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- The 102 Books I Read in 2025 (And My 19 Favorites)
The 102 Books I Read in 2025 (And My 19 Favorites)
Matt Karamazov
January 02, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 33 minutes
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Happy New Year!
The year 2025 is “in the books,” and it was a fantastic year for reading!
I went through the entire list of 102 books that I read last year, and could not for the LIFE of me narrow it down to just 10.
If I absolutely had to give you a Top 3? I might, MIGHT go with:
But even then…I’d be excluding sooo many fantastic books. So I went with 19, which I bolded and enlarged in the list below of all 102 books so you can find them more easily.
In my latest YouTube video, I also share the eighteen books I got for Christmas too!
And at the bottom of tonight’s newsletter, I go a little bit further in-depth on a few of my favorites from the past year.
Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
“Look for happiness under your own roof.”
“Why would a rich person waste time writing a book to help other people get rich? Two reasons. Because I enjoy writing something I feel I know about. And because I believe that almost anyone of reasonable intelligence can become rich, given sufficient motivation and application.
It also helps that I am writing while sipping a very fine wine indeed (a Chateau d’Yquem 1986 if you really want to know), nibbling on fresh smoked conch tidbits, ensconced by a window with one of the most beautiful views on earth.”
Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.
This month’s book is How to Get Rich, by Felix Dennis, a fantastic book about getting rich, obviously, but also with a touch of tragic beauty, written as it was when Dennis found himself at the top of the financial mountain, with terminal cancer…and alone.
Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!
17. Mastery, by George Leonard (F)
27. Purpose & Profit, by Dan Koe (F)
77. Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut (F)
83. 11/22/63, by Stephen King (F)
“Life as a limited human being - in an era of infinite tasks and opportunities, facing an unknowable future, alongside other humans who stubbornly insist on having their own personalities - isn’t a problem you’ve got to try to solve.”
This is not the kind of book where the author peddles a bunch of easy answers, for the simple reason that, when it comes to your life, there are no easy answers. Only hard questions and tough tradeoffs.
But it is the kind of book that will help you navigate those questions and tradeoffs, and help you think differently about them.
Speaking for myself, I believe that there are as many good possible lives as there are people to live them. You don’t have to envy anyone else’s life, because there’s a possible version of your life that’s more than worth living.
The problem, however, is that there are too many good possible lives, compared to the finite length of each individual human life. There’s just too much to go out and see, do, feel, and witness to fit it all into a mere four thousand weeks, which is the title of Oliver Burkeman’s previous book.
Burkeman’s philosophy, imperfectionism, is a helpful perspective from which to engage with this existential problem, and this book is full of strategies and ways of thinking that will help you overcome (or at least live with) the “time anxiety” that afflicts so many of us.
What makes our human predicament even more challenging, though, is that it’s not simply a matter of saying no to things you don’t want to do, or testing a new productivity hack that will save you 3.77 hours per week. That’s the easy part.
The hard part is saying no to things you do actually want to do, and to embrace the facticities of human existence, such as they are. We only have 168 hours per week, and four thousand weeks in an average human life, and the dizzying array of choices we face in what to do with that time, brief as it is, can paralyze the best of us.
Burkeman’s fantastic insight in this book is that life doesn’t begin once you’re finally on top of everything, and your daily routine is humming along perfectly.
Your life is already happening, and unless you give up the idea of fitting sixteen thousand weeks into a few short decades, you might miss it.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’s One of My Favorites: I love books by authors who don’t claim to have all the answers, but who come along and completely reframe the question. This is one of those books. Sincere without being serious, helpful without being condescending, and enlightening without offering up any easy, simplistic answers, Meditations for Mortals is one I’ll be recommending over and over.
“Goals and contingencies, as I’ve said, are important. But they exist in the future and the past, beyond the pale of the sensory realm. Practice, the path of mastery, exists only in the present. You can see it, hear it, smell it, feel it.
To love the plateau is to love the eternal now, to enjoy the inevitable spurts of progress and the fruits of accomplishment, then serenely to accept the new plateau that waits just beyond them.
To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring in your life.”
For context, I have 11+ pages of notes from Mastery. From a 176-page book. If that tells you anything about how amazing I thought this book was. So yeah, easily my favorite book of the year, of any year.
Briefly, it’s about human potential, and the evolutionary destiny of human beings to learn - and keep on learning for as long as we live. But it’s about so much more than that.
It’s about how the modern world relentlessly socializes us, sapping us of our original creative energy and forcing us to conform to a world that stifles our most noble, most human impulses for generativity and greater life.
It’s about committing to a life of excellence, about all the fantastic rewards associated with traveling such a path, and how to really live while you’re alive.
