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- My 21 Favorite Books from the Last 5 Years (Out of 629 Total)
My 21 Favorite Books from the Last 5 Years (Out of 629 Total)
Matt Karamazov
January 23, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 45 minutes
I’m buying myself some time here with today’s newsletter, as it’s been over a week since I’ve sent one and I still haven’t finished my breakdown of Feel-Good Productivity, by Ali Abdaal.
That’s coming very soon though - shouldn’t be more than a few days - and in the meantime, I wanted to share 21 of my favorite books from each of the last 5 years!
I tried to narrow it down to just one from each year, couldn’t, then gave up and tried to choose three favorites from each year, for a total of fifteen.
Couldn’t do it. I was working on whittling down my favorites from 2021 onwards and I had it narrowed down to 17 before I thought to myself, to hell with it! It’s my newsletter and I’ll do what I want haha.
Then I cheated even more, because I just could not keep it to just 21 books. So I added several “honorable mentions” from each year. 44 of them, to be exact.
Most of them are so close to that top spot anyway, and I just know your next favorite book is hiding in there somewhere.
This is a long-ish newsletter, so I’ll just quickly mention a few books that came out since the last issue of The Reading Life:
📚 Sponsor Magnet, by Justin Moore (Justin is the guy for creators who want to learn how to earn more in brand deals, sponsorships, etc. There’s no one I trust in that area more than him).
📚 The Obvious Choice, by Jonathan Goodman (I read an advance copy of this book and his method is a beautifully simple and effective way to build a profitable business that doesn’t cost you the rest of your life)
📚 What’s Your Dream?, by Simon Squibb (I don’t know Simon personally, but I’ve been dying to read this one, as his social media platform is one of the most positive, optimistic ones around, going around as he does funding people’s dreams of starting their own businesses)
So those books are all out now. I also wanted to recommend my friend Alex’s newsletter, which I’ve been reading for years and rarely miss. He’s absolutely one of the top experts worldwide when it comes to books and reading, and the stuff he puts out is just excellent.
He’s the one who recommended that I read Napoleon’s Library, and I also learned from him that Reid Hoffman has a new book coming out next week. Sign up to his newsletter here, and then let’s hit the books:
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“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
This isn’t a book, it’s a BRICK! Coming in at well over 1,000 pages, it’s certainly one of the longest books I’ve ever read, but also the most difficult, as Wallace uses 20,584 unique words in the 577,608-word book. There are even footnotes, some of which have their own endnotes, and you have to read those too because a) some of the funniest parts of the book are in there, and b) they actually inform the rest of the story.
It’s difficult to summarize, but generally, it’s about entertainment, drugs, addiction, suicide, depression, recovery, and um...tennis I guess? Most of the book takes place at an elite junior tennis academy situated next to a halfway house in Boston, USA.
Where the title Infinite Jest comes from (aside from it being a reference to Hamlet is that the previous director of the tennis academy, a film auteur by the name of James Incandenza has created a “video cartridge” that’s so irresistibly entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all motivation to do anything else other than watch it - Infinite Jest - over and over again until they eventually die.
So there’s one major theme - the addictive nature of entertainment - and the desire of human beings to give themselves away to something, even if that thing destroys them, either psychologically or physically, or both.
I could go on, but I do want to keep this relatively short, so I’ll just say that Infinite Jest somehow manages to be, simultaneously, the saddest and funniest book I’ve ever read. Just a monumental intellectual achievement, and I thought it was fantastic. Easily one of my favorite books of 2020, or any other year for that matter.
"Nietzsche's saint would be a man who would marvel at everything in Nature, who would live in a continually healthy ecstasy of praise for being alive."
If ordinary life usually seems a bit...well, ordinary...it may be because the way most human beings live their lives can be compared to an extraordinarily powerful jet airplane flying on only one engine.
I won’t write as long a description of this one, but basically, Wilson champions a new, more optimistic version of existentialism, and The Outsider is a comprehensive study of how various “Outsiders” rejected conformity, confronted the worst, most horrifying aspects of human existence, and still affirmed with all their being that life was still worth living.
