Timeless Books I Read In 2025
The views expressed here are solely my own and do not represent those of my employer. This content is based only on publicly available information and my personal reading.
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” - Herbert Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information Rich World, 1971
This quote shows no sign of age in 2025. Generative AI floods our already saturated media channels with vapid, ultra-processed content - most leaving our mind as fast as it entered.
However some information remains worthy of our attention years later. The challenge with our modern information abundance is not finding good content, but committing to content that remains worthy of your attention investment years after the fact.
I spend a lot of time at the moment thinking about how Generative AI is reordering the world. Thinking it would be easier to orient around things that will not change, I read a lot of books in 2025 looking for enduring principles.
This is a list of the things that stuck with me most in 2025 and that I predict will remain relevant long into the future.
1. Information Rules - Carl Shapiro & Hal R. Varian (1997)
I first encountered the opening quote in Information Rules by Shapiro and Varian - and it is not the only prescient insight in there.
Like today’s AI boom, the late-90s internet felt completely novel - so novel that perhaps old economic theories should be abandoned in favour of something new.
However, these economists proclaimed that economic laws were not dead, the relevant ones were just not taught in your Econ class. While information technology markets differ from the agricultural markets Econ class models are built on, they are still markets.
The authors did not write a mere textbook arguing that rumours of economic law’s death were greatly exaggerated, they wrote a strategy guide for people making decisions in this new environment grounded in the history of similar industries that came before.
They cover everything from procurement negotiation strategy to adopting and setting open vs. closed standards, and so much more.
If you are not convinced these ideas are durable, Google seemed to be. In the original 1997 copy Eric Schmidt (then CEO of Novell Inc.) wrote a blurb praising the book:
“Information Rules is the first book to explain network economics, the new economics of our lives. Shapiro and Varian explain all the crazy things that we see happening every day in Silicon Valley and other parts of the world. This book is a must-read for every business person in the new millennium.”
4 years later in 2001 Eric Schmidt became CEO of Google, and the next year in 2002 he hired Hal Varian to be Google’s Chief Economist until his retirement in August 2025.
Reading this book alongside Google’s public history (my understanding of which came from the Acquired podcast’s 2-part series), it is interesting to see how their approach to Android as an open platform mirrors the book’s framework for competing through ecosystems and network effects.
If you want some insight into strategic principles that shaped the outlook of one of the world’s most valuable companies, read this book.
2. Made in America - Sam Walton (1992)
A 33 year old autobiography of a discount retailer’s founder might seem an odd recommendation for understanding modern business. However, let’s consider a quote from David Glass (Sam’s successor) quoted in the book:
“In retail, you are either operations driven - where your main thrust is toward reducing expenses and improving efficiency - or you are merchandise driven. The ones that are truly merchandise driven can always work on improving operations. But the ones that are operations driven tend to level off and begin to deteriorate.”
This man helped build Walmart, a company where “Everyday Low Prices” is a religion. If he says sales (merchandising) must be ahead of lowering costs (operations), that is worth heeding.
The generality of this concept really hit later when I was watching a public talk by one of Anthropic’s performance engineering leads from re:Invent 2025. I initially assumed Anthropic saw performance engineering as a way of lowering costs (since increasing inference speed lowers resource cost per request).
But they didn’t talk about that at all - the benefits of increasing inference speed were either tied to enabling more features (generating more demand for sales) or increasing batch size (sell more tokens per unit of hardware).
Anthropic takes a merchandise-driven approach to infrastructure, not an operations-driven one.
As I look harder I see this appear across industries outside AI, and it is not the only insight of enduring value in this book.
Whether you are looking to build your own successful business or change a culture within an existing organization, there is a lot to learn from here.
3. The Goal - Eliyahu M. Goldratt (1984)
Some books excel by hammering one concept so deep into your head so that you cannot help but see it everywhere. In this book, that concept is throughput.
While a novel about optimizing factory production (yes you read that correctly) may not sound riveting or relevant 41 years later, it remains a fantastic read widely applicable today.
The whole story is a device to reframe readers’ intuitions about improving “efficiency” not by cutting costs and pushing people harder, but by coordinating the whole system to lift end-to-end output with bottlenecks being both central and ever-evolving.
This made Jensen Huang calling data centers ‘AI factories’ click for me.
I understand now that all the tricks AI engineers work on (quantization, parallelism, sparsity, etc.) are about increasing throughput (converting every dollar of input into more tokens sold) and bottlenecks are constantly shifting from chips to power to RAM and more.
They truly are like factories in the book, and understanding AI infrastructure through Goldratt’s lens informs how companies are approaching development.
You need not be an engineer to understand or find value from this story - the mindset shift is helpful across domains (whether thinking about how you use your own time to optimize your personal output, or just making a task go faster at work).
Also, I have read far worse novels. It is a mere 360 pages. Go read it.
4. Breakneck - Dan Wang (2025)
Probably the most popular book on this list (it became a podcaster book of choice in summer), I write this to proclaim that the hype was warranted.
Given that learning Mandarin is hard (5.5 years in I can confirm it is still difficult), and the lack of Western journalists living in China today, developing an independent and accurate model of what the world’s 2nd largest economy is like is remarkably difficult.
This book delivers that model for you in a concise, gripping package. It covers how China went from agrarian nation to world’s 2nd largest economy at breakneck speed, and where that trajectory is taking them.
Rather than a bland day-to-day description, Wang explains China in American terms - how they are similar, how they differ, and where he thinks each ought learn from the other.
All of this is delivered by a true expert in both, having been born in China and split his time between growing up in Canada, and working in China and the US.
This is the shortest book on the list at a mere 260 pages. Given China’s current and likely enduring relevance to the world, this is worth your time.
Concluding Thoughts:
Everything I listed is something that helped me better understand what will and won’t change in our AI driven reordering. I hope they can do the same for you.