2025 Book Review

I thought this book was refreshing. Its straightforward love for western civilisation and values is tempered by a dire warning that we are squandering our historic human capital on vanity projects of no real use - games, ad technology, and algorithmic feeds. Our adversaries do not make the same misallocations of labour, the book argues, and we continue to do so at our peril. At times it reads slightly like promotional material for Palantir, but it is worthwhile nonetheless.

I found Tom Holland's core proposition - that modern civilisation is inherently Christian, even those parts of it we think of as thoroughly post-Christian - to be mostly unconvincing. However as a narrative history of Christianity it does an excellent job of describing just what was, and is, unique about Christianity and its highly unusual reverence for every individual. I found myself thinking about Dominion for a long time after finishing it.

This book goes through all the ways the British state raises revenue and then spends it, often alongside observations about disappointing inefficiencies in doing so. It's refreshing to read about this topic from someone who so clearly seems to know what they are talking about - the author having run the Institute for Fiscal Studies for many years.

A recurring point is that the size of the welfare state has grown and grown, and that this growth has only been possible because it happened alongside a steady decline in the defence budget. If we now need to reverse this decline in the latter, very difficult choices about the former will need to be made.

"Every so often a flare goes up and you get to see where everyone is standing." Probably a very divisive book, but in addition to being an uncomfortably detailed account of an atrocity and its aftermath, it also raises interesting questions about what makes a society cohesive, versus what makes it splinter into factions.

Careless People briefly went viral earlier this year, as Meta tried to block its publication and so created a Streisand effect that made a lot of people hear about the book who wouldn't have otherwise - including me. It is a former senior Meta executive's account of her time at Facebook as it grew and mutated over the 2010s, and the wrongs she accuses it of doing.

Some of the revelations are quite shocking, even for Facebook, and the gossip is quite salacious. It does leave you with a faint sense that you aren't hearing the opposing view from many of the people she describes (who certainly won't enjoy how they are portrayed, such as Sheryl Sandberg), and the picture she paints of frequently being the only sensible person in a room full of morons may not be entirely accurate. But for all that, it is a fascinating account of how Facebook grew, and the lines it crossed to do so.

Ostensibly a parenting book, this book makes the case that children born after 1997 (give or take a year or so) have had a fundamentally different kind of childhood than any before them. That a combination of omnipresent internet access, ubiquitous smartphones with front-facing cameras, and the decline in independence and risk-taking in the physical world have combined to rewire their brains in calamitous ways, and that "[t]echnology increasingly allows [children] to satisfy their needs without having to engage in the physical and social risks that were previously required to satisfy those needs".

I don't have children, so the later parts of the book which consist of more practical, direct advice were not that relevant. But I do live in the world, and would prefer it to be propagated to subsequent generations who are able to shoulder that responsibility.

This is in a similar vein to The Anxious Generation, it's just not specifically about children. The book is about our collective, society-wide decline in the ability to focus on anything long-form due to the rise of algorithmic feeds, and the other changes to our digital lives with which you will be familiar from the past twenty years.

In addition to exploring the causes and consequences of all this, the author also details his own attempts at detoxing from omnipresent internet access. Probably the most moving and memorable part of the whole book was his account of the moment he realised, weeks into this detox retreat, that it was possible to recover a sense of focus, and that our ability to focus as we once did is still there, waiting to be restored.

The top three books of the year have a lot in common. They are all fiction, specifically sci-fi, specifically time travel sci-fi - and they all introduce some novel twist on the time travel trope.

The Gone World is set mostly in a 1997 in which travel to the future is possible, monopolised by the US government and used to solve crimes by essentially asking people in the future what the solution was - with those futures vanishing as soon as the traveller leaves (a fact some people in those futures are very much aware of, and so very keen to prevent the visitor leaving). There is also a nightmarish apocalypse encountered in every hypothetical future, which seems to occur closer and closer to the present the more the technology is used.

As with all sci-fi, the technological premise is never the interesting bit. Fleeing the present into the comforting safety of the past - literally and figuratively - is a recurring theme of the book, and one which gives it a melancholy warmth. It is not always easy to follow, particularly at the end, but I liked it a lot.

Another sci-fi novel with a twist. Here the premise is that your consciousness can travel back to an earlier point in your life thanks to a secret research project, allowing you to act differently and change the timeline - but when you catch up to the point in time from which you originally travelled back, the whole world suddenly gets the memories of the timeline you aborted, along with the new one.

The consequences of the repeated use of this are explored wonderfully, both for the individuals involved and, eventually, society itself - as the world begins to tear itself to pieces under the strain of so many false memories. It's smart and thorough, but you never really feel like you lose the thread of what is happening. And, like The Gone World, the intriguing promise of escaping the present into the safety of the past also appears again and again.

The third instalment in my unofficial time travel trilogy, and my favourite book of the year, is a Stephen King novel about a high school teacher who has access to a portal to 1958. Every time he goes through it, he resets back to the same moment in 1958. His dying friend tasks him with using it to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. Put like that, the book doesn't sound so compelling. But unlike the preceding two books, the sci-fi element here is just what facilitates the story, it isn't its core.

The novel is really three interwoven stories: a historical thriller about stopping the assassination, a sci-fi exploration of the unique time travel mechanics involved, and a love story. The world the author creates for you of small-town mid-century America is very compelling, and makes you nostalgic for a place and time you (at least in my case) have never experienced.

This book was one of a very few that, by the end, I found myself thinking about whenever I wasn't reading it, and long after I finished it. I would recommend it to almost anyone.