What I read in 2025

Science and Scientism, Biographies and Memoirs, Peace, Conflict, Pluralism, Political Economy, Picture Books, Fiction and more.

My reading every year starts organized and intentional, then podcast prep, galley copies, and new rabbit holes take over. This year captures that. My goal was to read more about science and mathematics, which led to its own rabbit hole, eventually connecting to economics, epistemic humility, scientific progress versus scientism. Another big category was biographies. It started with Rajmohan Gandhi accepting a podcast invitation and I read or reread all his books plus several other memoirs and biographies. More Indian political economy and history, this time a little regional. And some fiction, not enough, but some. Books in bold and italics are ones I read this year. Those only in italics are past reads that formed connections.

Science and Scientism

One goal I had at the year’s start was to read more about science. I haven’t studied physics past tenth grade, and while economics has mathematics, it’s purely instrumental. So that’s where I started.

It began with Once Upon a Prime by Sarah Hart. A mathematician who loves literature, she describes everything from geometric patterns in Moby Dick to combinatorial constraints in Sanskrit poetry before Fibonacci in the combinations of laghu and guru in Virahanka (600–800 CE), Gopala (before 1135 CE), and Hemachandra (around 1150 CE), even Pingala (around 300 BCE). Learning the mathematical references in my favorites like Gulliver’s Travels and the constraints in Shakespeare’s sonnets made me return to the originals. The most joyous read this year.

It also led me to Mathematica by David Bessis. He makes a deceptively simple claim. Mathematical thinking is not symbolic manipulation, but the disciplined refinement of intuition. Proofs come last, after the hard cognitive work of seeing why something must be true. As an economist from the Austrian tradition, this immediately appealed and confirmed every prior. Like when Bessis references visuals, draws “pictures,” and talks about how difficult it is to define elephants. But even a two-year-old knows and forms a visual the moment they hear the word. He shows how logical formalism is a foreign language for humans. Intuition is natural. Troubles begin when formalism suppresses intuition. But he offers a way out. Rigor is not intuition’s opposite, but its quality control.

Initially I just wanted to learn more about physics. Carlo Rovelli came highly recommended. One economist friend called him “the Tim Harford of Physics.” I started with Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, pocket-sized, I read it in one sitting. I got basic intuition behind relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, the notion of time. He treats physics as successive conceptual revolutions rather than accumulated well established theories and facts. I quickly ordered all his books.

The Order of Time came next. That “time” does not exist in some absolute sense but is a relational web of events was illuminating. To an economist, even when other constraints are lifted through technology and growth, time remains the single absolute constraint. That physics treats it differently was humbling. If I am being honest, I still don’t completely get time. I continued my Rovelli rabbit hole with Helgoland.

But my favorite Rovelli book was Anaximander: And the Birth of Science. I thought I was starting a biography of a pre-Socratic philosopher, with pupils like Pythagoras, the one who suggested the Earth floats freely in space. Instead, I found a quiet book about how science progresses.

Rovelli’s central idea is disarmingly simple. Science starts when explanations stop being things you inherit and protect and become things you can question. Anaximander matters not because he was “right,” but because he dared to replace myth with an explanation that could be discussed, criticized, improved. The Earth floating in space is important less as a claim than as an attitude, an answer offered to the world, not a story guarded by authority.

Around the same time, I started reading David Deutsch, long on my list but moved up after hearing him on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast. In The Beginning of Infinity, he argues that knowledge grows through conjecture and error correction, with no inherent limit to progress except the suppression of criticism and explanation. More echoes of what Rovelli explained through Anaximander and Bessis in Mathematica. But what jumped was that he was Popperian.

Almost fifteen years ago, my graduate mentors Mario Rizzo and Peter Boettke made sure I read all of Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi and FA Hayek, and it came rushing back. Reading Rovelli’s description of Anaximander, Karl Popper’s work feels like a modern restatement of the same move. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Conjectures and Refutations, Popper insists science advances not by collecting confirmations but by making bold guesses and exposing them to being wrong. A theory earns its place not because it feels secure but because it survives criticism longer than rivals. What Rovelli shows through Anaximander breaking from inherited stories, Popper turns into a rule for modern scholars. Bessis offers another version: intuition comes first, formal methods can, at best, help verify or falsify.

