Mostly a place where I write down things I repeat often so that instead of repeating them so often, I can just send a link.
Well, today, I was asked three times some variation of the question, “I follow you on GoodReads/your blog/your newsletter, and I know you’re busy, so how do you find time to read so much?!”
So, here’s my reading “cadence” so to speak.
At any given time if you check out my GoodReads profile, you’ll probably find I’m currently reading five books. Five is a pretty stable number because specifically, it’s five slots:
One physical book. Nowadays, this is usually non-fiction or graphic novel.
One fiction audiobook. I usually listen to some kind of fiction while driving, showering, or doing some particularly routine chores, like breaking down cardboard boxes. These are tasks that require basically no thought, so I can mentally really invest in the story.
One non-fiction audiobook. I like to listen to non-fiction books specifically while doing things that require me to be a little cognitively present in the world, like cleaning the fish tank, doing evening chores, shaving, etc. Since non-fiction is more straightforward in what it’s saying, I feel more comfortable listening to it while semi-distracted because it’s more apparent when I’ve missed something and need to bounce back.
One Kindle book. Ideally I’d read my current Kindle book instead of doomscrolling. In practice, I rarely have time for either nowadays.
So, the short answer is: it’s a lot of audiobooks while doing other things. There are some people that don’t consider audiobooks to really be “reading”, and that’s fine—to each their own. But I do, so I include that in my recommendations. Honestly, for fiction, I often prefer the audiobooks—especially with a busy schedule, a good narrator voicing different characters can go a long way toward helping keep track of characters that would run together in text. I originally switched from paperback books to audiobooks for the Discworld series because I had so little time to read paperbacks, but once I did I wish I’d listened to the entire series that way—the narration was significantly more immersive, and the ease of popping on an audiobook meant that I rarely went a day without listening to at least a little, which made it easier to keep up with the story. Multiple times I had to go back a couple chapters when reading a physical book because I had been away for a week and couldn’t remember what the heck was going on.
I enjoy my non-fiction audiobooks more than my physical copies too, although that might be more sampling bias: if a book has an audiobook available, I’ll read it that way, and I’m guessing better books are more likely to have audiobooks available.
It wasn’t always like this, granted. When my daughter first got me into reading, I almost exclusively read physical books because I found that reading was a really convenient hobby to have with young kids: there were so many empty 5-10 minute spots throughout the day that reading a physical book was easy to squeeze in. But as they got older, there got to be fewer windows where I knew I had a brief bit of free time, and so time for physical books waned.
I’ve also been asked, “You listen while showering? But that’s when I have my best ideas!” And, yeah, I’ve had that thought, too. I originally started listening to audiobooks in the shower and other medium-attention times of day during COVID when I just didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts for any period of time whatsoever, but I’ve stuck with that because… well, I enjoy it.
Now the one thing that might throw people off is that when I post a list of the books I read each month, it’s always a picture of physical copies. I’ve heard this referred to as “shelf trophies”, and that’s part of it; having the physical book is sort of motivating, too. But the bigger part is that it’s hard to go back and skim an audiobook for a favorite part or a specific quote or a refresher, but that’s easier to do with a physical book. I very often revisit books I’ve listened to through the audio version.
And most of the Kindle books I read are books we already have a physical copy of because it’s what my wife read.
So, to answer the question of how I read so much: mostly audiobooks while doing other things I would need to be doing anyway.
When I created Foundations of Generative AI last summer, I committed a cardinal sin: I quoted a book I hadn’t fully read. I saw the quote from the authors on LinkedIn and read the first chapter, but I hadn’t read the entire book.
Fortunately, the book is fantastic. The book AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, is a fantastic exploration of some of the undeserved hype, overblown risks, and understated downsides to artificial intelligence.
But there was something interesting as well: the audiobook had a bonus chapter, a sort of podcast about what’s new since the original publication date. One of the things this bonus chapter surfaced was the idea of using AI for literature reviews, and its tendency to reinforce a “rich get richer” approach.
