by Narain Jashanmal on December 12, 2025
I.
Twenty-six books read this year. By volume, an outlier. By format, a conformist: twenty of those twenty-six were audiobooks, consumed while walking Dubai's empty sidewalks.
That ratio is a tell. The library has become a stream: something that flows through the hours we used to lose to silence or ambience. Print, meanwhile, has retreated to the shores. Five books read on paper this year, reserved for subjects that demanded I stop moving and look. No screens in the bedroom; if I read before sleep, it's a physical book. These aren't rules so much as choices about where different kinds of attention belong.
I didn't plan a curriculum. But looking back at the year's reading, patterns emerge. The list reads less like a log of consumption and more like an attempt to triangulate a moment, to fix a position using the old instruments of the book while the ground underneath shifts toward something new.
II.
American adults now average under sixteen minutes of leisure reading per day, down from twenty-two minutes two decades ago. Among thirteen-year-olds, only seventeen percent read for fun almost daily, half the rate of 1984. Meanwhile, 4.4 million blog posts are published every single day. The denominator of available content has grown without limit; the numerator of attention remains fixed.
This isn't decline from some golden age. Reading for pleasure, as a mass phenomenon, is historically recent, a product of industrialized printing, public education, and the specific economics of the twentieth century. What we're witnessing is adaptation: the stream has widened, and we've learned to skim its surface rather than dive. Over half of links shared on social media are shared by people who never clicked through to read the article. The headline has become the text.
The attention economy rewards what is fast, visual, and algorithmically surfaced. Deep reading—the slow, linear immersion in a long argument or a complex narrative—requires the opposite: deliberate withdrawal from the stream. It has become a choice rather than a default, an opt-in rather than the ambient condition.
III.
Looking at the list, I can trace currents rather than draw categories. Some books flowed together naturally; others created eddies, pulling me back to questions I thought I'd moved past.
One current ran through the material reality of computation. Chip War, Apple in China, Co-Intelligence, Novacene—a progression from the industrial to the speculative, but all insisting on the same truth: the digital is physical. The cloud is heavy. It eats electricity, drinks water, and depends on supply chains that route through a handful of fabs in Taiwan and the Netherlands. Political power in 2025 flows not from the barrel of a gun but from the extreme ultraviolet optics of an ASML lithography machine. Nick Clegg's How to Save the Internet added another layer of materiality: regulation. Technology has a long history of treating policy as friction to be routed around; it has now run headlong into the reality that laws, too, are substrate. Even Lovelock's Novacene, which posits that we are midwives to a new dominant intelligence, is conditional on all of this holding together. The post-human future isn't guaranteed; it's contingent.
Another current carried questions about friction—where the algorithm meets resistance. SAM, Jonathan Waldman's account of engineers trying to build a bricklaying robot, is a years-long struggle against the imperfection of bricks, the fickleness of mortar, the unpredictability of weather. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum and Taming Hal extended this to interface design: systems built by engineers for engineers, forcing humans to think like machines. In 2025, the dominant interface for AI is still the chat box: a blinking cursor, an empty field, the tyranny of the blank prompt. It assumes you know what to ask, that your need is articulable in text, that conversation is the right metaphor. It often isn't. The books in this current are preparation for the experimentation ahead.
And then there were books that resisted the current entirely. Gambling Man, Lionel Barber's biography of Masayoshi Son, is a study in what happens when a single human personality bends capital markets through sheer conviction, right or wrong. Showpiece City, Todd Reisz's monumental history of Dubai, demanded print: maps, photographs, plans. You cannot skim a city into existence. Dubai didn't stumble into being; it was willed onto shifting sands by people making irreversible bets about what the future would want. I read it while living in the city it describes, watching the next layer of that bet get built outside my window.
The memoirs formed their own eddy. I Regret Almost Everything, Without Reservation, A Thousand Threads, The Enchanters. Keith McNally's neurotic self-laceration, Jeremy King's devotion to service, Neneh Cherry's weaving of art and family and displacement, James Ellroy's fever-dream reconstruction of 1960s Los Angeles. What they share is a quality algorithms cannot replicate: regret, or its cousin: the long(ing) backward glance at a life that couldn't have been optimized, only lived.
IV.
The format metadata tells its own story. Seventeen audiobooks, five print books, one ebook. The middle ground is vanishing.
Audio has colonized the interstitial: the walk, the errand, the hours that used to belong to silence or to nothing at all. This is what Walter Ong called "secondary orality": a return to the ear as primary receptor, but mediated through technology rather than presence. Complex arguments in Chip War or Novacene arrive through the auditory cortex, which evolved for narrative and dialogue, not for the dense logic of the page. I retain the arc, the characters, the feel of these books more than I retain their specific data. The library has become a soundtrack. I can hum the melody; I'd struggle to transcribe the score.
There's an irony here. Deep Work and Hooked, read back to back, form a diptych: the mechanics of the attention trap and the discipline required to escape it. I consumed both as audiobooks while walking. We value sustained focus; our environment forces us to consume arguments for it through fragmented channels.
Print, meanwhile, has become a deliberate act. The five books I read on paper weren't arbitrary—they were subjects that refused to stream. Showpiece City required maps, plans, photographs; you cannot listen to urbanism. The Enchanters resisted audio for different reasons: Ellroy's prose is dense, alliterative, syntactically violent. It demands the eye. Designing Visual Interfaces and Taming Hal were professional texts that needed annotation, flipping back, spatial memory. These books asked me to stop moving.
