Summer 2025 Reading List
Post-Christmas I always end up with the same happy problem: too many books to read. I do fly through them given the chance, but when work comes back around, and I keep treating myself to a little browse through the readings catalogue, I quickly end up with a pile of novels on my desk threatening to bury me if I let them grow any taller.
So my New Year’s resolution this year is pretty simple: No more books – well, maybe one or two steals I find at the 2nd hand bookshops – until I get through the backlog.
Fiction
Fantasy and Sci-Fi
An ever-decreasing part of my reading diet, there are still some authors who get me excited. I got through half of Fourth Wing on audiobook before deciding I needed to sit down and do it properly.
Fourth Wing, Fifth Wing and Sixth Wing - Rebecca Yarros
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
The Host - Stephenie Meyer
The Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
The Ministry for the Future - Kim Stanley Robinson
Thrillers
After trying out the peak this year, I found these in an op shop and am going to give them a try
The Predicament – William Boyd
The Cellist – Daniel Silva
The Messenger – Daniel Silva
The Black Widow – Daniel Silva
Modern Fiction
A couple of books that have been in the backlog for a while, plus a new award winner that I’m looking forward to
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
Bridget Jones – Helen Fielding
Ghost Cities – Siang Lu
Classics
A mix of paperbacks that I haven’t looked at since year 9 and some others that I got in a bundle on sale. I feel like if I’m ‘in to reading’ then I really should have these done
1948 - George Orwell
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Dubliners - James Joyce
The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling
Lady Chatterley’s Lover - D.H. Lawrence
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
Agnes Grey - Anne Brontë
H.G. Wells Anthology - H.G. Wells
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Metamorphosis and The Trial - Franz Kafka
Non Fiction
History and Biography
Not a big part of my non-fiction library, but I do find that when the themes are bigger than just one person and their path to celebrity, I seem to like the books much more.
Too Much and Never Enough – Mary Trump
Being John Lennon – Ray Conolly
The Man with the Golden Touch – Sinclair McKay
Raise Your Soul – Yanis Varoufakis
Biology and Anthropology
A mix of gifts and cheapies I’ve found online. Big fan of all of Adam Rutherfords’ work, so I’m excited for his two entries.
The Book of Humans - Adam Rutherford
The Body - Bill Bryson
A Brief History of Everyone Who’s Ever Lived - Adam Rutherford
The Psychopath Test - Jon Ronson
Human Origins - Sarah Wild
A Devil’s Chaplain - Richard Dawkins
The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
The Malay Archipelago - Alfred Russel Wallace
The Meat Paradox - Rob Percival
Sport
A small but growing part of the sportsbook market, moving away from the what and looking more at the why. Found all of these through podcasts, so I have a feeling I already know a lot of the theses.
Making Space – Mike Prade
The Program – David Walsh
Inverting the Pyramid – Jonathan Wilson
Climate Change
I always like finding optimistic and policy-based books on climate, hoping these fill that niche
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster - Bill Gates
Quarterly Essay 78 - Judith Brett
The Carbon Collision Course - Andrew Perry
Quarterly Essay 99 - Marian Wilkinson
How to Talk About Climate Change - Rebecka Huntley
Not the End of the World - Hannah Ritchie
Scorcher - Clive Hamilton
Technology and Society
With AI having such a big boom this year, we have more people thinking and talking about one of my favourite topics: How technology and society interact. Excited for some of the recommender books, especially after seeing Liz Pelly speak earlier this year.
The AI Con - Emily Bender and Alex Hanna
Bad Data - Georgina Sturge
Mega Tech - Daniel Franklin
The Coming Wave - Mustafa Suleyman
Weapons of Math Destruction - Cathy O’Neil
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - Shoshana Zuboff
Morning After the Revolution - Nellie Boweles
Blood in the Machine - Brian Merchant
100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet - Pamela Paul
Nexus - Yuval Noah Harari
The Mood Machine - Liz Pelly
The Future - Anton Funnel
Atlas of AI - Kate Crawford
Good Data - Sam Gilbert
You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song - Glen McDonald
Communications
Honestly, these are just books for work that I need to sit down with and interrogate
Who Needs the ABC - Matthew Ricketson and Patrick Mullins
Merchants of Doubt – Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
Trust Me I’m Lying - Ryan Holiday
Making Headlines - Chris Mitchell
Misc
Why Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Is a River Alive - Robert Macfarlane
What to Read and Why - Francine Prose
The One Thing You Need to Know - Marcus Chown
Deep Sea - Jon Copley
Vector – Robyn Arianrhod
The Self Delusion - Tom Oliver
Social Theory and Politics
This is the section where my personal reading starts to blend with my work reading, especially some of the classic social theory books that I find myself quoting without reading in full
A Short History of the World in 50 Lies – Natasha Tidd
Who Rules the World – Noam Chomsky
Caless People – Sarah Wynn-Williams
Let’s Tax Carbon – Ross Garnaut
Upturn – Tanya Plibersek
Keating and Kellys’ Sper Legacy – Mary Easson
Divided Opinions – Eddy Jokivick and David Lewis
Why We Polarised – Ezra Klein
The Avoidable War – Kevin Rudd
The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx
Republic – Plato
On Liberty – John Stuart Mill