Hey :)
Here’s a link to the books I read in 2025:
If you have any questions, hit reply.
While I’m here, I thought I’d share a few reading lessons from this past year:
- I read roughly half of the books I started. That feels like a good lesson in itself — move on quickly if a book isn’t serving you. You can always come back to it later.
- I made a very deliberate shift to using my Kindle more in 2025. Mostly for convenience, but also to reduce the number of business books I buy and keep. Carrying giant biographies around on our summer holiday was a big trigger here.
- I want my home library to be stocked with books I genuinely love. A lot of business books don’t need to be kept, and I’ve given many of them away this year. That’s another reason the Kindle has become my default for business reading.
- I’m working on making the Kindle my default device instead of my phone — even opening the Kindle app when I feel the urge to doom scroll on Instagram.
- I’m consciously decreasing time on my phone and increasing time with my reMarkable and Kindle. Not only are e-readers very good now, they’re mostly distraction-free, which feels healthier for me.
- I really like the extra utility I get from highlights in non-fiction and business books on Kindle. Being able to export notes and drop them into GPT for ideas and implementation has been genuinely useful.
- I also got much better at creating wish lists for books. I keep a growing Kindle wish list on Amazon, organise it from low to high price, and check it regularly. I’m usually looking for books discounted under £2.99 and picking them up when deals pop up.
- I was asked about my reading habits a few years ago on a podcast, and it made me realise something I do a lot: once I find a good author, I tend to get all their books. This year that showed up with Richard Koch — especially the 80/20 Principle books and some of his other consulting work — and also Patrick Lencioni. Once you find someone who’s a good writer with solid ideas, even if there’s some repetition across the books, that repetition is actually helpful. It hammers the ideas home and helps them stick.
- As much as I’ve defaulted to Kindle, if I can find the same books cheaper on World of Books, I’ll do that too. For example, I picked up around eight Patrick Lencioni hardbacks for about £3.99 each, which was cheaper than buying them on Kindle. World of Books is also a charity organisation, so it feels like the right thing to do. And for business books especially, you don’t really need them to be brand new.
Curious what you learned about your own reading in 2025 — and if there’s anything you want to do differently with it in 2026?
Chris.