(★★★★★) Two of my top reads for 2025.

Five stars. ( ★★★★★ ) Sports bras did not exist until 19-f-ing-77. I can’t get over this. There are so many mind-blowing facts and enraging/inspiring stories in Maggie Mertens’ book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women , you should rush to read it. Just don’t run, or your uterus might fall out.

Five stars. ( ★★★★★ ) I am fascinated by anauralia (lack of an inner voice), aphantasia (lack of visual imagination), and the general diversity of the inner human experience. Do I Know You?: A Faceblind Reporter’s Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination explores a range of neural diversity from faceblindness to super recognition. Sadie Dingfelder describes with great humor how her special brain has presented challenges in life, but also some surprising

Four stars. ( ★★★★ ) Solid takeaways, but could have been shorter. There’s some interesting stuff in Four Thousand Weeks , around a resonant premise that living for a future state or version of oneself is a good way to waste a life. But, like many books of this genre it could have been a podcast or an article. Oliver Burkeman coins two great phrases: cosmic insignificance therapy (experiences that lighten the burdens of life by reminding us how little we matter) and poss

Five stars. ( ★★★★★ ) Science! Not woo-woo. I can see why the author of The Expectation Effect was compelled to explicitly distance his book from The Secret and other nonsense. The book explains how perceptions and expectations influence outcomes – from learning, to health and wellness, to stress management, and aging. The audio version was an easy listen and a useful mindset tune-up. (I will be bummed if this one ends up in the debunking crosshairs of If Books Could Kill

My recommended reading / listening list.