Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Scope of Reading in 2025

  • Wide mix: heavy on sci‑fi/fantasy and classics, plus history, tech, philosophy, business, and memoir.
  • Many people reported reading more than in previous years; others struggled with burnout or attention and used reading to recover.

Sci‑Fi & Fantasy Dominance

  • Highly praised: Hyperion (especially book 1; later Endymion books drew mixed or negative reactions), Stormlight Archive, Project Hail Mary, Bobiverse, The Expanse, Culture series, Red Rising, Dune rereads, Dungeon Crawler Carl (especially audiobooks), and Brandon Sanderson’s broader Cosmere.
  • Other recurring picks: Three-Body Problem trilogy, Southern Reach, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s works, Peter F. Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds, Emily St. John Mandel, Metro author’s other SF, and numerous LitRPG/progression fantasies.
  • Some noted series bloat or pacing issues (Stormlight’s length, later Hyperion books, big epics generally).

Classics & “Serious” Literature

  • Popular classics: Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, The Count of Monte Cristo, Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, Grapes of Wrath, 1984, Camus, Steinbeck, Tolstoy, Dickens, George Eliot, Proust, Kafka, Mann, Hesse, Homer, Plato, C.S. Lewis, and more.
  • Several readers were surprised how readable or modern some classics felt; others bounced off titles like Moby Dick or Meditations without more context.

Nonfiction, Tech, and Work

  • Tech/engineering: Designing Data‑Intensive Applications, Secure by Design, DDD/IDDD, Clean Architecture, Staff/manager career books, Dream Machine, telephony histories.
  • History/biography: Roman emperors, medieval Europe, Genghis Khan, Stalin, Deng, WWI/WWII, Cold War, Reagan, Chopin, wine history, Gulag/totalitarianism, religion and Buddhism.
  • Science/medicine: calculus/pop‑math, chaos, physics, brain science, biology, differential privacy, cancer, pandemics, performance/health.
  • Business/self‑help: positioning, startups, Essentialism, comfort/discomfort, finance psychology, ADHD and productivity. Reactions ranged from “life‑changing” to “waste of attention.”

Reading Habits & Meta Observations

  • Strong uptake of audiobooks and library apps (e.g., Libby) to increase volume and lower guilt about quitting books.
  • Some noticed or rejected AI‑generated nonfiction.
  • A few focused mainly on children’s books with their kids, or on newspapers as slow, nostalgic reading.
  • Several pointed out that curated HN book lists themselves are now a key discovery tool.