Favourite books read in 2025

I haven’t read as many books as I was hoping to this year, but thanks to Matter I’ve read a lot more from across the web. Their support for sending articles to the Kindle makes for an excellent experience for long-form articles.

I’ll try to write about my favourite articles in the next few days, but here are my top three books I read this year.

Between Two Kingdoms, by Suleika Jaouad

An incredible storyteller with an incredible story to tell. This was very much un-putdownable and I really enjoyed it. The reader was invited into every conversation and passing thought that really built up the narrative throughout, and how Suleika tackled some incredibly tough topics was truly inspiring.

Unreasonable Hospitality, by Will Guidara

I first spotted this from The Bear and thought it looked interesting. It was a fantastic read, with so many brilliant stories and anecdotes to really drive home the points that Will was making. The power of incredible levels of service and attention to detail cannot be understated, and thinking about how the lessons here can be applied across other industries occupied my mind for a long time after finishing it.

A Different Kind of Power, by Jacinda Ardern

Jacinda Ardern becoming PM of New Zealand felt like a turning point in global politics. Sadly that influence has perhaps not had the full effect just yet, but her style of leadership is infectious and has certainly show that there is another way. She had to deal with some huge events during her time, and she took on each one with great humility.

The overwhelmingly cheap cost of storage has meant that we rarely delete things any more.

At work we come up with an idea, research it and present our findings as something that we could do. A few months pass, an evolution on that original idea comes along. We refresh our memory from the original idea, research what’s changed and then present it as a new idea, leaving the old one as it was.

Storage is cheap. The old idea is doing no harm. It’s just a harmless old document that no one would go and read.

Until we come to train LLMs on our company documents. All of a sudden, there’s important context missing. All those old (and good bad!) ideas and out of date reports all of a sudden are presented equally for an LLM to train against.

When we then come to interrogate this knowledge, how will we know what’s useful? How will we be able to trust it?

Today shows that you can still play this as a team sport, with honesty, fairness and transparency at the centre of every race and still come out on top as champions.

Papaya rules.

I realise I’m a couple of weeks late to the party with this, but the onboarding user experience with poke.com is brilliant.

It immediately feels familiar, being positioned as a contact through an existing chat interface, and it feels as though it “knows” you within a few minutes. Negotiating a monthly price is also novel, though I expect the vast majority of users end up paying the same amount.

However, I’ve played and enjoyed it for about a week and the novelty is starting to wear off. Sure, it’s immediately accessible and has helped draft a few emails, but in each case I’ve felt the need to adjust the draft before sending. Scheduled reminders and daily briefings are nice, but I’ve struggled to fit them into any sort of routine.

This is very much the state of AI more broadly today. Novel, intriguing, powerful. But we’re still figuring out how to integrate it properly. The real power is still to come. We’re still in the dial-up era.