On the surface, Leonard talks about martial arts, and his experience as a fighter pilot, to explain the 5 essential keys to mastery and how to achieve your athletic, creative, and intellectual potential. But on a deeper level than that, it’s about how not to waste a single moment of your one and only life.
So many of the things we do each day feel “in-between,” as though they’re not part of our “real” lives. We climb stairs to get somewhere else, never for the sake of climbing. We drive, not for the thrill of commanding an unbelievably complex machine (the car) by using an even more unbelievably complex machine (our brain), but merely to arrive at some other distant point in time and space.
But in the same way that the point of dancing isn’t just to get to a particular spot on the floor, attempting to gain mastery in any worthwhile endeavor isn’t just about the end result. It’s about the process, the plateaus, the pleasures of being here while you’re alive, and feeling every moment of your existence.
Mastery is one of the greatest, purest distillations of this philosophy for living, and George Leonard gets it.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’s One of My Favorites: Profundity after profundity, on page after page made me love this book, and it helped me enjoy the process of getting “there,” while realizing that I’m always going to be “here.” Every “there” is just another “here,” after all, and Leonard made me look forward to spending the next decades of my life in the eternal now, reading great books, working on getting better.
“When I was in college, my father shared an insight that I consider to be the single greatest investment advice I have ever received.
He told me to make it a rule to never think twice about investments in yourself: books, courses, and education; fitness; networking events; quality food; mental health; personal development; and sleep.
These may look like expenses, but they can all be considered investments that pay dividends in your life for a long time.”
You can have virtually anything you want in this life, but you can’t have everything, and certainly not all at once. In my experience, and as a result of reading this book, I believe that life is best lived in seasons, and that the best decisions are made while keeping the entire scope of your life in mind at all times.
The 5 Types of Wealth (one of the absolute best books I read in 2025, and by a wide margin) will help you optimize, if not maximize, your Time Wealth, Social Wealth, Mental Wealth, Physical Wealth, and Financial Wealth across your lifespan.
The thing is that maxing out any single one of these stats is inevitably going to mean lagging behind in some other area. You can dedicate your entire life to the accumulation of wealth (and many people do), but in that scenario you can just as easily come to the end of your life realizing that you unthinkingly sacrificed the best years of your life to do it.
You can find yourself alone at the mountaintop, the mental stress of having “made it” causing you to spend all your money buying back your health, the clock of your life winding down to zero, leaving you with no time left to turn it all around.
Similarly, Tony Robbins refers to the “Four Burners,” and that’s a great way of thinking about your priorities as well. Let’s say Five Burners, since we’re talking about The 5 Types of Wealth. But when you’re trying to “heat up” one specific area of your life, you start cranking up that specific burner.
For example, if you want to prioritize your physical health and mental peace, that’s fine, but you should realize that this means you won’t have as much time available to go out with your friends every weekend or advance your career as fast as you might be able to otherwise. You can have anything, but not everything.
It’s a perfectly legitimate choice to prioritize your Physical and Mental Wealth, but odds are, you’re not going to be able to get promoted to the corner office, take first place in a physique competition, see your parents every weekend, build a strong, lasting marriage, attend every one of your kids’ soccer games, read 100 books a year, and still find time to meditate for two hours every morning.
And if you try to run all five burners at 100 percent at the same time, you’re likely just going to burn your whole house down.
One of the many things I like about The 5 Types of Wealth is that Sahil Bloom is not “anti” ambition - far from it. In this book, he’s just showing you that our societal scoreboard is broken, and that you can in fact reject the default path, thereby setting out on your own, toward a life that’s strategically designed to fit your priorities. Again, you can have virtually anything you want in this life, but you have to be willing to pay the price.
The last few things I’ll say here is that taking the time to consciously design your life will not kill your spontaneity or infringe upon your freedom. In fact, living blind will imprison you as you make impulsive, shortsighted choices that give you fewer options later on.
Sure, eating a healthy diet means you lose the freedom to eat sixteen chocolate chip cookies every day, but you gain the greater freedom of being able to dance to your favorite song at your eightieth birthday party. The freedom to even make it to your eightieth birthday!
Living on a sensible budget restricts your “freedom” to put your entire future on a credit card, but it gives you the freedom to spend extravagantly on the things that genuinely make your life better.
And what you’ll also find is that the compound effect of these individual, smart, conscious choices multiplies your efforts across your lifespan, leading inexorably to a life that’s simpler, freer, happier, and wealthier than you ever could have imagined.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’s One of My Favorites: The wisdom-per-page in this book is pretty remarkable, and for such a wide-ranging book (literally EVERYTHING that’s most important in life) Sahil does a fantastic job of giving you the “80/20” of what’s worth focusing on and what will get you the best results.