I’ve tried to find anywhere else that idea might be unpacked more completely. They also wrote a fantastic article on their blog titled “Could AI slow science?” in July 2025 that alluded to the idea, but the audiobook unpacked it in more detail. There have been other articles about this, like this one, and this one, and this one, but none of them really directly tie into the bonus chapter’s notes.
So, I’m sharing this for three reasons:
AI Snake Oil is a great book.
Citation collapse was already getting discussed before my article. I wish I’d listened to the book first so I could have tied into their commentary on the topic.
If anyone knows more specifically what they’re talking about in the bonus chapter, let me know!
So, to make this make sense, it’s important for me to share a couple interesting little details about where I live and my daily routine.
About ten years ago, we built a house—well, hired a company to build a house—next door to the house I grew up in.
Then, six years ago, my oldest child started attending the same school that I attended from elementary school through high school graduation. It’s about a 20-minute drive away. I handle morning carpool.
The combination of those two elements means that every single morning, I drive the exact same route that I drove every single morning 20 years ago when I was a senior driving myself to high school.
That’s given me some weird perspective on how some things have changed. For one, although there’s this idea that traffic is generally always getting worse, I can say with confidence that for this particular singular route, traffic has actually gotten better over the last 20 years. When I was a senior, if I didn’t get out of the house by 7:10AM, I wouldn’t be in class by 8:00AM. The route is 20 minutes with no traffic, but back then, traffic was bad, and it got exponentially worse from 7:10AM to 7:30AM. But nowadays while we aim to leave at 7:10AM, we’re actually just fine as far as literal tardiness is concerned if we pull out at 7:25AM or 7:30AM.
But there’s a more specific trend I’ve noticed. When I was in high school, traffic on Friday was always worse. On Fridays I really needed to aim for 7:00AM. I don’t know why that was, but it was reliably true. There’s actually an old joke that made the rounds on social media about Atlanta traffic—I found a version of it on reddit. The key line is:
The morning rush hour is from 5:00 am to noon. The evening rush hour is from noon to 7:00 pm. Friday’s rush hour starts on Thursday morning.
It was a joke, but it felt like there was some truth. Friday rush hour was always way heavier.
This morning, I took my kids to school. We rolled out at 7:07AM: I checked the timestamp on our security cameras. Usually at that time on other weekdays, we’d be looking at about 25 minutes. Back in high school, Friday would add 10 minutes. But instead, we rolled into carpool at 7:26AM. 19 minutes. For context, when I took them to an event on Saturday morning when there were basically zero other cars on the road, it took us 17 minutes.
That wasn’t a one-off occurrence. The past two years, I’ve known that on Fridays, we can afford to leave fifteen minutes later and still get to school in plenty of time. But twenty years ago, Friday meant leaving ten minutes earlier.
What changed, and why am I babbling about this in an article about a four-day workweek? More and more, I’ve been reading about how one of the “compromises” around remote work has been remote Fridays. Companies are specifically designating Friday as the work-from-home day. There’s some precedent for that as well: I remember when I worked for a company, they instituted no-meeting Fridays as a similar opportunity to focus on deeper work. I know colleagues at Georgia Tech who similarly try to set aside Friday for paper-writing, assignment-grading, and other non-meeting activities.
If everyone’s working remotely on Fridays, that certainly explains the lack of traffic I’ve seen. But there have also been lots of articles about Friday “quiet-quitting”, or confession posts on sites like reddit from employees noting how they actually spend their remote days.
In my opinion, here’s the reality: while throughout history there have been times where a big, top-down mandate for a 40-hour workweek or a 5-day workweek or some other constraint has been handed down, the majority of developments happen over time, naturally, and organically. Right now, with the rise of AI, we’re seeing individuals’ productivity rise in a way that has many people calling for shortened workweeks. But rarely does a company come out and say, “Everyone’s 25% more productive, so you all get Friday off!”
But what does happen is that the productivity gains from AI merge with the social changes toward remote Fridays to create a world where people are able to work four day workweeks with no real negative repercussions. They get their work done, and their new day off happens to coincide with a day where their colleagues, who are given the same “remote” day, are also off, so the real-time pressure to be available diminishes. The four day workweek isn’t dictated, but it emerges.