It’s an absolutely magnificent book, well-argued, beautifully written, and Wilson was only 26 years old when he wrote it! The Outsider changed my life. Full stop.
The Law of Effection: “The more lives you affect in an entity you control, in scale and/or magnitude, the richer you will become.”
This book changed the entire trajectory of my business, and my life basically. I read it in my car while working a minimum wage security job, DeMarco’s ideas about entrepreneurship and how to positively affect more people simply revelatory for me as I put them into action and became a full-time educational content creator within the next three years.
At the end of the day, owning a business is one of the greatest keys to freedom available to anyone with an internet connection and a burning desire to succeed. You don’t need to live in fear of Monday, and you certainly don’t need to live the kind of life that the rest of society expects.
“Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings.
This does not come about without some effort: to compose that general book, each individual book must be transformed, enter into a relationship with the books I have read previously, become their corollary or development or confutation or gloss or reference text.
For years I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book."
Okay, so Infinite Jest is mind-bending, but this book is on another level of artistic genius. At least I thought so. It’s funny, postmodern philosophy is such trash, but postmodern fiction? This book’s incredible.
From the very first page, you’re involved in the story, about to enter a bookstore and buy Italo Calvino’s new novel, the very book you’re reading right now. I don’t want to give too much away, because the ending is just fantastic, but basically, in the main narrative “the reader” is searching for the second chapter of the book that he just bought. The secondary narrative, though, consists of the first chapter of ten different books that combine in the end to…
You just have to read it. Everything is interconnected in this book, the writing is smart, “enchanting” I guess? Can I use the word enchanting? It’s enchanting. The whole book is just a journey, and even though it’s about the tenth of the size of Infinite Jest, it has the exact same amount of “brilliance per page.”
(In the Order in Which I Read Them)
“‘They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person,’ he said after the failure of the royalist assassination plot of 1804. ‘I will defend it, for I am the Revolution.’”
There have been more books written with the word Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821, but in a very real, visceral sense, this book brought him back to life, at least in my imagination.
Most everything I thought I knew about Napoleon – which, admittedly, wasn’t all that much – turned out to be either wrong or incomplete, and in this 800-page biography that I inhaled in a week I found myself swept up in the larger-than-life majesty of Napoleon’s life and campaigns.
It’s actually astonishing how many of the institutions and laws and reforms that exist today come directly from him. Meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education and so much more were ushered in during Napoleon’s reign, and he championed all of it. It took almost every nation in Europe banding together in order to defeat him, and they had to adopt many of his reforms themselves in order to do it.
Just the massive scale and scope of Napoleon’s adventures, his sweeping vision, and his humanity…they all combine to make this one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, biographies or no.
“Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”
Usually, I finish a book every two days, but I strung this one out for weeks and weeks because I was loving it so much. It is, in no uncertain terms, a masterpiece, and now it’s one of my absolute favorite books.
The book is arranged in six interlocking parts, told from six difference perspectives, going forward in time, until the middle section, at which point it folds back on itself and goes back through the time periods in reverse order. Yeah! I know.
Starting from a character in the 19th century, we move forward to the early twentieth, the late twentieth, the near future, a little further into the future, then the late future and back again, with the actions and lives of each character affecting each other across time and space.
The stories are funny, nail-biting, vicious, exhilarating, suspenseful, deep – and sometimes several of those at once. The literary references will keep lifelong readers searchingly engaged, the cliff-hangers will keep most readers up way later than they should be, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll read this book more slowly as you get to the last page, just so you can keep the book going and it doesn’t ever have to end.
“He knew that young children learn less from books or movies or television than they do from caring adults.”
Children can always spot a fraud; they know when someone’s not being authentic or when they’re different from who they claim to be – which is evidence that Mister Rogers was the real deal. He was one of the most inspiring early childhood educators ever, and he saw the best in kids, which made it possible for them to bring out the best in themselves.
When you read the comments on some of the recent Mister Rogers YouTube tribute videos it’s all there: You have thousands and thousands of positive comments – never negative ones – with people saying things like, “My childhood was a fucking nightmare; Mister Rogers was the only adult who ever told me I was worth anything,” and stuff like that. It’s honestly amazing, and more than a little bit sad.
