The Best of 64 Books Read in 2025: A Psychologist's Obsessions
I am unsure of whether it is a compliment or not, but my most widely read article every year is my annual list of book recommendations. Please tell me you digested last year’s batch? If not, get on it:
Provoked is for playful, intelligent, creative, and discerning readers. If you enjoy this article, support the mission (be a free subscriber or get premium benefits).
I read 64 books this year, which was higher than expected since I am trying to stay in monk mode, finishing my next book (here). A few reminded me how incredible other people’s brains can be and how, no matter how many ayahuasca retreats I attend, my creativity will never match certain authors. Let me share my awe, admiration, and exuberance for these authors…
Before I get to the individual books, let me tell you what I noticed this year.
I developed an emotional crush on Taylor Jenkins Reid. Malibu Rising, Maybe in Another Life, Carrie Soto Is Back, Daisy Jones & The Six. I went deep on her. She writes about ambition, family secrets, the price of greatness, and how past events bleed into the now. She writes on the psychology of divorce and reinvention with a ruthlessness psychologists should envy. Draw your own conclusions about why that appealed to me this year.
I kept circling cult and group psychology. The Compound by Aisling Rawle. The True Happiness Company. Mister Magic (holy wackadoodles!). The Collective Edge by Colin M. Fisher. Something about how groups reshape our identities and sometimes destroy us. I’m working through something here.
I read a pile of contrarian psychology and social science. The Status Game by Will Storr . Conformity by Sunstein. Defy by Dr. Sunita Sah. Outraged by Kurt Gray . Talk by Alison Wood Brooks, PhD. This is my wheelhouse: status signaling, the courage to dissent, why we fight, how great conversations operate.
I consumed thrillers that tackled the underbelly of relationships (you think I care whether books are targeting women or child readers???). Sharon Bolton’s stuff. The Neighbour’s Secret. The Neighbors. The Sleep Experiment. Domestic darkness. What happens behind closed doors.
And I was drawn to bizarro reinvention stories. There Is No Ethan (a catfishing deep-dive). The Day Tripper. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. In Five Years.
You don’t plan your reading year. You pick up what calls to you and discover later what you were really looking for. With that, here’s what stuck out most.
The Books That Mattered
Culpability — Bruce Holsinger
A self-driving car kills someone. A family’s vacation unravels. And Holsinger asks the question that will define the next century: When AI makes a decision, who’s responsible?
The setup: five family members, each hiding something, trapped in a beach house as investigators close in. The mother is a MacArthur genius who designed the algorithm running the car. One daughter has been confiding secrets to an AI chatbot. The vacation house is smart-surveilled. Every scene drips with ambient AI.
Holsinger captures something about upper-middle-class fragility despite the seemingly functional outside trappings. The husband clawed his way up from a blue-collar family; the wife was born into privilege and doesn’t notice the insulation. Their collision with algorithmic consequence reveals fault lines that were always there.
It’s also a damn good thriller with a final sentence that made me say “holy mother fucking flying spaghetti monsters” out loud.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls — Haruki Murakami
Murakami is my eternal Nobel Prize-winning author and it remains a travesty that he has yet to win. At 74, he returned to an idea that haunted him for forty years. He first wrote this as a novella in 1980, then reworked it into Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World in 1985 (one of the best fictional novels ever!). He was never satisfied. This is his third attempt.
The story follows a teenage love lost to a walled city that exists somewhere between dream and memory. The girl vanishes. The boy spends decades unable to move on. He eventually enters the city only to find her frozen at sixteen while he’s middle-aged.
Be prepared, as the pacing is glacial. Critics call it self-indulgent. They’re wrong. The slowness is what separates this book from anything else you will read and (and!) it mirrors how longing moves through time. Get it - here
🔒 For the Curious, the rest of my list is below
Starting with the book that has no business being this good…