The ebook—one title, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum—sits awkwardly between. Screen-based but still text; portable but not ambient. I suspect this format will continue to shrink (for me, at least), squeezed between the convenience of audio and the fidelity of print. The middle seldom holds.
What does this split mean? Perhaps only that reading has stratified by purpose. Audio for breadth, for keeping up, for letting ideas wash over me while the body is occupied. Print for depth, for difficulty, for subjects where skimming is surrender. I'm not sure this is decline. It might just be differentiation.
If there's a single thread connecting the most unlikely pairings on the list, it's friction.
V.
The frictionless world is a fiction. The robot in SAM failed because the physical world—with its inconsistent mortar and fickle weather—refused to align with the elegance of code. Showpiece City proved that a metropolis cannot be skimmed into existence; it must be dragged out of the sand. Even the memoirs on the list were catalogs of productive resistance—struggles with staff, with ego, with the sheer difficulty of doing things well.
Every system that promises seamlessness—the app, the platform, the algorithm—is hiding the friction rather than eliminating it. It's been pushed into the supply chain, the content moderation queue, the pricing model, the terms of service. The books I found most valuable this year were the ones that foregrounded what others obscure: the gears grinding, the resistance, the parts that don't optimize.
Perhaps this is why the chat box feels inadequate. It presents itself as frictionless—just type what you want—while concealing the immense difficulty of knowing what you want, of articulating it precisely, of iterating toward something you couldn't have specified at the start. The best interfaces will be the ones that make productive friction visible rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
VI.
Reading isn't dying. It's separating, into stream and shore, into flow and friction.
The research on deep reading describes a consistent pattern: fewer people immersing in long-form text, more people skimming surfaces, attention fragmenting across platforms. But the aggregate obscures the distribution. A "reading class" is emerging, not through illiteracy or lack of access, but through preference and habit. Some will continue to read books, long articles, complex arguments. Many will function perfectly well with summaries, videos, and AI-generated briefs. Both groups will be literate. They'll inhabit different relationships to knowledge.
I'm not sure which group I belong to. The format split in my own reading suggests I'm amphibious, capable of swimming in the stream, still willing to haul myself onto the shore when the subject demands it. Twenty audiobooks say I've adapted to the current. Five print books say I haven't fully surrendered.
The amphibious reader is an unstable position. It requires constant negotiation: what deserves the stream, what demands the shore? The answer isn't fixed by genre or subject matter. It's fixed by what I need from the encounter. Some books I want to wash over me, leaving residue. Others I need to wrestle with, marking pages, returning to passages, letting difficulty do its work.
The risk is that the shore erodes. Each year the stream runs faster, carries more, makes the case for convenience more persuasive. Staying amphibious requires intention—choosing, sometimes, the slower and harder thing.
VII.
The year's reading wasn't a syllabus. I didn't set out to triangulate anything. But curation, even when unconscious, reveals intent. The books we choose are choices about where to direct the small allotment of attention we have left after the stream takes its share.
Twenty-six books. A mix of currents and eddies, audio and print, flow and friction. Some taught me how the machines work. Others reminded me what they can't replicate. A few demanded that I stop, sit down, and submit to difficulty.
In a world of infinite content and finite attention, the act of reading a book, any book, but especially a long one, a hard one, a physical one, has become a small act of defiance. Not against technology, which I use—and build—daily. Against the assumption that convenience is always the right optimization. Against the flattening of experience into feed.
The stream will keep running. I'll keep swimming in it. But I intend to keep climbing out, and jumping back in.
The List
- SAM, One Robot, a Dozen Engineers, and the Race to Revolutionize the Way We Build — Jonathan Waldman | audiobook
- The Whole Story — John Mackey | audiobook
- The Ten Faces of Innovation — Tom Kelley | audiobook
- Careless People — Sarah Wynn-Williams | audiobook
- Hooked — Nir Eyal | audiobook
- A Thousand Threads — Neneh Cherry | audiobook
- 2020: A Reckoning — Eric Klinenberg | audiobook
- Co-Intelligence — Ethan Mollick | audiobook
- Novacene — James Lovelock | audiobook
- Barking Up The Wrong Tree — Eric Barker | audiobook
- Apple in China — Patrick McGee | audiobook
- Trillion Dollar Coach — Jonathan Rosenberg | audiobook
- Deep Work — Cal Newport | audiobook
- Broca's Brain — Carl Sagan | audiobook
- Humans Need Not Apply — Jerry Kaplan | audiobook
- Gambling Man — Lionel Barber | audiobook
- Chip War — Chris Miller | audiobook
- How to Save the Internet — Nick Clegg | audiobook
- I Regret Almost Everything — Keith McNally | audiobook
- Without Reservation — Jeremy King | audiobook
- Showpiece City — Todd Reisz | print
- The Enchanters — James Ellroy | print
- Top This and Other Parables of Design — Phil Patton | print
- Designing Visual Interfaces — Kevin Mullet | print
- Taming Hal — Asaf Degani | print
- The Inmates Are Running the Asylum — Alan Cooper | ebook