Dani Arribas-Bel

It’s that time of the year (again). Last year was the second time and, if I manage a third one this year, we can start calling it a tradition. And I quite like traditions like this. Before we get into the good stuff, one clarification. The sharp eye will have noticed I did drop “book” in this year’s title. This is all but unintended. In part, it is a bit of ego caressing¹, in part it might be something a little more meaningful. Earlier in the year, I signed up for Reader and, later on, I picked up an Onyx Boox. All of a sudden, the whole of the internet was presented to me like a book I could take to bed without distractions. That’s taken its toll on actual books², but it’s not been for nothing. I have read more long-reads and discovered more perspectives than I’d have been able by focusing only on books. So, this year, I’m giving them a spot on my review by highlighting the ones that have made a mark as of December (way too many to list wholly, but you can see a sample in my link blog). With that out of the way, enough of intros, links and footnotes (you can see a full list of books and links at the bottom), let’s do it.

This year, there’s not been a clear winner on non-fiction, like last year. There’s been a few really good ones that I’ve returned to in a less obsessive way over the subsequent months. I greatly enjoyed What if we get it right? and it might be one of the few instances where I think the audiobook is probably a better medium. It’s set up as interviews with a bunch of people from all corners of life on what “getting it right” with the climate would look like. The audiobook contains the actual interviews, not a readout of them. Not all of them touched me in the same way, but enough of them made me think in slightly different ways about climate change. I also really liked How infrastructure works. It’s less of a thrilling read, more of a slow, boring in the best possible sense of the word (calm, undistracted) one. If you stick to it and get past some aspects of the tone, there’s plenty to like and learn on the other side. One of them was the insight of how the challenge in infrastructure for the XXIst Century is going from a world where resources felt unlimited but energy limited to one of “infinite energy and finite materials”. And the core message of the book is also one to retain with you: that infrastructure is, at its best, shared care, humanity coming together to care for each other at scale. Try to find that elsewhere.

It was also a good year of fiction. No five stars but plenty of fours. I got around (pun intended!) to read Orbital and thought it was very well written but, perhaps, not more. I liked Delta-V because it came at a time where I was really in the mood for good, “hard” sci-fi, it’s pretty much that and it delivers at it. And speaking of traditions, I returned to the Slough House series for my yearly fix, ahead of the TV version. All in all, most very satisfactory, almost none much of a surprise. The closest I came to it was Bluebird, Bluebird, which was a new author to me and a new detective series set in contemporary East Texas. It was a nice mix of good detective execution and a great context setting in terms of race, culture and idiosyncracies of that corner of the world.

And now for the ”new” medium, the Internet. According to Reader, I’ve highlighted (my measure of whether a text had anything I wanted to remember or not) 262 items this year. Many of them were technical, irrelevant by now (AI!) or not that memorable. A few of them have managed to stick to my brain in ways that have surprised me. About half of them were about AI in one way or another, there was sooo much of it this year, some of it was even good! I read a lot of Cory Doctorow, so it’s no surprise something from him made the list. I’m a bit saturated of “enshitification” at this point, but his new big idea, Reverse Centaurs and how AI is being designed to be helped by humans rather than the other way around is as interesting as it gets, I imagine we’ll hear more of it in 2026. I finally got around reading (listening to!) AI as Normal Technology and can confirm all the chatter around it is justified. I enjoyed particularly the first of the three parts, which focuses on the economics of the technology and how it will (or not) spread throughout the economy. This is econ 101 but, sometimes, you “just” need the basics well understood. Speaking of understanding well, Neal Stephenson has some thoughts too (and a new newsletter!). From his post on AI I took the “every augmentation is also an amputation” quote (which was actually from Marshall McLuhan), and it’s returned to me every time I read a new shiny app feature description that promises to make me so much more productive. Harper Reed is one of the few folks occupying the shared space in a Venn Diagram with people excited about AI and people I like and respect, and his “codegen” hero’s journey is equal parts insightful and fun(ny). A bit of a technical one, so indulge me but, if you are into satellites, the TerraWatch newsletter is a treat in your inbox. His recent take on why privatising basic Earth Observation is a terrible idea is a good entry point. To wrap up, two very different and very personal reads that involve absolutely zero AI or technical stuff. I don’t know how I came across Mike Monteiro, but his newsletter has stuck in my read digest. I imagine it’s the combination of honesty, rawness and the occasional insight. His recent post about flying to bury his father (after a very complicated history) is all those three condensed and multiplied by several x’s. And the final one, a very apt one at that, is by Craig Mod. I’ve read a lot of him (no less his phenomenal book on walking in Japan) this year, so it’s also no surprise he makes the list. This one is a retrospective on the house in Tokyo he’s selling. But it’s really a meditation about all the time he’s passed there, what’s meant to him, and how the house was both context and sometimes even content to much of it. It’s beautiful.

And that does it for this year! If you(‘ve) read any of the above, remember next time you see me one of the few things I like more than reading is talking about reading. If there are others I should read, hit me up with recommendations. Life’s too short to fill it with mediocre reads.

Fiction

1. Delta-V by Daniel Suarez
2. Rose/House by Arkady Martine
3. La asombrosa tienda de la señora Yeom by Kim Ho-yeon
4. Foundry by Eliot Peper
5. London Rules by Mick Herron
6. Orbital by Samantha Harvey
7. Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke
8. Ice’s End by P. Finian Reilly

Non-Fiction (* for audiobooks)

1. What If We Get It Right?* by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
2. How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra
3. A City on Mars* by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
4. Techno rebels - The renegades of electronic funk by Dan Sicko
5. China in ten words by Yu Hua (with translation from Allan H. Barr)
6. Mood Machine* by Liz Pelly
7. The Illegals by Shaun Walker
8. Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod

Internet reads

1. The Reverse-Centaur, by Cory Doctorow (and my post on it)
2. AI as Normal Technology, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (and my post on it)
3. Remarks on AI from NZ, by Neal Stephenson
4. An LLM Codegen Hero’s Journey, by Harper Reed
5. Why “Science-as-a-Service” doesn’t work for Earth Science by Aravind Ravichandran (and my post on it)
6. Studio Goodbye, Studio Hello, by Craig Mod
7. How to bury your father, by Mike Monteiro