Hello, dear reader(s). Are you ready for one last look back at 2025? I hope so, because that’s this blog’s topic, specifically a list of the best books I read last year. As always, it’s all non-fiction, although some of them are so crazy they sound like fiction. 

In the category of Corporate Malfeasance, The Everything War by Dana Mattiolli details Amazon’s ruthless business practices, where driving small businesses into bankruptcy is all part of the plan. Read this book, and you will find yourself promising to never shop at Amazon again … but you will. 

Are you on Facebook? Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism by former employee Sara Wynn-Williams is a devastating takedown of a company that tossed aside its initial ideals in favour of unbridled growth, damn the consequences. Read this book, and you will find yourself promising to never go on Facebook again … but you will.

I’ve never owned anything other than an Apple computer. I love the product, but the company’s reputation takes a hit with Apple in China by Patrick McGee, detailing how Apple has become embedded with the deeply evil communist regime. And if you’re looking for a book that will make you hate the megarich (that doesn’t take much convincing), check out The Haves and the Have Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich by Even Osnos. 

In the When Men Were Men category, Realm of Ice and Sky by Buddy Levy is one of those crazy stories of obsessed Arctic explorers, and one man’s idea of getting to the North Pole via dirigible! The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides (great name for an author, right?) tells the astounding story of Capt. James Cook’s final, fateful voyage. In the Crazy History category, Ghosts of Iron Mountain by Phil Tinline is the out-there story of how a group of cultural luminaries in the 1960s created a hoax that took over the politics of the U.S. Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties is a conspiracy theorist’s dream, a well-documented story linking Manson, the CIA and mind control experiments that is absolutely nuts. 

Still with history (yes, I’m a history nerd), Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe relives ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland in gripping fashion. And going way back in time, Berlin Diary by William L. Shirer is the famed reporter’s diary of life in early Nazi Germany, a day-by-day account as it happened. It’s absolutely fascinating; Shirer actually met Hitler and his henchmen. Still with war, Til We Meet Again by Brandon Marriott paints a vivid portrait of a Canadian in the trenches of WWI. 

Pretty heavy reading, but on the lighter side I can recommend all of the following: Joyride, a memoir by acclaimed New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean; Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night by Susan Morrison; Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey; A Fine Line Between Clever and Stupid: The Story of Spinal Tap by Rob Reiner (pause for a tear); and Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass, by my favourite humour writer, the great Dave Barry.  

So turn off Netflix, crack open any of the above books and get reading.