I try to read 52 books every year. This year I fell short by eight for two reasons: (1) I read a bunch of long books (The Prize, LotR); and (2) I simply had less reading time than I’ve had in the past.
Historically I’ve “read” a lot of books via audiobook, usually during commute, travel, and other dead time (laundry, dishes, walking places I’m going to walk to anyway). This year I did something different: I let more of that time become silence. Sometimes that meant meditation; other times it meant letting my mind wander and quietly process whatever problem it’s chewing on instead of constantly bombarding it with input. It turns out it’s nice to walk somewhere without headphones and let your brain turn over a thorny work problem until an actual insight floats up.
The books I did read clustered around a few familiar themes: tech and startups (a lot of which got metabolized into my How to Think Like a VC series); sci-fi; the relationship between technology, energy, economics, and geopolitics; and a couple of classics. 2026 will probably look similar. (I still read personal growth books now and then, but after a deep dive from ~2017–2020 I’m mostly hitting diminishing returns. I’ll aggregate the best lessons from that era once I’m done with the VC series.)
Without further ado — this year’s recommendations.
Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company (Patrick McGee) — A wholly enthralling, obsessively detailed account of how Apple offshored hardware manufacturing — and, through Apple, how the U.S. effectively offshored large swaths of its high-tech industrial capability over the last 30 years. The book refuses to reduce this story to simple villains and heroes: industrial policy, labor economics, corporate incentives, and regulation all collide inside a global economy that rewards convenience and punishes long-term thinking.
High-tech manufacturing is dirty, dangerous, and difficult — and it’s also essential. If the U.S. wants to re-shore, it can’t do it without accepting real trade-offs: environmental constraints, labor costs, permitting timelines, subsidies, and (implicitly) a willingness to pay more for many of the physical objects modern life depends on. And if it doesn’t re-shore, it remains structurally beholden to Taiwan and China. There are no clean solutions here — only choices you own.
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (Dan Wang) — Another U.S./China book, with a thesis that’s simple enough to be memeable and incisive enough to stick: America is run by lawyers; China is run by engineers. You don’t get the pros of either system without also swallowing the cons. The U.S., with rule of law and lots of friction, moves slowly and protects individual rights. China optimizes for outcomes over process — sometimes effectively, sometimes brutally, occasionally both at once. This one is short, sharp, and clarifying. A must-read if you want to stop having incoherent opinions about why some countries can build things and others mostly litigate about building things.
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (Daniel Yergin)—I re-read The Prize and then its follow-ups (The Quest, The New Map). The whole trilogy remains essential if you want to understand energy politics without being trapped in whatever the current news cycle is yelling about. The Prize is still the best of the three because it’s a clean historical arc: the birth of the oil industry in the 1800s through roughly 1990. The latter two digress more into contemporary energy technology and geopolitics, which makes them more “of their moment” — but they’re still worth reading as supplements (especially for certain post–Cold War threads, including how energy realities show up in conflicts people pretend are purely ideological).
Sam Walton: Made in America (Sam Walton) —The early Wal-Mart story reads like a mix of frontier capitalism and competitive obsession: endless travel, relentless cost discipline, a borderline-comical fixation on tiny operational details, and a founder who treats “outworking everyone” as both strategy and identity. This book is up there with Shoe Dog for most entertaining business memoir, albeit with the same caveat: both books revel in the scrappy origin story and sidestep the complexities and consequences of what happens when the business becomes an empire.
Patriot: A Memoir (Alexei Navalny) — Equal parts inspiring and heartbreaking. A bleak, Kafkaesque picture of what happens when you fall afoul of the power structures in a country ruled by might instead of laws. Navalny is funny, self-aware, and ultimately optimistic despite it all. The book is a reminder to not take life and liberty for granted, but that you can still find happiness and purpose despite increasingly dire circumstances. For a deeper dive into banality of evil in modern Russia I’d recommend Peter Pomerantsev’s unsettling Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.
The Opposite of Settling (Case Kenny) — I can only half-recommend this: the core message of the book is really good, but the book itself is really poorly written. It’s repetitive, unfocused, and should be a quarter of the length. I’m putting this up there with Existential Kink in my “books that should be blog posts” shelf —because if this were a tight essay, it would be excellent.
The core idea is straightforward and genuinely useful: build upward cycles in your romantic life by becoming the kind of person who naturally attracts (and can actually sustain) the kind of relationship you want. The twist is that you’re not doing that work for the other person — you’re doing it for yourself. Only once you embody that do you stop chasing, bargaining, and performing, and can start recognizing what’s actually good when it shows up. (I wrote about this theme earlier this year, which is probably why it hit so hard.)
The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) — I finally got around to reading this for the first time (preceded by The Hobbit). While The Hobbit is a children’s book, LotR is orders of magnitude deeper and more profound. This is one of those works of art that is so influential that it may not always be clear to a contemporary reader why it’s so great — until you understand that it was so revolutionary, that it so heavily influenced everything that came after it that whole branches of culture wouldn’t exist without it. (That said, if you model your moral compass after the dynamics in these books I have some serious questions for you.)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy” (Douglas Adams) — I first encountered this series when my mom read it to me and my siblings as a bedtime story when I was ~11. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the humor didn’t land at the time. Re-reading it now gave me an entirely new appreciation for what it is: absurdity, wit, and existential irreverence executed at a level that’s hard to replicate. I read all five books in a row and even added the sixth “honorary” one for good measure. The core message is basically: there doesn’t need to be a core message. There may be no grand meaning to existence and sometimes a funny, ridiculous story can just be a funny, ridiculous story, and that’s all it needs to be. It’s good to remember that.
If I squint at this list, a pattern jumps out: systems. Not in the “corporate process” sense, but in the civilizational machinery sense: how supply chains shape geopolitics, how energy shapes conflict, how governance shapes what a country can build, how power operates when no one is accountable, how companies scale when someone is maniacal about execution, how relationships improve when you change the incentives inside yourself, and how myth (or absurdity) can be a better teacher than theory.
The other theme is the one I didn’t get from books: silence. Reading less this year wasn’t deprivation, but rather leaving room for synthesis. I’m still going to aim for 52 in 2026, but I’m less attached to the number than I am to the outcome: steadily feeding my mind while still giving it enough space to turn input into insight. Because for me, unless all this knowledge absorption transforms into connection and creation — what’s the point?
If you have any recommendations you think I’d like — especially fiction — send them my way!