by Narain Jashanmal on December 12, 2025
Twenty-six books read this year. By volume, an outlier. By format, a conformist: twenty of those twenty-six were audiobooks, consumed while walking Dubai's empty sidewalks.
That ratio is a tell. The library has become a stream: something that flows through the hours we used to lose to silence or ambience. Print, meanwhile, has retreated to the shores. Five books read on paper this year, reserved for subjects that demanded I stop moving and look. No screens in the bedroom; if I read before sleep, it's a physical book. These aren't rules so much as choices about where different kinds of attention belong.
I didn't plan a curriculum. But looking back at the year's reading, patterns emerge. The list reads less like a log of consumption and more like an attempt to triangulate a moment, to fix a position using the old instruments of the book while the ground underneath shifts toward something new.
American adults now average under sixteen minutes of leisure reading per day, down from twenty-two minutes two decades ago. Among thirteen-year-olds, only seventeen percent read for fun almost daily, half the rate of 1984. Meanwhile, 4.4 million blog posts are published every single day. The denominator of available content has grown without limit; the numerator of attention remains fixed.
This isn't decline from some golden age. Reading for pleasure, as a mass phenomenon, is historically recent, a product of industrialized printing, public education, and the specific economics of the twentieth century. What we're witnessing is adaptation: the stream has widened, and we've learned to skim its surface rather than dive. Over half of links shared on social media are shared by people who never clicked through to read the article. The headline has become the text.
The attention economy rewards what is fast, visual, and algorithmically surfaced. Deep reading—the slow, linear immersion in a long argument or a complex narrative—requires the opposite: deliberate withdrawal from the stream. It has become a choice rather than a default, an opt-in rather than the ambient condition.
Looking at the list, I can trace currents rather than draw categories. Some books flowed together naturally; others created eddies, pulling me back to questions I thought I'd moved past.
One current ran through the material reality of computation. Chip War, Apple in China, Co-Intelligence, Novacene—a progression from the industrial to the speculative, but all insisting on the same truth: the digital is physical. The cloud is heavy. It eats electricity, drinks water, and depends on supply chains that route through a handful of fabs in Taiwan and the Netherlands. Political power in 2025 flows not from the barrel of a gun but from the extreme ultraviolet optics of an ASML lithography machine. Nick Clegg's How to Save the Internet added another layer of materiality: regulation. Technology has a long history of treating policy as friction to be routed around; it has now run headlong into the reality that laws, too, are substrate. Even Lovelock's Novacene, which posits that we are midwives to a new dominant intelligence, is conditional on all of this holding together. The post-human future isn't guaranteed; it's contingent.
Another current carried questions about friction—where the algorithm meets resistance. SAM, Jonathan Waldman's account of engineers trying to build a bricklaying robot, is a years-long struggle against the imperfection of bricks, the fickleness of mortar, the unpredictability of weather. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum and Taming Hal extended this to interface design: systems built by engineers for engineers, forcing humans to think like machines. In 2025, the dominant interface for AI is still the chat box: a blinking cursor, an empty field, the tyranny of the blank prompt. It assumes you know what to ask, that your need is articulable in text, that conversation is the right metaphor. It often isn't. The books in this current are preparation for the experimentation ahead.
And then there were books that resisted the current entirely. Gambling Man, Lionel Barber's biography of Masayoshi Son, is a study in what happens when a single human personality bends capital markets through sheer conviction, right or wrong. Showpiece City, Todd Reisz's monumental history of Dubai, demanded print: maps, photographs, plans. You cannot skim a city into existence. Dubai didn't stumble into being; it was willed onto shifting sands by people making irreversible bets about what the future would want. I read it while living in the city it describes, watching the next layer of that bet get built outside my window.
The memoirs formed their own eddy. I Regret Almost Everything, Without Reservation, A Thousand Threads, The Enchanters. Keith McNally's neurotic self-laceration, Jeremy King's devotion to service, Neneh Cherry's weaving of art and family and displacement, James Ellroy's fever-dream reconstruction of 1960s Los Angeles. What they share is a quality algorithms cannot replicate: regret, or its cousin: the long(ing) backward glance at a life that couldn't have been optimized, only lived.