What I Learned from 31 Books: My 2025 Reading List

In hindsight, I didn't set out to read about power in 2025. My choices in books tend to be rather arbitrary, mostly non-fiction, dictated by what jumps out at me from the stack of books by my bedside (which seems to grows exponentially!), or based on an upcoming trip (Andalusia) or some topic that I come across that I feel the need to delve into deeper. But when I looked at the books I read in 2025 this weekend: thirty-one books ranging from ancient Rome to contemporary fascism, from Chilean poetry to atomic physics, I saw a pattern emerge that I couldn't ignore. Almost every book, regardless of genre or century, was ultimately about the same thing: who wields power, who's crushed by it, and what happens when it shifts or collapses.

The Power to Destroy

I started the year with Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atom Bomb, and in retrospect, beginning there set the stakes for everything that followed. Rhodes shows how scientific curiosity, pure, abstract, almost innocent, became the most terrifying form of political power humanity has ever possessed. The moment the Trinity test succeeded, we gained the capacity for species-level destruction. There's no going back from that knowledge…now forever hanging over us like the Sword of Damocles.

American Prometheus complicated the narrative further. Oppenheimer wasn't a villain or a hero; a brilliant man who helped create something he couldn't control, then spent the rest of his life grappling with what he'd done. That's the thing about power at its most absolute: it doesn't stay in the hands of those who unleash it and always has the potential of falling into the wrong hand.

When Democracies Crack

Reading How Democracies Die and The Wannabe Fascists felt less like intellectual exercise and more like watching a slow-motion collapse. Levitsky and Ziblatt's argument that democracies don't usually end with coups but with the gradual erosion of norms kept echoing as I watched our own political discourse coarsen and witnessing the rise of authoritarian rhetoric across the world, and most worrisome, here at home.

What struck me most was how fragile distributed power actually is. I always imagined democracy as resilient, especially here in the U.S., but these books show it's more like a verbal agreement that only works when everyone plays along. The moment enough people decide the rules don't apply to them, the whole structure begins to wobble and can easily collapse. Power that's supposed to be accountable becomes concentrated in the hands of those shameless enough to grab it and exploit it for their own benefits.

Empire's Extractive Logic

The historical books—Rivers of Gold, The Medici, Venice, Charlemagne—revealed power's economic foundations. Spanish silver flowing from Potosí mines worked by enslaved Indigenous people. Medici banking networks turning Florence into an empire of credit. Venetian galleys controlling Mediterranean trade routes. Charlemagne's land grants binding warriors to him.

Hugh Thomas's Rivers of Gold was particularly devastating. The Spanish conquest of the Americas wasn't just political domination but was the systematic extraction of wealth through human suffering on a scale that's hard to comprehend. Every ounce of gold that flowed to Spain and gilded their fabulous church altars represents broken bodies and destroyed civilizations. Power requires resources, and getting resources requires subjugation. The math is brutal and consistent across centuries.

But reading Álvaro Enrigue's Tu Sueño Imperios Han Sido alongside Rivers of Gold created a disorienting effect. Where Rivers of Gold gives us conquest as historical fact—documented, archived, inevitable in retrospect—Enrigue plunges into the fevered consciousness of the conquistadors themselves as they enter Tenochtitlan in 1519. His counterfactual reimagining asks something unsettling: what if the men who destroyed an empire were operating in a state of paranoid delirium, driven by dreams and terror as much as by strategy? The novel suggests that conquest happens not just through superior force but through the collapse of shared reality. When two worlds meet and neither can make sense of the other, power flows to whoever acts first, most decisively, most ruthlessly, regardless of whether they understand what they're doing.

What haunts me about these books is how it destabilizes the narrative of inevitability. Rivers of Gold documents what happened with the authority of archived fact. Tu Sueño Imperios Han Sido reminds us that in the moment, nothing was certain. The encounter between Cortés and Moctezuma was contingent, chaotic, shaped by misunderstanding and altered perception on both sides. An empire didn't fall because it had to. It fell because specific people made specific choices in states of profound confusion about what was real.

The Power of Ideas

Then there were the books about ideological power: Karl Marx, The Message, Isabel La Católica, and the competing narratives of medieval Spain in The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise versus The Ornament of the World. Ideas themselves become instruments of power…sometimes liberating, often oppressive, always contested.

What fascinated me was how even revolutionary ideas calcify into new orthodoxies. Marx wrote to challenge capital's power, but Marxism became its own form of authority. The Catholic Monarchs wielded religious ideology to consolidate state power and expel Jews and Muslims. And the debate over whether medieval Iberia was a paradise of convivencia or a myth serves present-day political purposes; it seems that our interpretation of the past is always about power in the present.

Language and Resistance

My Spanish and Latin American reading, Bolaño's Nocturno de Chile, Borges's Medio Siglo Con Borges, Hernández's El Martín Fierro, Schwablin's El Buen Mal, showed how literature both preserves and challenges power form Bolaño's Chile under Pinochet to Borges navigating Peronism and Hernández's gauchos resisting civilization's encroachment.

Reading these in Spanish felt like coming home to something I'd been missing. For years, I'd defaulted to English...it's easier, more efficient, the language of my daily life. But something gets lost if you only engage your heritage through translation. These books demanded to be read in the language they were born in.

It wasn't just about linguistic authenticity. It was about reconnecting with my roots, with a way of thinking and feeling that exists in Spanish but doesn't quite translate. There's a particular rhythm to how ideas unfold in Spanish, a different relationship between sound and meaning. Reading in Spanish reminded me that I think differently in Spanish, a lot more emotionally, with different points of reference and cultural nuances.

Who Gets to Say What Happened?

I also started to think about concepts like who gets to define what counts as knowledge, history, what happened, what's real, what's the truth. The Invention of Prehistory showed how our narratives about human origins serve present-day ideologies. Papyrus revealed how writing itself centralized power in ancient Egypt and Rome. As Gods Among Men explored how rulers claimed divine authority to justify earthly dominance.

Even our understanding of the deep past is shaped by power. Archaeological interpretation, historical narrative, scientific consensus…all of these are contested spaces where different groups fight to control the story we tell about ourselves. The ability to define reality, to say this is what happened and this is what it means, may be the most fundamental form of power there is. As we grapple with the growth of AI we should be careful about what is being generated and the potential to define or even redefine our history in ways we have yet to imagine.

What Now?

So, in looking back at 2025, as well as confronting what lies ahead in 2026, I'm left wondering what this all means? I think about the work I do, one way or another, all of it involves navigating power structures. Who gets treatment and who doesn't. Whose voices shape "evidence-based practice." Which recovery narratives are legitimized and which are dismissed. What counts as clinical expertise versus lived experience.

Understanding how power works—historically, politically, economically, culturally—isn't just academic. It's essential for anyone trying to work within or against existing systems. And right now, as we face a second Trump administration, this knowledge feels urgent in ways it didn't last January.

We cannot be paralyzed by the magnitude of what we're facing. The lesson isn't that resistance is futile because power always wins. The lesson is that power is contingent, contested, and ultimately fragile, which means our actions matter. Every choice to defend democratic norms, to protect vulnerable communities, to insist on truth when lies proliferate, to build solidarity across difference…these aren't symbolic gestures. They're the work of preventing the worst outcomes, of preserving what can be preserved, and for laying the groundwork for what comes after.

I think I may have finished 2025 with a clearer understanding of how power operates and how it fails but now comes the harder part: putting that understanding into practice as we navigate what's ahead.