Progress depends on ideas that can be attacked. David Deutsch may push this furthest. In The Fabric of Reality (which I haven’t yet finished) and The Beginning of Infinity, he argues progress is driven not by accumulation but by correction. Explanations grow by being exposed to criticism, discarded when they fail, replaced by better ones. What matters is not prediction alone but creating explanations that fall apart if you change any piece of them—explanations where every part does real work.

Michael Polanyi helps explain why none of this can be reduced to a recipe. In Personal Knowledge and The Tacit Dimension, he reminds us that knowing is always done by people, not methods alone. We learn what counts as a good question, what makes an objection serious, which results matter, through practice and apprenticeship. Science can be both tradition-bound and open to revolution. You need shared standards to criticize meaningfully, but those standards must themselves remain open to revision.

In The Counter-Revolution of Science, Hayek’s target is what he calls “scientism” - the habit of borrowing the style and authority of physics or mathematics for questions where that style does not fit. Especially a misfit for economics, where the relevant knowledge is scattered across many minds, shaped by interpretation, and tangled up with human purpose. I always read this as a warning to economists not to imitate physicists. But reading Rovelli and Bessis, I realized the warning applies to the natural sciences too. The problem is not the methods of physics but the false confidence that comes from treating any method as beyond question.

Reading Rovelli after Popper, Polanyi, and Hayek made the book feel less like ancient history and more like a mirror. Science at its best is not a machine for producing certainty. It is a fragile practice built around a simple rule: explanations must be allowed to fail. Once shielded from criticism, progress slows, sometimes stops. What Anaximander discovered, and what these thinkers keep rediscovering, is that knowledge grows not by being defended but by being exposed.

Deutsch makes explicit what is often implicit in Popper. This process is fragile. It depends on a culture that allows criticism to go wherever it leads, not just in science but in politics, economics, morals. The birth of science is not a one-time historical event. It must be continuously defended.

One last strand fits this theme naturally, at least to my mind. Deirdre McCloskey and Matt Ridley both stress that this dance of guess, criticism, and correction only works inside genuine classical liberalism, a culture that tolerates disagreement. In Bourgeois Dignity (I think, but definitely the Bourgeois series), McCloskey argues modern progress took off when societies granted dignity to people who argued, experimented, contradicted their betters. And when persuasion replaced status as the way ideas won. Innovation followed not because people became smarter but because they became freer to say, “I think this is wrong.” Ridley makes a related point in The Rational Optimist. Trial, error, and improvement require open exchange. Ideas bump into each other, fail, recombine, try again. That process breaks down wherever beliefs are untouchable, criticism punished, or authority decides truth in advance.

Perhaps you will find different connections. Please share them with me if you think I am overreading or making too many connections where none exist. My training in the Austrian tradition led me here. But I strongly recommend Bessis, Rovelli, and Deutsch to social scientists and economists, and perhaps rereading Popper, Hayek, and Polanyi, as I did this year.

Biographies and Memoirs

Before I get to the Indian biographies and biographers, the most incredible biography and autobiography I discovered this year was of Oleg Gordievsky. They say truth is stranger than fiction and Oleg Gordievsky’s life as a KGB officer and an agent for MI6 is one of the best examples. If someone wrote it as a fiction novel, we would criticize it as too far-fetched. The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre is an absolute page turner. I am surprised no one has turned it into a mini-series. Gordievsky died in March 2025, and that prompted me to read his autobiography Next Stop Execution, which is not as good as Macintyre’s telling. I don’t want to give much away, so just read the book. And while less glamorous a save than Stanislav Petrov, Gordievsky also saved the world from nuclear war by helping deescalate tensions while playing both sides. An extraordinary life.

Another unexpected treat was John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie. It’s the biography of a relationship. Leslie deconstructs the Lennon vs. McCartney binary, arguing that their genius lay in a true love story and a creative rivalry. Opposites attract and their unresolved tension gave us some of the greatest music in the modern world.