Of course, there are places this will take more time than others. Anything that requires a lot of synchronous interaction will by necessity be slower to move. But coming out of COVID, lots of schools have replaced snow days with digital learning days. Is it a far stretch to imagine a near-future where schools institute digital learning Fridays, where Friday is set aside as a day for students to work asynchronously and for teachers to catch up on planning and grading… only to quickly morph into another day off as those tasks are instead integrated into typical free periods and study halls?
Ten years from now, it would not surprise me in the least if the world—or at least the United States—had generally converged on an unspoken four-day workweek for office workers, where Friday is designated as a remote work day but where—like good students in middle school—we all finished our homework during the day and got some free time back.
As I’ve done the last five years (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), I’m ending the year by selecting the top ten books that I, personally, read in the past year—regardless of when they were released. I don’t usually review books because for the most part, if I don’t like a book, I think that says more about the reader–book fit than the value of the book itself; but I do like to specifically recommend books that I think will appeal to a lot of people (or improve a lot of people’s lives), and this is my once-yearly way of doing that. And as always, an entire series might qualify as “one” of the ten books if I don’t think it’s possible to separate the appeal of any single book from the series as a whole.
An interesting note on my “methodology”: the way I make these lists is to go back through my Goodreads list for the year and look for books I assigned 5 stars (for context: I almost never give a rating other than 5 stars; 5 stars mark my favorite books, 1 stars mark the extremely rare books I think are objectively bad, and every other book doesn’t get a rating). I copy them down here, pre-assigning them to either my Top Ten or to the honorable mentions. Then, depending how the numbers work out, I either drop a couple down to Honorable Mention or select my favorites from the honorable mentions to move into the top section to get to ten.
This year there was no moving up and down; there were ten books I identified as my ten favorites from the get-go. Neat.
So, here are my top “ten” books that I read in 2025, in no particular order. Well, technically, in a very particular order: the order in the year in which I read them.
Lifeform by Jenny Slate. I love the way Jenny Slate writes right at that line between prose and poetry, and how the individual short stories leave you wondering how autobiographical each one might actually be. She’s one of the only authors I’ve found that can make you laugh, cry, and think in the same sentence, let alone in the same book.
The 22 Murders of Madison May by Max Barry. I’m three-for-three with Max Barry, Providence and Jennifer Government were already two of my all-time favorites. In this one, I love the light-touch sci-fi angle that stays in the background except where necessary, and I love the twist. My favorite kinds of twists are those that connect to something outside the story itself, whether that’s the book’s name, the book’s structure, or the book’s literal printing style.
The Scholomance Trilogy by Naomi Novik. I thoroughly enjoyed this sort of alternate take on the school-of-magic trope. I appreciated how it confronted the necessary realities of the setup head-on and incorporated them into the world-building rather than hand-waving it away as “well, I guess everyone’s just okay with sending their kids to such a dangerous place.” I also loved how it reflected real-world questions of society and equality without getting too heavy-handed: it was easy to read as a story on its own without constantly figuring out the source of an allegory, but it was also easy to pick up that the darker implications of the book’s world are mirrored in the real world.
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. I’ve thought about picking a single book of the year in addition to my top ten, but some years there’s not a clear favorite. This year, though, there was, and it was this. It’s a science-backed account of the evidence of humanity’s inherent goodness, along with a compelling explanation of how that goodness gets co-opted for evil—and what we can do about it. My latest entry into my eventual list of “books I wish everyone would read”.
The Martian by Andy Weir. I said this a couple years ago when Project Hail Mary was one of my favorites, but it almost seems silly to add my two cents to something written by an author as popular as Andy Weir, except to say again—my expectations for this book were sky-high, and yet it still exceeded my expectations.
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. I really appreciated this attempt to bring science to some intercultural differences that we feel intuitively, but struggle to describe without getting into overgeneralized stereotypes. I’ve found myself putting it into use on multiple occasions already (and, worse, revisited conversations I’ve had over the years with a new realization about the context and finally figured out what I should have said differently—oh well).
