Reading Notes: The Fourth Quarter of 2025

This quarter’s reading list spans political theory, computing history, mathematics, autobiography, and classic literature. As usual, the mix yielded both highlights and some disappointments.

History and Politics

Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order prompted an interesting reflection on the nature of political science as a discipline. The field faces a fundamental challenge: trying to fit a model with thousands of parameters onto a dataset of only a few dozen historical examples, which are themselves vague and based on incomplete records. Consequently, the book largely devolves into straightforward history. While serviceable as a history text, it struggles to support the broad conclusions it aims to draw.

Winston Churchill’s fourth volume of A History of the English Speaking Peoples, The Great Democracies, covers 1815–1901. While maintaining a strong focus on England, it also touches on the American Civil War, Australia, and Britain’s colonial activities in Africa.

Computing and Technology

Phil Lapsley’s Exploding the Phone offers a detailed history of phone phreaking. The book leans more into the legal escapades of famous phreaks than technical minutiae, which was a minor letdown, but it remains a solid overview of a crucial era in computing history.

John Romero’s autobiography, Doom Guy: Life in First Person, provides a fresh perspective on id Software and its seminal games. It complements David Kushner’s Masters of Doom exceptionally well, making it a very satisfying read for fans of that history.

Don Eyles’s Starburst and Luminary recounts his work as a young MIT engineer coding the lunar module landing programs for several Apollo missions. The book’s level of detail is astonishing given the decades that have passed, likely the product of thorough journaling. The author’s tangents into his personal life dilute the otherwise compelling technical material, but it remains an insightful look at that era.

Biography and Science

Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist is a thorough and engaging biography of Warren Buffett. Its main flaw is its 1995 publication date, leaving the last three decades of Buffett’s career unexamined.

Katalin Karikó’s Breaking Through: My Life in Science details the molecular biologist’s path to pioneering therapeutic uses of mRNA, including its role in the COVID-19 vaccine. This comes highly recommended.

Mathematics and Games

In The Joy of SET, authors McMahon and Gordon explore the surprising mathematical depth of the SET card game. Far beyond simple combinatorics and probability, the book connects the game to modular arithmetic, vectors, linear algebra, and affine geometry. It’s a well-written and engaging read for math enthusiasts. It does not, however, aim to improve your gameplay.

Fiction and Literature

Sergei Dovlatov’s The Zone, read in Russian, is a satirical novella about a guard in a 1960s Soviet prison camp. It didn’t resonate as strongly as the author’s The Compromise.

John Williams’s Stoner left me with decidedly mixed feelings. The prose is masterful and evocative, with beautiful character development and impressive depictions of the learning process. Yet several characters, particularly Edith, feel like caricatures, and their actions strain belief given Stoner’s demonstrated strength of will. The narrative also devotes extensive time to topics that never surface again. This is a book that requires another read to fully form an opinion.

My attempt at Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain proved tedious. A young student visits his cousin in a Swiss TB sanatorium and stays for years, observing the parade of odd personalities. Despite some bright spots and timeless observations on human nature, the book feels dated and rambling. The audiobook format was the only thing that carried me to the end.

Re-reads

A revisit to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow confirmed its continued relevance, though it didn’t live up to my memories of the initial read. I also revisited Basil Mahon’s The Man Who Changed Everything and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.