Another set of memoirs that don’t fit in a neat category were Fierce Attachments: A Memoir and The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir by Vivian Gornick. The first is an uncomfortably intimate peek into her mother-daughter relationship as a structure of mutual imprisonment. The second is about the relationship with a city, or rather a city full of strangers that make it possible to have a solitary life in a crowd.

A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis is also deeply personal. I am not even sure memoir is the right word for it. It is journal entries about desolation and grief after his wife dies. A little too intimate, hard to read, absolutely gutting.

Before my trip to Kenya, I read the prescribed syllabus for Americans, Out of Africa, the memoir by Danish author Karen Blixen under the pen name Isak Dinesen. It covers her relationship and experiences with Kenya and Kenyans in the interwar years. Not sure it helped me for the trip, but it’s a poignant book.

The year of biographies started as I was prepping for Rajmohan Gandhi’s two-part interview for the podcast. In one sense I have been preparing my whole life. I have read a lot of his books but I had to reread them. It started with the full-length biographies of the founding fathers. We even did an episode on them.

Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People, and an Empire succeeds by keeping Gandhi at human scale while never forgetting he operated at mass scale. But for me the Gandhi book I enjoyed even more is The Good Boatman: A Portrait of Gandhi, a compact moral portrait emphasizing method over myth. The book is strongest on Gandhi’s internal deliberation process. He is also the biographer for his maternal grandfather. Rajaji: A Life portrays C. Rajagopalachari as the republic’s most principled and perhaps most prescient and therefore most frustrating figure.

Patel: A Life shows the state-builder who actually consolidated India after independence. Rajmohan Gandhi presents him as the republic’s Bismarck. This is perhaps my favorite on the list. Patel has been appropriated by so many groups more recently, and it is useful to read this biography, with its meticulous archival work, on who Patel really was and his preference for unity.

Eight Lives: A Study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter, subsequently retitled Understanding the Muslim Mind for later editions, was also a reread this year. Short biographies that provide an incredible lens into the founding fathers of the subcontinent, not just India, and also the diversity in Muslim thought. Ghaffar Khan: Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns is the most illuminating, not just because Ghaffar Khan is both underrated and extraordinary, but because it presents nonviolence as a disciplined political strategy among people trained for violence.

Understanding the Founding Fathers is a lovely bookend to this series of biographies. He compares and contrasts these extraordinary individuals, working alongside but often clashing. We’ll return to Rajmohan Gandhi’s other books, but first let me get through the other biographies.

Another lovely memoir, well written, nostalgic, and gentle, is The Undying Light by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, who is incidentally Rajmohan Gandhi’s younger brother. A civic memoir from an extraordinary public servant about ideas, ideals, and aspirations met with pragmatism and modern reality.

Abhishek Choudhary might be the best biographer in modern India with his two volumes on Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The first volume, Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right, 1924–1977, is about the making of Vajpayee as a political figure, a staunch Hindu nationalist, and the simultaneous making of a political movement consolidating the Hindu right in India. In the second book, Vajpayee: The Believer’s Dilemma, Choudhary goes beyond biographical details. He shows us what happens when Vajpayee must lead and balance his ideological compatriots with governance in a constitutional democracy. I have lived through some of this time, and it was less illuminating than the first volume, but very much worth reading together.

Another book of ten short biographies was Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism by Ramachandra Guha, who is lesser known as an environmentalist. It recovers an indigenous Indian environmental tradition that predates both colonial conservation and postcolonial modernism. The unsurprising names were Rabindranath Tagore, JC Kumarappa, M. Krishnan, and Verrier Elwin (on whom Guha authored a full biography titled Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India). But Patrick Geddes, K.M. Munshi, and especially Radhakamal Mukerjee, the Elinor Ostrom before Elinor Ostrom, surprised me the most. To prepare for the episode I also read The Unquiet Woodsand This Fissured Land, which he coauthored with Madhav Gadgil. Another Guha book I read this year was The Cooking of Books, about his correspondence with his longtime editor Rukun Advani. A charming read.

