Happy New Year folks!

Here’s what I read in 2025. Hope you find a gem or two for your lists. (Previous issues: 2024, 2023)

Non-fiction

The Ascent of Money – Niall Ferguson

A convincing case that finance shaped the modern world pretty much at every turn, starting with the financialisation of wars, colonisation, industrialisation, and into globalization which is a better known story. It’s a heavy read but definitely worth it.

🏆 The Spy and the Traitor – Ben Macintyre

The true story of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB colonel who spied for MI6 at the height of the Cold War. The personal sacrifice, decades of secrecy, and audacity of everyone involved (especially for his last escape) is unforgettable. Gordievsky passed away in March, when I learned about him in this FT obituary (the comments section was full of his grateful readers of this book from the free world). Rest in Peace Oleg!

With the KGB’s net closing in, Gordievsky activated an MI6 plan to extricate him. While he stood on a Moscow street holding a Safeway shopping bag, a British spy walked past him with a Harrods bag and chewing a Mars bar — a sign that the plan would go ahead.

The Technological Republic – Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

The case for the US to stop treating tech as entertainment/commerce and start treating it (as it used to at the start of Silicon Valley) as the backbone of sovereignty and security. Their arguments against the privacy pushback on state-level AI: the right way to preserve privacy is legitimate institutions and more public oversight—not opting out of capability (as adversaries will develop them).

🇫🇷 Sauver l’information de l’emprise des milliardaires – Olivier Legrain & Vincent Edin

Un essai assez convainquant sur danger direct pour le pluralisme que représente la detention de presque tous les grands medias (journaux & TV) par les milliardaires en France (Bolloré, Niel, Draghi, Arnault, Dassault, Sterin). Internet a permis l’émergence d’un contre-pouvoir hors des groupes détenus par grandes fortunes (ex. Mediapart, Reporterre, Les Jours) mais au modèle économique vulnérable et avec beaucoup moins de force de frappe.

🇫🇷 Où sont passés nos milliards ? – Lucie Castets

Castets pose la question suivante: la dépense publique augmente, donc pourquoi les services se dégradent? En résumé sa réponse est que certes les dépenses augmentent mais pas suffisemment sur les services de premiere ligne (hopital, école, justice), et trop sur du ‘back office’, niches fiscales & sociales, aides aux entreprises et crédits d’impots (e.g CiR), subventions, dispositifs d’urgence / boucliers.

🏆 Paris ’44 – Patrick Bishop

A fast-pace, thriller-style telling of the liberation of Paris, from the last years of occupation to the climactic days of August 1944. So many interesting and heroic characters portrayed, whose names I now enjoy with a new eye around Paris landmarks.

The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant – Tae Kim

The first history of Nvidia; amazingly none had been written before this one coming which came out in December 2024. We’d all heard the stories of Huang’s intensity, 50+ direct reports, etc. but stories of the relentless execution and risk-taking is really the stuff of legends, and this was worth a read. I just wished Kim had tried to answer the ‘why’ behind Huang’s drive a bit more. My notes here.

🏆 Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future – Dan Wang

A sharp analysis of China as an “engineering state”, the US as a “lawyerly society” and what it means for global competition. My notes here.

🏆 Down and Out in Paris and London – George Orwell

I had never read this classic, and was prompted to read more Orwell following this really excellent interview of Hitch on EconTalk, about Orwell’s legacy and prophetism about the 3 great ills of the 20th century (imperialism, fascism, communism). As expected it’s a very powerful and moving description of poverty in Paris and London in the 20s/30s. The style reminded me a lot of Herman Melville’s (I’m still halfway through Moby Dick…), leaving no stone unturned in the descriptions and mixing facts with a moral appreciation of situations. I’ll definitely wander in the 5th arrondissement with a new eye…

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

Nevertheless he was a good fellow, generous by nature and capable of sharing his last crust with a friend; indeed he did literally share his last crust with me more than once. He was probably capable of work too, if he had been well fed for a few months. But two years of bread and margarine had lowered his standards hopelessly. He had lived on this filthy imitation of food till his whole mind and body were compounded of inferior stuff. It was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood.

A tramp tramps, not because he likes it, but for the same reason as a car keeps to the left; because there happens to be a law compelling him to do so. A destitute man, if he is not supported by the parish, can only get relief at the casual wards, and as each casual ward will only admit him for one night, he is automatically kept moving. He is a vagrant because, in the state of the law, it is that or starve. But people have been brought up to believe in the tramp-monster, and so they prefer to think that there must be some more or less villainous motive for tramping.

Fiction

The Vegetarian – Han Kang

The unsettling story of a South Korean women who refuses to eat meat, and the ramifications on her life, relationships and health. The clinical prose and way that the story is told through three vantage points, none of which being the women herself, which made this book particularly uncomfortable.

Clamser à Tataouine – Raphaël Quenard

J’ai beaucoup aimé le style et l’humour noir grincant de ce livre, meme si j’ai eu du mal à en tirer des conclusions.