The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian. I loved this book even though, interestingly, it doesn’t actually talk about the alignment problem itself that much. What I loved is that it talks about how deeply entwined machine and human learning have been, and it gives several anecdotes about how each have informed the other over the years. It’s amazing how many times something was discovered in one field—either cognitive science/neuroscience or machine learning—that made the other field say, “Huh… we should try that, too” only to find out it’s true for both artificial neural nets and real brains. I find it particularly fascinating that while psychology has evolved from behaviorism to cognitivism, early AI efforts were more more cognitive while more recent improvements are more behaviorist in many ways.
Playground by Richard Powers. I read this at the same time as The Alignment Problem, and they’re bizarrely good companions: not only does Playground tell the lightly-fictionalized origin story of a ChatGPT-like AI assistant, but while The Alignment Problem focuses on how AI learning is similar to human learning, Playground focuses on how human relationships have a massive impact on technological development, which then impacts human society. It also has one of those phenomenal structural twists like The 22 Murders of Madison May, although to experience it fully I’d highly recommend reading it rather than listening to the audiobook.
I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin. I always feel a little weird putting Jason Pargin’s books among my top books of the year (this is the third time in four years) because the humor is pretty vulgar and errs on the juvenile side, but he has this remarkable ability to write stories that seem absolutely absurd and immediately realistic at the same time—in a way that makes you reflect on how something so ridiculous can also be so believable. And in this book, what really shined through was how he created characters that would usually be extremely unsympathetic, but revealed their backstories in a way that made them believable and understandable. You constantly find yourself saying, “I think this character’ is absurd’s beliefs are despicable, but I can understand where they came form”, which I think is a truly rare form of character writing.
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor. This was going to be an honorable mention for me until right at the end—it’s a really entertaining and novel story featuring a fascinating look at a different culture (different to me, anyway), some questions from the near-future about augmented humanity, and a story that sort of meandered but was fun to follow nonetheless… until the twist at the end. it’s similar to Playground and The 22 Murders of Madison May in that the twist is less within the plot and more structural to the book as a whole, and it completely changes the entire story.
And that aside, my (long, long) list of honorable mentions for 2025. Some of these have comments, some of these are just me saying, “Hey, I liked this one too!”
Honorable Mentions:
Ninth House and Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo. The fact that Bardugo actually went to Yale and was a member of one of these societies just makes everything more fun to read.
Alter and Point Nemo by Jeremy Robinson. It was cool listening to Jeremy Robinson do something a little more serious with Alter, and Point Nemo was just typical action-packed Jeremy Robinson in a good way.
Night Watch, Thud!, and Snuff by Terry Pratchett. I’d always heard the later City Watch books were Pratchett at his best, and I agree after these.
A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars by Les Johnson. This book reminds me of the math books of the 1950s and 1960s whose techniques would one day power artificial intelligence once computers got strong enough. It walks through how we’ve already demonstrated what specific engineering problems must be solved to enable interstellar travel, and how close we are. I read Pale Blue Dot this year, too, and A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars feels to me like a more up-to-date version of it.
A Very Punchable Face by Colin Jost. Also hilarious. The timing (2021) also made it an interesting snapshot, given that it was written at the height of COVID and by someone who tells political jokes for a living.
Nemesis by Jeremy Robinson. So an interesting little slice of history: Robinson wrote his Project Nemesis series before writing Infinite, which established itself as the frame story for a lot of Robinson’s other works. One of the worlds Infinite visited was the world of Nemesis, and it was one of my favorite chapters, so it made me go read the entirety of Project Nemesis. It was great, except the chapter in Infinite was actually a sort of alternate-universe take on Project Nemesis that I really wanted to read more about… and then this book came out, which is the actual alternate universe Nemesis story from the Infinite series. And it was really good.
This year as well, Goodreads added some cool little visuals for the “My Year in Books” recap:
Sort of a random set of books to highlight, but hey. I found this interesting, too:
I’ve got an annual goal of 100 books, and it’s true that early in the year I tend to focus on shorter books early in the year just so I won’t need to rush at the end of the year. I hit 100 books in September, so my books in October, November, and December were just way, way longer.
