If 2024 was the year the day job started bleeding into the reading list, 2025 went the other way: deep into the comfort of a re-read, picking up a childhood favourite series mid-binge from the tail end of last year and mostly not coming up for air. There’s still a clear professional thread running through some of the non-fiction below — forecasting, statistics, diplomacy — but the dominant note this year was nostalgia rather than work.
A third of the list below is one extended re-read/listen, continuing where Tom Clancy left us at the end of 2024; the rest is a genuine grab-bag: more Neil Gaiman audio drama, a slice of ocean science, a slim Viking history, and a single short story that’s stuck with me more than most novels manage.
So, in reading/listening order for 2025:
- The Sum of All Fears (2014) by Tom Clancy [⟳, but first time audiobook]
- Debt of Honor (2014) by Tom Clancy [⟳, but first time audiobook]
- Executive Orders (2014) by Tom Clancy [⟳, but first time audiobook]
- The Bear and the Dragon (2014) by Tom Clancy [⟳, but first time audiobook]
- Blue Machine (2023) by Helen Czerski
- Collateral Damage: Britain, America, and Europe in the Age of Trump (2021) by Kim Darroch
- Naked Statistics (2013) by Charles Wheelan
- Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (2015) by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
- The Sandman (2020) by Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs [⟳]
- The Sandman: Act II (2020) by Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs
- Excerpts from the Text of an Explanatory Stele Erected for our Edification by the Scholars of the Outer Orion Tendril (2021) by Timons Esaias
- The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire (2021) by Tore Skeie
My favourites of 2025 were as follows:
- The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire (2021) by Tore Skeie — having spent the best part of three years getting through Bernard Cornwell’s fictionalised version of this exact period, it felt overdue to read the real history behind it. Skeie is genuinely excellent on the politics and brutality of the North Sea world without ever losing the narrative pace of the novels it’s effectively standing in for.
- Blue Machine (2023) by Helen Czerski — a physicist’s tour of the ocean as one vast, interconnected engine of currents, heat and life, picked up after the best part of eight years as a non-executive director of Welsh Water, and a slow-building interest in environmental systems that the day job alone doesn’t quite explain. Genuinely changed how I think about something I’d otherwise taken for granted.
- And an honourable mention to the four sequential instalments of the Jack Ryan saga by Tom Clancy — The Sum of All Fears, Debt of Honor, Executive Orders and The Bear and the Dragon. Properly formative books from my teenage years (not least for an entirely disproportionate knowledge of 1980s and 1990s US and Soviet military hardware), and an odd experience reading Cold War-vintage geopolitical fiction back-to-back with Kim Darroch‘s Collateral Damage, a real diplomat’s account of some of the same dynamics playing out in practice.
The tsundoku pile is, at this point, basically structural. Plan for next year, as predictably as ever: must do better. Enjoy!
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