As you can probably tell, I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend this book to pretty much everyone, and I’ve been thinking about it almost every single day since I read it. His story is surprising, sad, exciting, inspiring – everything you wouldn’t expect from that nice man in the cardigan that used to show up every morning and tell you that he loved you just the way you are.
“No other Paradise exists, my poor friend. Don’t listen to the priests. No other Paradise exists!”
Well, great, now I have to read every single other book that Kazantzakis has ever written. Seriously, Zorba the Greek is one of the most powerful, life-affirming books you’re ever likely to come across, and I don’t think that anyone who is somewhat alive and breathing can read this book and sit still.
I mean, you can just sense the Life-Force leaping off every page, the way that Kazantzakis shakes us each by the shoulders, shouting into our ears, ‘Live! Live now! Breathe deeply! While you still can!’
The unnamed narrator of the book goes into business with an older man, Zorba, and they both go on to operate a lignite mine on the island of Crete. The former is based on Kazantzakis himself, and Zorba is a real person whom he met early in the 20th century and who irrevocably changed the direction of Kazantzakis’s life. He also changed mine.
“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front…”
I knew next to nothing about Chesterton going into this book, and it ended up being one of my favorite books of all time. In short, it’s an existentialist novel/allegory about a secret society of anarchists and the police detective assigned to infiltrate and expose them.
The Council of this anarchist organization each take their names from the days of the week, and the man who becomes Thursday is in for an earth-shattering, ego-shattering surprise…
I don’t even want to give any more away, because it’s just so amazing. If you’re familiar at all with the philosophy of Alan Watts and Colin Wilson, you’ll “get” this book right away.
“Enlivened once again, life’s pulses waken
To greet the kindly dawn’s ethereal vision;
You, earth, outlasted this night, too, unshaken,
And at my feet you breathe, renewed Elysian,
Surrounding me with pleasure-scented flowers,
And deep within you prompt a stern decision:
To strive for highest life with all my powers.”
This is a simply spectacular 18th-century German play in two parts about an old scholar, Heinrich Faust, who’s become disillusioned by the finitude of human knowledge and makes a deal with the devil, Mephistopheles.
The bet they agree to, roughly speaking, is that if Mephisto can show Faust a moment that he will want to live eternally, then in that moment his soul shall be turned over to Mephisto forever.
Humanity, justice, and love of life itself are what I think of whenever I think of Goethe or this play, and it truly is a masterpiece. Like I said, it’s simply spectacular, wonderful to read out loud, and I really, really hope you take a look at it for yourself.
The version I read was translated into English by the famous philosopher Walter Kaufman, and that’s the translation I would recommend.
(In the Order in Which I Read Them)
“Whether the future is wonderful or terrible is, in part, up to us.”
This is an absolutely spectacular book about the (potential) far, FAR future of humanity, and where MacAskill makes the case for "longtermism," or the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.
The fact is that, if we don’t destroy ourselves (I know, I know, big “If”), there could be millions of years of human civilization left to come, including billions of future humans who have yet to be born!!
What kind of lives will they lead? What kind of world will we leave them? I mean, there could be students millions of years from now looking back on the year 2025 and learning about what we did today to save humanity.
I’d describe the tone of this book as hopeful, yet realistic. MacAskill takes a scientific, dispassionate view of the threats currently facing our civilization and discusses the odds of whether we can successfully survive them. It’s just an absolutely amazing achievement and it’s easily one of the best books I’ve ever read!
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
Oscar Wilde might just be one of my favorite people, not just counting writers, and this is one of his most well-known books. It’s about a man, Dorian Gray, who becomes enraptured by a portrait of himself and makes a deal with the devil to sell his soul in exchange for eternal youth and beautiful.
What he finds is that he can engage in the worst forms of debauchery and vice, and yet only his portrait, hidden away where nobody can find it, ages and bears witness to his fall from grace. It’s an absolutely amazing book (I know I say that a lot, but I make no apologies for that haha), and it solidified Oscar Wilde as one of my favorite writers.
"No, no - there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see - what I don’t fear!"
