The year is quickly coming to a close but we think there’s still time to sneak in one (or two) more books before we flip the calendar to 2026. From the 1929 stock market crash, to a new vision of courageous leadership, an insider’s look at Facebook, and so many more best-of-the-year books to add to the top of your reading list.
by Sarah Wynn-Williams
An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them. Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice.
- *Barnes & Noble: Best Business Books of 2025*
- *New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025*
- *NPR: Books We Love 2025*
- *Time: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025*
- *Economist: The Best Books of 2025*
- *AP: 10 notable books of 2025*
- *Slate: 10 Best Audiobooks of 2025*
- *Audible: The Best Audiobooks of 2025*
- *Kobo: Best Audiobooks of 2025*
- *Libro.FM’s Top 10 Audiobooks of 2025*
by Bill Gates
The origin story of one of the most influential and transformative business leaders and philanthropists of the modern age. Everyone is programmed a little differently, and Bill Gates’ unique insight led to business triumphs that are now widely known. Source Code is not about Microsoft or the Gates Foundation or the future of technology. It’s the human, personal story of how Bill Gates became who he is today: his childhood, his early passions and pursuits. Bill Gates tells this, his own story, for the first time: wise, warm, revealing, it’s a fascinating portrait of an American life.
*Amazon: Top 20 Business & Leadership Books of 2025*
*Barnes & Noble: The Best Business Books of 2025*
by Andrew Ross Sorkin
From the bestselling author of Too Big to Fail, comes a riveting narrative of the most infamous stock market crash in history—one with ripple effects that still shape our society today. With unparalleled access to historical records and newly uncovered documents, New York Times bestselling author Andrew Ross Sorkin takes readers inside the chaos of the crash, behind the scenes of a raging battle between Wall Street and Washington and the larger-than-life characters whose ambition and naïveté in an endless boom led to disaster. The dizzying highs and brutal lows of this era eerily mirror today’s world—where markets soar, political tensions mount, and the fight over financial influence plays out once again. 1929 is a tale of power, psychology, and the seductive illusion that this time is different.
- *Barnes & Noble: The Best Business Books of 2025*
- *Apple: Best Books of 2025*
*Next Big Idea Club: 10 Best Business Books of 2025*
*New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025*
*Time: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025*
*Economist: The Best Books of 2025*
by Faiz Siddiqui
Once frequently heralded as a modern-day Edison, Elon Musk has taken up a new place in the public consciousness with his growing desire to disrupt not just the automotive and space industries but the policies that shape our nation, placing him at the center of America’s most complex undertakings in manufacturing, politics, and defense and technology, even as his increasingly erratic personal behavior has raised questions about his stability and judgement. At a moment when America’s tech gods are more influential than ever, Hubris Maximus is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of lionizing magnetic leaders. Washington Post journalist Faiz Siddiqui offers a gripping, detailed portrait of a singularly messy and lucrative period in Musk’s career, as well as a case study in the power of using one’s platform to shape the public narrative in a world that can’t turn away from its screens.
- *Barnes & Noble: The Best Business Books of 2025*
by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle
When you travel through love, heartbreak, joy, parenting, friendship, uncertainty, aging, grief, new beginnings—life—you need a guidebook, too. We Can Do Hard Things is the guidebook for being alive. The authors asked each other, their dearest friends, and 118 of the world’s most brilliant wayfinders: As you’ve traveled these roads—marriage, parenting, work, recovery, heartbreak, aging, new beginnings—have you collected any wisdom that might help us find our way? They put all of that wisdom in one place: We Can Do Hard Things—a place to turn when you feel clueless and alone, when you need clarity in the chaos, or when you want wise company on the path of life.
*Amazon: Top 20 Nonfiction of 2025*
*Barnes & Noble: The Best Personal Development Books of 2025*
by Gardiner Harris
An explosive, deeply reported exposé of Johnson & Johnson, one of America’s oldest and most trusted pharmaceutical companies. Filled with shocking and infuriating but utterly necessary revelations, No More Tears is a landmark work of investigative journalism that lays bare the deeply rooted corruption behind the image of babies bathing with a smile.
*Amazon: Top 20 Nonfiction of 2025*
*New York Public Library: Best Books for Adults 2025*
by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life. Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished. Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance.
*NPR: Books We Love 2025*
*Amazon: Top 20 Nonfiction of 2025*
*Barnes & Noble: The Best Business Books of 2025*
*New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025*
by Mel Robbins and Sawyer Robbins
In The Let Them Theory, Mel Robbins—New York Times bestselling author and one of the world’s most respected experts on motivation, confidence, and mindset—teaches you how to stop wasting energy on what you can’t control and start focusing on what truly matters: YOU. Your happiness. Your goals. Your life. Written as an easy-to-understand guide, Robbins shares relatable stories from her own life, highlights key takeaways, relevant research and introduces you to world-renowned experts in psychology, neuroscience, relationships, happiness, and ancient wisdom who champion The Let Them Theory every step of the way.
*AP: 10 notable books of 2025*
*Amazon: Top 20 Nonfiction of 2025*
*Barnes & Noble: The Best Personal Development Books of 2025*
by Sven Beckert
Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton, places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework, tracing its history during the past millennium and across the world. Drawing on archives on six continents, Capitalism locates important modes of agency, resistance, innovation, and ruthless coercion everywhere in the world, opening the aperture from heads of state to rural cultivators. Beckert shows that despite the dependence on expansion, there always have been, and are still, areas of human life that the capitalist revolution has yet to reach. Sven Beckert doesn’t merely tote up capitalism’s debits and credits. He shows us how to look through and beyond it to imagine a different and larger world.
