This list is my personal celebration of the books that left me in awe this year. It features recent releases, hidden gems unearthed from recent years, and timeless classics that never lose their magic. If a book made me pause, think, or just say “WOW,” it earned a spot here.
Four Thousand Weeks – Oliver Burkeman
One of those rare productivity books you genuinely should read, moving far beyond the superficial “life hacks” and relentless optimization that dominate the genre. It offers not just a set of techniques, but a philosophical shift in how we approach our limited time on Earth.
Burkeman begins with the sobering arithmetic: assuming an 80-year lifespan, we have roughly four thousand weeks. This fact frames his core argument: our lives are fundamentally finite, and denying this is the root of our anxiety and dissatisfaction with time management.
The book brilliantly exposes the “efficiency trap” – the self-defeating cycle where becoming more productive only leads to an increased volume of work and greater demands. Instead of trying to “get everything done” (a “limit-denying fantasy”), Burkeman advocates for a “limit-embracing attitude”.
- Productivity is a Trap: Becoming more efficient doesn’t create “enough time”; it simply creates new things to do.
- The Power of Limitation (Finitude): Drawing on philosophical ideas (including Heidegger’s “Being-towards-death”), the book argues that our limited time is not a misfortune, but the very thing that makes life meaningful. To be, for a human, is to exist temporally. Facing the certainty of death and the necessity of sacrifice is the path to an “authentic” life and “sober joy.”
- Settling is Essential: The constant striving for an infinite array of possibilities or the “best” outcome is paralyzing (e.g., the Kafka example). Burkeman controversially, but convincingly, advises that you must “definitely settle” on choices – in career, relationships, and priorities- to be able to dedicate yourself to what truly matters.
- The Real Measure of Productivity: It’s not about how much you get done, but whether you manage to neglect the right things. His three practical rules include:
- Pay Yourself First: Schedule the important things you want to do first.
- Limit Work in Progress: Keep a strict limit (e.g., three major projects) to force manageable chunks.
- Resist Middling Priorities: Actively avoid the bulk of your to-do list that falls between the vital and the trivial (the other 20 things after your top 5).
- Attention is Devotion: Distraction is merely a symptom of our desire to escape the discomfort of our limitations. True presence comes from accepting the “unpleasantness” of focusing on difficult tasks and resisting the urge to have things “be otherwise.”
- Rejecting the “When-I-Finally” Mind: The future-focused mentality that postpones fulfillment (“When I finally get my workload under control… then I can relax”) means the present moment is never satisfying. The alternative is the profound liberation of “I don’t mind what happens” (Krishnamurti), which means letting go of the inner demand that the future conform to your desires.
The Land of Laughs – Jonathan Carroll
Novel with a brilliant idea at its core and a final act that genuinely hits hard. The setup takes time to unfold, and the middle of the book can feel uneven, but the conclusion easily ranks among the best ones.
The premise is immediately intriguing: a young man travels to a strange, isolated town built by his favorite children’s author, whose imagination still seems to echo through the place. The early chapters drift a little before the real tension begins to show, but once it does, everything snaps sharply into focus.
The protagonist, Thomas Abbey, carries the burden of being the son of a famous actor. His struggle with identity, shame, and the pressure of his father’s shadow adds emotional weight to the mystery surrounding the town of Galen. The personal conflict blends naturally with the novel’s more surreal elements. Galen feels like a tiny bubble floating outside the rest of the world. No outsiders enter, no outsiders leave, and something always seems slightly off. Carroll builds this sense of claustrophobic small-town atmosphere with remarkable precision. Only after finishing the book does the reader fully understand why the town feels so unnervingly sealed off.
Abakanowicz – Paweł Kowal
This book turned out to be one of the most surprising reads of my year. I picked it up expecting a classic artist biography, but what I got was a portrait of a woman who built her own universe with the stubborn precision. It’s a story about ambition without chaos, discipline without rigidity, and an imagination so large it needed entire rooms, halls, and museums.
What fascinated me most was learning how Abakanowicz created the Abakans, those massive textile creatures that broke every rule of what “craft” or “fine art” should be. She always chose the bigger option. If something could be small or monumental, she went monumental. Anda Rotenberg puts it perfectly: she had “the courage of scale.” And that courage is everywhere in this book, stitched into every anecdote and every detail of her day.
The author takes a social-biographical approach, so you get much more than the art itself. You see how postwar politics shaped her career, how the Warsaw art world functioned, and how Abakanowicz navigated it with letters, strategy, and a kind of elegant stubbornness. Even her daily schedule reads like a lesson in focus: work at 8, correspondence at 9, lunch at 13, repeat for decades.
