I read a lot this year. Honestly, it was my best year for reading so far with 31 books in total. The big shift for me was actually diving into fiction, which isnât something I usually do, but it ended up being exactly what I needed to balance out the technical deep dives.
These are the ones that actually shifted my perspective and earned their shelf space:
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy): I finally tackled the beast. Itâs not just âhistorical fictionâ; itâs a masterclass in how individual lives are swept up in the tides of history. It makes modern âcrisesâ feel a lot smaller and serves as a humbling reminder that the âGreat Menâ of history are often just passengers to larger systemic forces.
The Staff Engineerâs Path (Tanya Reilly): This is the map I wish Iâd had two years ago. Essential reading for anyone navigating the transition from âwriting codeâ to âowning outcomes.â Itâs a definitive guide for fixing organizations with the same rigor we use to fix systems.
Human Acts (Han Kang): Brutal, poetic, and necessary. A look into the Gwangju uprising that stays with you long after you close the book. Itâs a masterclass in perspective and a reminder of the human cost behind political shifts.
I spent a lot of time this year trying to understand why the financial plumbing is leaking and how to build digital alternatives.
Broken Money (Lyn Alden) & How Countries Go Broke (Ray Dalio): These two are a perfect pairing. Alden explains how the ledger actually works, while Dalio provides the 500-year historical lens to show that weâve seen this movie before.
Building Bitcoin in Rust (Lukas Hozda): Thereâs no better way to understand a protocol than trying to implement it in a language that forces you to care about memory safety. Implementing the UTXO model while fighting the borrow checker is high friction, but high reward.
Liberalismo (Carlos GuimarĂŁes Pinto) & Antes do 25 de Abril (AntĂłnio Costa Santos): Reading these together provided a great bridge between Portugalâs historical constraints and its future possibilities. Itâs the classic battle between central planning and decentralized opportunity.
I went through a dystopian phase with Huxley (Brave New World), Zamyatin (We), and Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451).
My take is that We (2 stars) felt like a rough draft for the others. Itâs historically important, but it felt like a prototype that didnât quite reach production.
Paired with Jonathan Haidtâs The Anxious Generation, these classics felt less like fiction and more like current affairs. We are living through the âGreat Rewiringâ and Haidtâs data on the collapse of play-based childhood is basically a massive memory leak weâre only just starting to debug.