Of those 111 books, 91 were audiobooks, 12 were physical books, and 8 were on Kindle. I’ve been working on the same physical book since August, but my time to sit down and read an actual book that I have handy has frustratingly evaporated. That sentence was originally written last year and is exactly true again this year.
Earlier this evening, I misspoke at the dinner table. I said something about the word ‘agua’ being French. My daughter quickly said, ‘No, it’s Spanish!’
And because I’m a Dad, I decided to lean into the con. I said, ‘No, it’s French. I can’t remember what it’s French for, but I know it means something in French.’ And while I was saying that, I typed into my phone, as if I was Googling what it was for.
Instead, I was typing the first message below into Gemini. It replied with its first message, written instead of spoken. Then, acting exasperated at my failed Googling, I just said “Hey Google” and spoke my second message out loud. It responded with its second message, also out loud for everyone at the dinner table to hear.
My kids acted amazed. My wife asked, “Wait, really? Is it spelled the same way?” in completely justifiable disbelief. Then I showed them the conversation.
Then, I started to tell my daughter, “See, you can’t believe everything you see on the internet!”, just like we’ve been told for the last 25 years. Except I realized that with the ubiquity of AI nowadays, it won’t always feel like these conversations are “on the internet”. In fact, with the rise of on-device micro-LLMs, they won’t always even be on the internet. So instead I tried to change at the last second to say, “You can’t always believe AI!” Except I’d already said, “See, you can’t believe everything you see on…” And so what I ended up saying was:
“You can’t believe everything you see on the ainternet!”
…pronounced ain’t-ernet. I was trying to merge “AI” and “internet”, but I ended up merging “ain’t” and “internet”.
And it instantly occurred to all of us: that term is the perfect description of the problem facing the modern internet, where AI slop is running amuck, where bots in comment threads and email scams are getting harder to distinguish, where creating something to superficially mislead and lend false credibility to a lie literally takes just a single message.
In the past, you couldn’t believe everything you see on the internet because people lie on the internet all the time. Now you can’t believe everything you see on the ainternet because much of it isn’t—or rather, ain’t—even written by a person at all. It’s generated by a bot following some prompt or instructions from a human user so far removed from the bot’s behavior that it may scarcely even be considered to be acting on the human’s behalf.
This is similar to the dead internet theory. The dead internet theory posits that for the last decade, the vast majority of content on the internet has been auto-generated by bots and algorithmically curated to “control the population and minimize organic human activity”, as the Wikipedia article succinctly puts it as I’m writing this. And what’s particularly remarkable to me is that the dead internet theory started to gain popularity in 2021—before tools like ChatGPT and Gemini made generating fake content so trivial.
But while the dead internet theory is a conspiracy theory that this shift is being deliberately perpetuated by state actors, I don’t think we necessarily need to go that far to see what’s happening. We can explain a lot of this just by simple economics. We exist in an attention economy with widespread data gathering and optimization; so long as human attention is considered so valuable, there will be efforts to optimize capturing as much of it as possible. Over the last decade that’s been increasingly savvy algorithms for content curation, but those relied on content existing in the first place to be curated. Using AI to custom generate the content that will hold as much attention as possible is just a natural consequence of that value and this new technology.
And that’s why the old adage that you can’t believe everything you’ve seen on the internet has been pushed into overdrive: because it’s not just that someone might be trying to lie to you to forward their own agenda. Now, the algorithms themselves may be telling you any lie they calculate will capture your attention because getting your attention is their agenda.
But it ain’t true. It ain’t authentic. It ain’t real.
Mostly a place where I write down things I repeat often so that instead of repeating them so often, I can just send a link.
Disclosure: I use Amazon referral links in some of my blog posts. That's mostly just a lightweight way to track and see if anyone's even clicking through. If you buy something through one of these links, I may get a bit of money back and achieve my dream of one day being able to buy the nicer set of kitchen scissors that Amazon sells instead of the bargain variety.