*Next Big Idea Club: 10 Best Business Books of 2025*
*New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025*
by Martha Beck
In Beyond Anxiety, Dr. Martha Beck explains why anxiety is skyrocketing around you, and likely within you. She also tells you how to not only reduce your anxiety but use it to propel you into a life filled with peace, meaning, and joy. Using a combination of the latest neuroscience as well as her background in sociology and coaching, Beck explains how our brains tend to get stuck in an “anxiety spiral,” a feedback system that can increase anxiety indefinitely. To climb out, we must engage different parts of our nervous system—the parts involved in creativity. Beck provides instructions for engaging the “creativity spiral,” in a process that not only shuts down anxiety but leads to innovative problem solving, a sense of meaning and purpose, and joyful, intimate connection with others—and with the world.
*Amazon: Top 20 Business & Leadership Books of 2025*
*Barnes & Noble: The Best Personal Development Books of 2025*
by Steven Pinker
From one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, a brilliantly insightful work that explains how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness, which we experience as something that is public or “out there,” is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives. Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. Consistently riveting in explaining the paradoxes of human behavior, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… invites us to understand the ways we try to get into each other’s heads and the harmonies, hypocrisies, and outrages that result.
*Amazon: Top 20 Business & Leadership Books of 2025*
*Economist: The Best Books of 2025*
by Henry Gee
We are living through a period that is unique in human history. For the first time in more than ten thousand years, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. In the middle of this century population growth will stop, and the number of people on Earth will start to decline – fast. In this provocative book, award-winning science writer Henry Gee offers a concise, brilliantly-told history of our species–and argues that we are on a rapid, one-way trip to extinction. The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire narrates the dramatic rise of humanity. The human story is relatively brief—the oldest fossils of H. Sapiens date to approximately 300,000 years ago—yet the spread of our species has been unstoppable…until recently. With assured narration, dramatic stories, and his signature sprightly humor, Henry Gee envisions new opportunities for the future of humanity—a future that will reward facing challenges with ingenuity, foresight, and cooperation.
*Next Big Idea Club: 12 Best Science Books of 2025*
by Nicholas Carr
From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. Whenever people gain more power to share information, the assumption goes, society prospers. Superbloom tells a startlingly different story. As communication becomes more mechanized and efficient, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony. Media technologies all too often bring out the worst in us. A celebrated commentator on the human consequences of technology, Nicholas Carr reorients the conversation around modern communication, challenging some of our most cherished beliefs about self-expression, free speech, and media democratization. With rich psychological insights and vivid examples drawn from history and science, Superbloom provides both a panoramic view of how media shapes society and an intimate examination of the fate of the self in a time of radical dislocation.
*Amazon: Top 20 Nonfiction of 2025*
*Next Big Idea Club: 10 Best Business Books of 2025*
by Cory Doctorow
Enshittification: it’s not just you—the internet sucks now. When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he was not just finding a funner way to say “things are getting worse.” He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives (and not for the better). The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users—and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. In the end, the platforms die. Now in Enshittification, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and—most important—how they can be undone.
*Amazon: Top 20 Business & Leadership Books of 2025*
*Next Big Idea Club: 12 Best Science Books of 2025*
*Kobo: Best Audiobooks of 2025*
by Stephen Witt
Nvidia is as valuable as Apple and Microsoft. It has shaped the world as we know it. But its story is little known. This is the definitive story of the greatest technology company of our times. In June of 2024, thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny’s restaurant, Nvidia became the most valuable corporation on Earth. The Thinking Machine is the astonishing story of how a designer of video game equipment conquered the market for AI hardware, and in the process re-invented the computer. Essential to Nvidia’s meteoric success is its visionary CEO Jensen Huang, who more than a decade ago, on the basis of a few promising scientific results, bet his entire company on AI. Through unprecedented access to Huang, his friends, his investors, and his employees, Witt documents for the first time the company’s epic rise and its single-minded and ferocious leader, now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures.
*Winner of the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award*
*Next Big Idea Club: 10 Best Business Books of 2025*
*Economist: The Best Books of 2025*
by Brené Brown
In Strong Ground, Brené Brown returns with an urgent call to reimagine the essentials of courageous leadership. In a time when uncertainty runs deep and bluster, hubris, and even cruelty are increasingly framed as acceptable leadership, Brown delivers practical, actionable insights that illuminate the mindsets and skill sets essential to reclaiming focus and driving growth through connection, discipline, and accountability. This is a vital playbook for everyone from senior leaders developing and executing complex strategies to Gen Z-ers entering and navigating turbulent work environments. It is also an unflinching assessment of what happens when we continue to perpetuate the falsehood that performance and wholeheartedness are mutually exclusive.
*Amazon: Top 20 Business & Leadership Books of 2025*
*Barnes & Noble: The Best Personal Development Books of 2025*
by Jefferson Fisher
No matter who you’re talking to, The Next Conversation gives you immediately actionable strategies and phrases that will forever change how you communicate. Jefferson Fisher, trial lawyer and one of the leading voices on real-world communication, offers a tried-and-true framework that will show you how to transform your life and your relationships by improving your next conversation. Now for the first time, Fisher has distilled his three-part communication system (Say it with control, Say it with confidence, Say it to connect) that can easily be applied to any situation. Your every word matters, and by controlling how you communicate every day, you will create waves of positive impact that will resonate throughout your relationships to last a lifetime.
*Amazon: Top 20 Business & Leadership Books of 2025*
*Barnes & Noble: The Best Personal Development Books of 2025*
*Apple: Best Audiobooks of 2025*
by Karen Hao
From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman’s OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy. Empire of AI, the behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.
*New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025*
*Economist: The Best Books of 2025*
*Smithsonian: Top 10 Science Books of the Year*
*Scientific American: Best Nonfiction of 2025*