History, especially regional histories, also made my favorites list. Returning to Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten is a long-run political and social history of how plural societies die slowly and then all at once, and the much-needed context for Partition. Modern South India: A History from the 17th Century to Our Times makes the southern states come alive and provides context for its modern successes, because it was a laboratory. An economic history, Kerala: 1956 to the Present by Tirthankar Roy and K. Ravi Raman, is a corrective to both Kerala-worship and Kerala-dismissal. It explains why high human development coexisted with anemic growth and how remittances papered over structural problems.

Another grand history of a region and its people is The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community by Salil Tripathi, who covers everything from trading and networks to politics, culture, and modern business without hagiography. Hustle can produce the best kind of entrepreneurs and the worst kind of politicians.

Understanding India Better

There were a number of books that are hard to classify. Let’s call them books that help me piece together the jigsaw puzzle that is India. This includes political economy, history, and law.

Oddly, my favorite Rajmohan Gandhi book isn’t any of the biographies but Revenge and Reconciliation: Understanding South Asian History. He embodies revenge through Ashwatthama, one of the immortals from the Mahabharata, and reconciliation through Buddha. The question is whether revenge or reconciliation will win in the long arc of the subcontinent. If there is one book you read on India’s pluralism and conflict, this should be it.

Its historical companion would be India, 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent by Audrey Truschke, which I have started but not yet finished. Detailed and complex without cartoon heroes and villains from Mughal and colonial times.

Analytically a different approach but on the same theme, for the podcast with Christopher Coyne, I read How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite and In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace. Not set in the subcontinent but on the same theme of conflict and peace. I also discovered Conflict and Defense: A General Theory by Kenneth Boulding, a really excellent book treating conflict, war, and defense as analyzable systems rather than moral anomalies or irrational outlier events.

On the broader theme of India’s pluralism, civic life, secularism, conflict, and peace are some quick reads by Rajmohan Gandhi. Fraternity: Constitutional Norm and Human Need. India After 1947: Reflections and Recollections. And Why Gandhi Still Matters: An Appraisal of the Mahatma’s Legacy, which separates the transferable method from the historical Gandhi. The book’s best contribution is showing how Gandhi’s approach to conflict, making your own side bear the costs rather than imposing them on others, remains analytically useful even if you reject the metaphysics behind it.

Tareekh Pe Justice: Reforms for India’s District Courts by Prashant Reddy T. and Chitrakshi Jain illuminates the incentives and institutions that cause the dysfunction in India’s district courts. What the normal litigant encounters in India, how delays are endemic and not exceptional, and how and why district court judges are the lowest within a colonial caste system of the judiciary. A must read.

Another aspect affecting every citizen and future citizen of India is its dysfunctional education system where learning is often the lowest priority. In Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi’s Schools, Yamini Aiyar gives us hope by outlining an experiment in Delhi, where implementation is the real site of reforms, and the negotiation happens not just by bureaucrats but also by parents, politicians, teachers, and the frontline workers of India’s education system.

Scamlands: Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud That Preys on the World by Snigdha Poonam uncovers the scam-industrial complex, its underlying economic and sociological reasons, and illuminates the nature of everything from phishing to pig butchering scams from Jharkhand to Cambodia.

Understanding Other Countries Better

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson recontextualizes a well-established truth for modern American progressive politics. Economic growth should be a bigger priority than redistribution, and if not, you end up in a politics where you get neither growth nor redistribution, just stalling. Not much new in terms of economic insight but a great exercise in persuasion.

Focus: The ASML Way by Marc Hijink was a very fun read about engineering culture, the differences between German and Dutch and American companies, the contrast between technical versus business CEOs, and industrial policy done right.

It’s hard to understand continents like India and China. There is no one book, no easy way to enter that world. I like biographies, or books about a particular firm or food or music, and fiction. And this year an excellent book that became my entry point into China was Apple in China by Patrick McGee. The foreground is how Apple scaled in and as a consequence increased its dependency on China, but the background is full of detail on the entrepreneurship and building culture that led the prosperity revolution starting in Shenzhen and eventually spreading to all of China.

Almost the opposite end of the spectrum in simplicity is Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang. The book is almost too binary in setting up the engineering versus the lawyer state to contrast China from the US. But perhaps it is the lack of complexity that makes it a useful entry point to understanding the Chinese state (to me a complete blackbox) as outsiders.