“In true competition, no person is defeated. Both players benefit by their efforts to overcome the obstacles presented by the other.”
Let me just say right upfront that I have absolutely zero interest in tennis, and yet, The Inner Game of Tennis was one of the best books I’ve read all year. I knew it was a classic manual for mental performance, and I knew that it’s been mentioned by Bill Gates as one of his top-five favorite books, but I still never expected it to be this good.
The main argument of the book is that, in tennis as in life, each of us have two “selves” - Self 1 and Self 2 - that are often in conflict with each other. Self 1 is the more critical, ego-based Self, which tends to inhibit the natural functioning of Self 2, which is our more intuitive, authentic Self. Guess which Self is better at tennis?
The parallels with Daniel Kahneman’s research, as written about in Thinking, Fast and Slow, are obvious, even though each conception is quite different. Kahneman demonstrated how both “Systems” work in tandem, each proficient in different areas and best used for different purposes, whereas in Gallwey’s book, the insistent and overbearing Self 1 is one of the main obstacles to true happiness and athletic performance.
Truthfully, The Inner Game of Tennis brought to mind so many more connections than these as well. I see shades of Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse, various works of Eastern philosophy, as well as the latest developments in sports psychology.
The Inner Game of Tennis is universally applicable, and like me, you need not have any intentions of ever stepping foot on a tennis court to get the most out of reading it. Self 1 gets to all of us sometimes, and the softer voice of Self 2 too often gets drowned out in a flurry of self-criticism - on and off the court.
For that reason and many others, this book receives one of my highest recommendations, and I think that virtually everyone would be fascinated to find out just how deep the Inner Game goes.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’s One of My Favorites: This book had been on my reading list for a long time, and when I saw how many people with absolutely zero interest in tennis also loved this book, I knew I had to push it higher up on my list. Again, just the life-changing insights that started coming hard and fast, on seemingly every page…I just thought it was incredible. I might even take up tennis!
“Happiness is that feeling you get right before you need more happiness.”
The Art of Spending Money is about what money can buy, what it can’t buy, and how to tell the difference.
I ended up with twelve pages of notes from the thing, and it’s easily one of the best books I read in 2025. I’ll still be thinking about what I learned from it in 2035. Likely longer.
A few terms stand out that helped me think completely differently about money and its relationship to my life and happiness. One is “social debt,” which refers to how there are often hidden costs associated with certain large purchases and expenditures.
Once you’re expected to spend money, you have to keep spending money, or else risk losing the status you’ve gained within your newly-entered socioeconomic reference group.
Then there are ideas like “mental liquidity,” meaning the ease with which you’re able to change your mind based on new information. Housel also talks about how memories of past experiences can appreciate and grow in value as you get older - similar to Bill Perkins’ concept of “memory dividends” in his book, Die with Zero.
One of the main lessons of the book is that people are so often clueless about what will actually make them happy. The wrong question to ask in that situation is, “Can money buy happiness?” Rather, you might ask, “How can money buy happiness?”
“What haven’t I tried spending money on yet that might actually improve my life? What’s my thing? And how can I reduce the unnecessary spending in the other areas of my life so that I can spend even more money on what will truly make me happy?”
However, there are very few “shoulds” in this book, for the simple reason that you, and you alone, know what’s best for you. The Art of Spending Money isn’t prescriptive as much as it is about helping you detach from the emotional element of money and look somewhat dispassionately at its true nature.
Personally, my spending habits are inconsistent, which, as Morgan Housel argues in the book, is likely a good thing. It means that I’m making my own purchasing decisions, not buying what random strangers “expect” me to buy.
First-class flights will always seem like a giant waste of money to me; instead, I’ll throw the money I would have spent on leg-room for three hours into index funds and crypto. I’ll spend ridiculous amounts of money on buying time, freedom, and independence, and virtually nothing on fancy vacations.
As you can imagine, this is a book that can keep you busy for long after you’ve read it. Housel covers a lot of ground (in this, and in his other two books, which are also excellent), and virtually everybody can make astounding financial progress (and “peace of mind” progress) by thinking deeply about what he has to say.
I’m calling it right now: many of the things I’ve thought about and pondered as a result of reading this book will seep into my consciousness, quietly informing my spending decisions for many years to come.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’s One of My Favorites: Okay, so by this point I’ll read virtually anything that Morgan Housel puts out, and this book lived up to every great expectation I had for it. The short, funny, but meaningful and insightful stories and vignettes, the sensible advice presented in a completely new way, the actual changes it inspired me to make, and the confirmation it gave me that I was also on the right track…for these reasons and more, The Art of Spending Money was an easy favorite this year.
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OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.
And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 180,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and scaling my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are two more ways I can help you:
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