What stayed with me most is how much she valued the process itself. She didn’t chase chaos or inspiration. She built a microcosm where she could work relentlessly and safely. And underneath all of that-fame, exhibitions, the MoMA triumphs-there’s something very human: the belief that your friendships, the way you eat, and the way you learn about the world quietly shape everything you create.
Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver
This book hit me harder than I expected. The translation by Kaja Gucio is excellent, and it captures the raw rhythm of Demon’s voice. The story moves from one disaster to the next – opioids, abuse, poverty – but somehow, instead of crushing you, it keeps showing you flashes of hope through the people who refuse to give up on Demon.
June, Amy, Betsy, Angus… the book is full of fierce women who carry whole worlds on their backs. The opioid crisis becomes painfully real through figures like Aunt June and her partner, who pushed pills on doctors, and June pushing them further into the community. Yet even in that darkness, you get moments like the quote Demon loves: “Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you.” It’s a quiet moral compass, almost a whispered reminder that someone believes he can be more than the world around him.
The novel even pulls in real history, like the infamous 1916 hanging of an elephant named Mary in Tennessee. It sounds surreal, but it really happened, and Kingsolver uses it as a metaphor for how society punishes the vulnerable instead of fixing what caused the harm.
What makes the book unforgettable is Demon’s slow rise under the guidance of Coach and Angus. His love story with Angus feels fragile and true, like a light he keeps thinking he doesn’t deserve. And yet, he grows. He survives. He finds a way forward.
Easily one of the best novels I’ve read in a while.
A Terrible Love of War – James Hillman
This book was a tough read. Not just because the translation was clunky, but because it forces you to stare straight into the parts of human nature we usually hide from. The author argues that war isn’t an exception but our default setting: it’s ancient, constant, socially accepted, and powered by the “hawks” present in every society.
Through Arendt, Einstein, Kant, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and Marx the book shows how war breaks the body, the mind, and the very structures that make us civilized. Keegan’s three features of war (deliberate cruelty, direct coercion, depersonalization) anchor that idea in brutal facts, from Okinawa’s psychological collapse to the way modern soldiers often can’t even pull the trigger without conditioning.
What surprised me most was the spiritual thread: war pulls people toward God, chaos, beauty, madness all at once. The chapter on war and love (read SZA and Kendrick Lamar interview about it too) is the strongest in the book. It explores how destruction and affection intertwine, and why some people – like Kurken Janikien – found more relief in revenge than in pacifism.
The author’s remedy? Long-term thinking, culture, restraint, and the courage to imagine reality as it truly is – without the comfortable innocence we cling to today. It’s not a comforting book, but it’s the kind that rewires how you see conflict, power, and the darker impulses shaping the world.
Rodziewicz-ówna – Emilia Padoł
More about the book here.
While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness – Meg Kissinger
This memoir mixes family history with the author’s early journalism, and while it isn’t the most interesting book on my list, it does offer a surprisingly candid look at how conversations around mental health have changed over the decades. It also captures the vibe of everyday American life in the 1960s, which adds some charm even when the storytelling drags. Not a standout read, but it has a few moments that make it worth flipping through.
Mrożek – Anna Nasiłowska
Sławomir Mrożek’s life reads like a long walk in circles: constant movement, constant creation, and a constant attempt to outrun himself. Despite being a difficult person in many ways, his success brought him people, attention, and an undeniable charm. Fame opened doors, but the real engine behind it was simple: he produced endlessly. Some works were brilliant, like Tango and The Emigrants. The rest? Solid enough to keep the money flowing.
Two lessons stand out:
- Create a lot. Most of it will be “fine,” but the gems will come only if you keep going.
- Success – or even the perception of it – attracts people. Fame is a magnet, even when the person behind it is complicated.
The book also shows Mrożek as someone who never stopped searching for a place to belong. He lived in Rapallo, Chiavari, and Nervi.
He wasn’t a sacred monument in the early 2000s when he came back to Poland. People felt comfortable poking at him, and he himself stayed sharp, critical, and sensitive to political and social shifts. Like he said, “writers are as sensitive as barometers,” and he really lived by that.
There are delightful details sprinkled throughout the book:
• In Kraków in the 1950s people joked he wrote twenty hours a day.
• He subscribed to a clipping service (Globo) to track every mention of his name – basically an old-school sentiment tracking and RSS feed.
One of the most striking moments comes after Bierut’s death. Mrożek describes a feeling of lightness, almost a rebirth, as if the future suddenly reopened in front of him. He writes about drinking “for life that found me again,” with that mixture of youth, hope, and uncertainty that feels both intimate and universal.