This novella is one of the most famous ghost stories ever told, and it’s been adapted into movies, plays - everything - hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of times.
The story centers around a young woman, a governess, whose first job is to take care of two children at an obscure estate in the country. The magic and power of it lies in the fact that you’re never really sure whether it is a ghost story, or a chronicle of mental illness.
Henry James isn’t the easiest writer to read, but this short book is wonderfully written - suspenseful, beautiful, complete - and the way he can twist and turn sentences to obscure his meaning until the very end means that literally the very last word on the very last page delivers such an astounding shock that it’s seared in my memory. Can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s simply amazing.
“Forgetting yesterday neither will I think of tomorrow. Why should I throw now after maybe? Can tomorrow’s sand flow through the glass before today’s? Will the sun rise twice this morning? Can I perform tomorrow’s deeds while standing in today’s path?
Can I place tomorrow’s gold in today’s purse? Can tomorrow’s child be born today? Can tomorrow’s death cast its shadow backward and darken today’s joy? Should I concern myself over events which I may never witness?
Should I torment myself with problems that may never come to pass? No! Tomorrow lies buried with yesterday, and I will think of it no more.”
Og Mandino (great name, eh?) went from being a depressed, divorced alcoholic on the verge of suicide to selling more than 50,000,000 books, and this is one of my absolute favorite books of all time.
Not just one of my favorite sales books, but favorite books. Period.
The main message of the book is to “do it now.”
Yesterday is past, tomorrow may never arrive, and if you waste today, you waste “the last page of your life.” “These hours are now my eternity,” Mandino says. Incredible. If Marcus Aurelius was an insurance salesman, he’d probably write something like this!
(In the Order in Which I Read Them)
“It's necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.”
This might actually be my number one favorite book of ALL TIME, and it made a massive impression on me when I read it in 2023. Probably because this 19th-century tale of wrongful imprisonment and revenge felt so much like my own life.
Without going into too many details (I will at some point, don’t worry haha), I was wrongfully accused of a crime two years ago, due to one of the most stunning displays of police stupidity I’ve ever seen. Seriously, it was something to behold. Just the sliminess, carelessness…the total lack of responsibility for throwing my life into disarray for a year and a half. Anyway, the charges were eventually dropped and I’m getting ready to sue this one constable (and probably the whole department) for his part in the whole thing…but the main character of The Count of Monte had some legal troubles of his own.
Thrown in a deep, dark dungeon for a crime he didn’t commit, Edmond Dantes spends 10 years in prison, losing nearly everything in the process, until after befriending a fellow prisoner, learns of this buried treasure located on the island of Monte Cristo.
This all happens in the first 300 pages (it’s 1,200+ pages long), so I’m giving too much away, but he escapes, finds the treasure, becomes unrecognizable, and spends the rest of the novel taking revenge on the people who put him away.
It’s absolutely INCREDIBLE - quite literally a masterpiece of world literature - and it completely consumed my entire being when I first read it. I’ve gone on long enough, but seriously, it’s a classic, beloved by millions, and one of the greatest books ever written!
“We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises - which tend to be all that matter.”
Morgan Housel is the author of The Psychology of Money, a fantastic book that’s sold more than seven million copies, but I think I loved this one even more!
Same as Ever is about all the things that don’t change, and how instead of trying to predict the future by guessing what’s going to happen, we can instead look to the past for clues as to the way things have always happened.
If you liked his first book, I think you’ll like this one too, and it’s very underrated.
“If a scientist wanted to design a giant petri dish with all the right nutrients to make hypomanic genius flourish, he would be hard-pressed to imagine a better natural experiment than America. A ‘nation of immigrants’ represents a highly skewed and unusual ‘self-selected’ population. Do men and women who risk everything to leap into a new world differ temperamentally from those who stay home? It would be surprising if they didn’t.”
This is another extraordinarily underrated book, this time about hypomania and the people who suffered from it - the same people who built America from the ground up.
Hypomania is condition - not technically a mental illness - that sits between depression and full-on mania, characterized by unusual energy, drive, ambition, visions of grandiosity, etc. So, people like Christopher Columbus, Alexander Hamilton, the Mayers (of Hollywood fame), Craig Venter (who sequenced the human genome), and others.
