I have always enjoyed sharing the books I read each year with the world. You can find my lists for 2020 here, 2021 here, 2022 here, and 2024 here. Continuing this tradition, below is a list and short summaries of the books I read in 2025.
1. Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker
A great book on how science, reason, and humanism have shaped our world over the past two centuries. The book utilizes data to paint a picture of an improving world—the world has never been freer, wealthier, more peaceful, and healthier than now.
Or bluntly put, “There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow.” For a more in-depth review of this book, check out my elaborate entry here.
2. Decolonising the Mind by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Language isn’t only a medium of communication; it is the carrier of a people’s culture. The late Ngugi wa Thiong’o dissects the colonization of a people’s mind through language. It wasn’t by mere happenstance that colonizers imposed their language on the colonies.
For a more in-depth review of this book, check out my elaborate entry here. Check out my own decolonization efforts after reading this book here.
I facilitated a book club discussion on this book at Penda Kujua Book Club. I had a blast with this!
3. What Universities Owe Democracy by Ronald J. Daniels
Written by the current president of America’s oldest research university (Johns Hopkins University), Ronald J. Daniels explores the contributions of universities in fostering good citizenry.
Daniels also does an amazing job in chapters four (Purposeful Pluralism: Dialogue across Difference on Campus) and five (The Reform of the University and the Future of Democracy), confirming that universities’ ongoing turmoil with President Trump’s Administration has been brewing for some time. This turmoil makes the book even more timely!
4. Homecoming by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s essays illuminate the shared histories and cultures of the Caribbean and Africa, particularly as sufferers of Western colonialism. The book taught me a great deal about our shared histories with the Caribbean.
5. High Output Management by Andy Grove
Stepping into a new role as a project manager, it was only right that I learn more about management. This classic by a former Intel boss, Andy Grove, dispenses immense knowledge on management, from how to conduct 1-on-1 meetings with reports more effectively, to meetings as outputs (not outcomes) of a manager, the importance of identifying high-leverage outputs and relentlessly focusing on them, and effective delegation.
6. Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves
The male gender is struggling and falling behind in many sectors – including education and employment – but a lot of people are turning their ears away. Richard Reeves compellingly paints a bright picture of the problem and offers practical solutions.
What makes this book even a great read is the conciliatory approach that Reeves deploys to bring forth his argument. Oftentimes, such books take a confrontational approach, pitting men against women. I recommend the book to both men and women, especially those who want both their daughters and sons to flourish, socially and economically.
7. Unbowed by Wangari Maathai
Long live Professor Wangari Maathai, East and Central Africa’s first woman professor! The 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner. The world’s renowned environmental conservationist.
This honest, tell-all memoir vividly captures Maathai’s struggles: to maintain and expand Kenya’s forest cover, gendered violence and the patriarchal status quo, liberation through quality education, and ecological evolution in the keen radar of an authoritarian political regime.
The matriarch fell, but her struggles and successes live on through us; we should not let her pain and suffering go to waste!
8. The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
Quite similar in tone and content to Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, but less expansive. An easier and quicker read than Pinker’s. Matt Ridley’s core argument in the book is that free trade and exchange of ideas—what he calls “ideas having sex”—is the fundamental tenet of human prosperity. He likens humanity’s prosperity to the gene evolution process—that is to say, just like genes, ideas evolve through exchange and recombination, and the stronger ones survive.
The book reinforces Pinker’s argument that we have never been freer, wealthier, more peaceful, and healthier than now. For a more in-depth review of this book, check out my elaborate entry here.
9. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas Woods
The Catholic Church, it turns out, contributed significantly to the shaping of Western Civilization as we know it. We are so used to the stories of great battles in Greece or Rome when tracing the origins and influence of the Western world. Catholicism is a hidden pillar.
Thomas Woods vividly illustrates how the Church didn’t repress science but actually birthed it, along with the university system, international law, and free-market economics. I hope you are surprised, just as I was. Additionally, Woods does a phenomenal job challenging the “Dark Ages” narrative and offering a compelling counter-history to the secular view of progress.
10. Mandate of the People by Margaret Ogola
A posthumous gift from the late, great Margaret Ogola, published just after she passed away in 2011. While she is best known for The River and the Source, which I read as a set book in high school, this novel dives into the chaotic world of Kenyan elections in the fictional constituency of Migodi.
At its core, it pits Leo Adam Agade, a candidate of integrity, against the rotten vote-buyer and tribalist, Gervase Kitambo Gwalla. A painfully relevant read for anyone watching our current political landscape. It’s a light, easy read.
11. Papyrus by Irene Vallejo
This is a biography of the book as we know it. I mean the biography of the written word. Irene Vallejo crafts a beautiful account of the book’s life, from the reeds of the Nile and the Library of Alexandria to the modern day, and key people who fought to preserve it.
Vallejo weaves her own personal stories, such as her parents reading to her nightly, visiting a secondhand bookshop with her father, and a visit to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, adding contemporary context while also complicating the genre of this very book—biography, history, autobiography, or some other genre?
The book reminds me that my ability to read this very sentence is a miracle of survival and that books have always been the most dangerous and enduring inventions of mankind. I’m certain I’ll re-read the book at some point in my life.
12. Birth of a Dreamweaver by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
If Decolonising the Mind is the philosophical account of Africa’s colonized education system and how to break free from that mental slavery, Birth of a Dreamweaver is the origin story of the architect of that philosophy. Ngugi wa Thiong’o recounts his years at Makerere University in Uganda, a golden era that birthed a generation of East African intellectuals, including Grace Ogot, Ali Mazrui, Okot p’Bitek, and Rebeka Njau.
He details the writing of Weep Not, Child, East Africa’s first major novel to be published in English, and the struggle to find an African voice within a colonial education system. I recommend the book to a fan of African literary history.
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