The book also explores theatrical trends: the post-Ibsen psychological realism versus the new dramaturgy focused on the question why live rather than how to live – the realm of absurd and philosophical theatre where Mrożek thrived.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – Shoshana Zuboff
Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century wrote about a very simple formula: returns on capital usually grow faster than the economy itself (r > g). When wealth snowballs like that, it doesn’t just sit quietly – it starts shaping politics. As he puts it, “capitalism shouldn’t be eaten raw,” because in its raw form it naturally drives inequality and pushes society toward something like neo-feudalism.
The book by Zuboff takes this logic and brings it into the digital era. Here, the contradiction of “second modernity” becomes clear: people want control over their lives, yet everywhere they turn, that control slips away. Hal Varian from Google famously said, “every transaction involves a computer,” and that’s the root of everything that follows. Computers don’t just process data; they extract, monitor, personalize, and experiment constantly.
The author argues that the usual metaphor (“if a service is free, you’re the product”) is too soft. A better analogy: people are raw material. Tech giants get richer not because users show up, but because users generate behavioral surplus – tiny traces of activity that can be turned into predictions and sold. Google didn’t invent these tools (cookies, web bugs), but it industrialized them. If Ford revolutionized production, Google revolutionized extraction.
This logic produced what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism: an entire economic order built on monitoring, prediction, and selling certainty to third parties. Users are no longer the goal – they’re the route to someone else’s goal. Sheryl Sandberg took this model from Google to Facebook and scaled it into a trillion-dollar machine.
The story goes deeper, connecting these systems to broader ideas:
• Accumulation by dispossession – gaining assets cheaply by redefining what counts as an asset.
• Searle’s declarations – creating reality simply by stating it (“facts from nothing”).
• 9/11 and U.S. politics – a moment that normalized data extraction and linked Silicon Valley with government interests.
• Durkheim who once argued that the division of labor held society together; today, the division of knowledge plays that role, and it’s far more unequal.
• Behaviorism – Silicon Valley’s hidden philosophy, built on conditioning and nudging.
One striking example: Verizon assigning every user a permanent ID to track them endlessly – a real-world demonstration of Schwarz’s idea that “the more you know about a person, the easier they are to control.”
The author also discusses personal autonomy through Searle’s view of free will – the tiny gap between what we intend to do and what we actually do. In a world of nudging and predictive systems, this small gap becomes the last frontier of freedom.
Zuboff is not without nuance. She’s skeptical of automated contracts (like the Kipping family example) but also shows cases where automation helps people, not harms them. The point isn’t to deny technology’s benefits – it’s to understand the power imbalance hidden underneath.
Whether you agree with her or not, Zuboff presents a complete worldview. It’s bold, sometimes extreme, but undeniably eye-opening. Once you see how behavioral surplus works, it’s hard to unsee it.
Neapolitan Novels – Elena Ferrante
I read all four novels in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, and they left me completely immersed in the world of Naples, its streets, families, and contradictions. The books trace the lifelong, complicated friendship between Elena and Lila, two girls from a poor neighborhood whose bond is at once fierce, tender, and competitive. Elena climbs the ladders of education and culture, but she is constantly aware of Lila’s brilliance, her daring, and her uncanny ability to shape the world around her.
Ferrante’s Naples is alive with postwar struggles, ambition, violence, and beauty, a place where every small act feels weighted by social expectation, family ties, and the city’s stubborn spirit. The novels explore friendship, jealousy, desire, and the intricate dance between self-realization and the pull of one’s origins. Even as Elena and Lila grow older, marry, have children, and carve out their separate lives, their connection continues to resonate.
Ferrante’s writing is so captivating that I often found myself unable to put the books down. For the first three novels, I read the last hundred pages in a single sitting.
How Proust Can Change Your Life – Alain de Botton
This book shows what Proust’s life and books can teach us about life, happiness, and how we see the world. The big idea is that art is not just about the subject, but how it’s shown. Proust found inspiration in small details, like reading train schedules, and his friends sometimes remembered things from his life or books wrong, which shows how perception shapes reality.
One lesson is about empathy. People react differently to the same thing, and instead of judging, we can try to imagine what it feels like for them. Life teaches us lessons through small annoyances, mistakes, or disappointments if we pay attention.
Proust also shows that sometimes having less makes life better. Albertine loved her few clothes more because she could truly appreciate them. Real happiness and desire often come from imagination and what is hard to get. Attraction is stronger when someone or something is just out of reach.
He also had a way of treating people that mattered. Conversation should make the other person happy, not be about showing off yourself. Friendship is about learning about others, not just talking about yourself.
Summer and Smoke – Tennessee Williams
Summer and Smoke is about desire, class, and the clash between body and soul. John is polished, worldly, and focused on pleasure, while Alma – whose name means soul – is spiritual, pure, and idealistic. They are drawn to each other but struggle to connect because they see life so differently. The play explores love, longing, and the tension between who we are and who we want to be.
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