That’s Gartner’s thesis, that immigrant populations were more likely to have people were hypomanic, and that the founding of America was basically a natural experiment where you’d have all these high-energy, high-ambition people in one place, building.
It’s a really, really good book, and it’s also hilarious in certain sections. I absolutely loved it, and now it’s one I find myself recommending all the time.
“The multiple demands on an entrepreneur’s time are extraordinary. I am here to tell you that you need to take extraordinary measures to match those demands. Measures so radical and extreme that others may question your sanity.
This is no ordinary time management book for the deskbound or the person doing just one job.
This book is expressly for the wearer of many hats, the inventive, opportunistic entrepreneur who can’t resist piling more and more responsibility onto his own shoulders, who has many more great ideas than time and resources to take advantage of them, and who runs (not walks) through each day. I’m you, and this is our book.”
In this book, the eccentric entrepreneur Dan S. Kennedy shares the extreme time management strategies he uses personally to run his multimillion-dollar company while successfully safeguarding his schedule and his sanity.
Even if you’re not a business owner or entrepreneur, this is one of the best time management books I’ve ever read (and I’ve read dozens of them). It’s a little extreme, like I said, but your time is literally your life. It makes sense to be at least a little bit extreme about something that’s so valuable.
I honestly don’t believe it’s possible for anyone to guard their time too fiercely (while still making themselves available to help others, I mean), and if you’re serious about protecting your most precious resource, try reading this book.
(In the Order in Which I Read Them)
“If you don’t have a plan, society does, and it’s been planning your life for decades.”
Dan Koe’s a legend in the creator economy: a deep thinker and lifelong learner who earns more than $100,000 PER MONTH online through his courses, programs, YouTube videos, and more. He’s getting paid to learn, and a lot of his work centers around helping other people do the same. But it’s more than that…
The Art of Focus points to a worsening crisis in our society, as well as a second concerning trend that’s been developing for decades. The crisis is one of attention and meaning: basically, people are just going through the motions, sleepwalking through their days; working jobs they hate, living lives they don’t want, wondering what it’s all for.
The trend that’s been developing is the divide between creators and consumers. Between people who make stuff, and people who just passively consume it. As Dan says, if you don’t choose what to pay attention to, society will decide for you. Autonomy is the new status symbol, and The Art of Focus will help you actualize it.
“The coalition of tyrants will learn that they are loathed equally by men of all colors.”
So I’ve already gone on and on about how amazing The Count of Monte Cristo (and obviously I stand by that!), but this one is about The Count of Monte Cristo.
More specifically, The Black Count is the Pulitzer Prize-winning story of the REAL Count of Monte Cristo…Alexandre Dumas’s father! Apparently, he was a general in Napoleon’s army (whose own life reads like a novel) and the inspiration for his son’s classic masterpiece.
You’d almost certainly want to read The Count of Monte Cristo first, but if you’ve read that book and enjoyed it, then you might also love The Black Count! I did!
“If you are going to achieve exceptional success, especially exceptional financial success, you have to break completely free of wage-earner thinking.”
I’m not a “rule-follower” by nature, so this one naturally spoke to me. Exactly as the title says, it’s an unconventional guide to success that flies in the face of most of the advice circulating out there about how to succeed in business and in life.
The bottom line here is that there’s always a way to succeed, but you’re not likely to find it by following the crowd. To borrow from The Third Door by Alex Banayan (another excellent book), life is like a nightclub.
Most people are standing in line in front of the main entrance, waiting patiently, quietly following the rules, hoping eventually to get in. There’s also the VIP line going back in the opposite direction, where celebrities and people with money and connections also clamber to get in. Then there’s “the third door.”
The third door is the one you make yourself. It’s where you go around the back of the building, crack open a window, climb in through the kitchen, slipping past security and the rest of the staff and making your own way in.
Dan Kennedy’s book helps you find the third doors that exist all around us. Now, all you need to do is find or develop the courage to walk through them.
Amazon Description: No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules, by Dan S. Kennedy
(In the Order in Which I Read Them)
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OK, that’s it for now…
More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!
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With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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