One of the more frustrating books I read this year was In Praise of Floods by James C. Scott. I have long admired Scott and read all his books. Seeing Like a State, Against the Grain, and The Art of Not Being Governed are my favorites, in that order. But In Praise of Floods was not as cohesive, in some parts not even fully comprehensible to me, though in other parts the genius of Scott shines through when he talks about rivers and their meandering and the fragility of systems when they interact with top-down human intervention. Perhaps because it was published posthumously and edited by others. But even a disappointing Scott book is better than most books.

Fiction

I didn’t read much fiction this year. But I started the year with Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and then More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa. There is something architecturally serene about the Morisaki Bookshop, which serves as a refuge of paper and dust. Here, the passive act of sleeping among the clutter of books and history allows a stalled life to finally find its rhythm again. Minimalist in its writing. Japanese books about bookshops and book towns might be my favorite new sub-genre.

The most surprising find this year was Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott. I found the reference in Sarah Hart’s Once Upon a Prime. Abbott uses geometry to dismantle Victorian arrogance, showing that when a mind is truly closed, a new perspective (dimension) looks indistinguishable from madness.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy was another surprise. The high-court judge facing his own mortality, and walking us through the pettiness of middle-class values and status and the meaninglessness of life. I thought it would be more depressing, but it was surprisingly clarifying.

I read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel Small Gods and it was a lot of fun. The first two pages are so fantastic, I was hooked, adn read it out of order. My first of the Discworld novels, and I will definitely read more over the next few years. I also read Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman, a short story collection, and it wasn’t as interesting as expected. My only real commitment to poetry this year was Jonathan Swift: Complete Poems. A must read, funny and humane and insightful as only Swift can be.

I started reading Middlemarch. Partly because it seems to be back on everyone’s list, partly because it was one of the classic books referenced in Sarah Hart’s Once Upon a Prime that I hadn’t yet read. But I’m afraid I haven’t made much of a dent there. So hopefully this one carries forward into next year’s list.

Picture Books

For my birthday I got the lovely coffee table book Paper Jewels: Postcards from the Raj by Omar Khan. It’s a book of Indian postcards in colonial times, as a new technology, art, and communication. My love for postcards aside, it is fantastically curated and a different glimpse into how the empire was shaped, one postcard at a time.

My other love, elephants, came alive as I read some books to prepare for my trip to Kenya. Remembering Elephants is a collection that uses photography as a way to finance conservation. The photographs are staggering. Another incredible book is Elephant Reflections by Dale Peterson and Karl Ammann. And before my Ghana trip I discovered The African Gaze: Photography and African Visual Culture by Amy Sall, an incredibly powerful set of photographs of Africans by African photographers.

Books I Am Currently Reading

Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History by Rohit De and Ornit Shani is everything I expected from both of them. India’s founding is described in two starkly different ways in the literature. One side suggests that the constitution, India’s democracy, and its institutions were all an elite project. The other, led by both De in A People’s Constitution and Shani’s How India Became Democratic, democratizes the scholarship and shows through detailed archival research how regular Indians embraced the ideas of democracy and voting and constitutions and courts. This is a new step in that literature, talking about the assembling of India’s constitution outside the Constituent Assembly.

The Roots of Rhythm by Joe Boyd is a fantastic journey of music across decades, continents, and genres with Boyd as the reliable witness to changes in culture. It’s massive, and I can’t and don’t want to read it fast. The kind of book I will read over years and maybe never finish start to finish. But an absolute joy.

Trilegal: The Making of a Modern Indian Law Firm by Akshay Jaitly is at first glance the story of the growth of one of India’s largest law firms, but in the background are major changes in India because of liberalization, sectoral reforms, the growth of the regulatory state, and increase in foreign investment. To me the most interesting part is the interaction between the growing size of the market and good institutional design.

Democracy, An American Novel by Henry Adams might be the perfect satire, sometimes seeming like non-fiction, to someone like me living in Washington DC in current times.

A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey by Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian is an absolutely magisterial treatment of Indian political economy over the last 75 years. I have just started the book over the holidays. It will take me a while and I will have a lot more to say about it.