and therefore there is a lot of documentation of that period and his intentions. Sorolla created the gardens in order to paint them, like Monet did with in Giverny at about the same time, but the gardens became a work of art in themselves. The book includes a lot of pictures of the finished gardens, sketches and blueprints from the construction, and reproduction of paintings by Sorolla.
The origins of efficiency by Brian Potter. Brian Potter is the author of the blog Construction physics. If you like the blog, you will probably enjoy the book as well. I liked how Potter explains the ways in which production processes become more efficient, and in the next to last chapter, how some processes don’t, with home construction being the prime example. I found the conclusion inspiring and well supported by the rest of the book. When discussing learning curves, Potter notes that when high production costs are the result of market limitations, it may be possible to jump-start and industry by subsidizing production until it has fallen far enough down the learning curve, but if there are technical limitations that prevent efficiency improvements or mean that a product will always be more expensive compared to alternatives, this jump-start process will fail. This made me think about the Norwegian subsides for off-shore wind. The Norwegian government seems to think that it will be able to bring down costs to make the technology competitive. By reading the book I realized that the case is not very clear-cut, and details matter a lot. Regulations, for example, can make a big difference.