2025 in Books

January 2, 2026

I read in preparation for two significant trips this year: one to Japan and another to India. I had never been to either country before (nor indeed anywhere in Asia). To my surprise, I found that novels tended to be a better way to orient myself relative to non-fiction. Unsurprisingly, Claude offered excellent suggestions regardless of the genre, and I supplemented that advice with Tyler Cowen’s best-of lists.

Here are some highlights from my reading in 2025.

Japan

I visited Japan with my brother in July, spending two weeks hiking sections of the Nakasendo Trail between Kytoto and Tokyo. Most of our trip was in the rural countryside, although we finished the trip with three nights in Tokyo.

Three novels gave me some sense of Japanese culture. Kenzeburo Oe’s A Personal Matter (1964) speaks to the intense yearning in post-war Japan for a comfortable and self-actualized life, free from traditional obligations to family. The semi-autobiographical novel describes the author’s struggles to come to terms with the birth of his brain-damaged son, whose presence upends his dreams to travel abroad and whom he contemplates murdering.This novel is nicely read in combination with Andrew Solomon’s stories of the many ways that parents reckon with having disabled children in Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (2013). Similar themes emerge from The Woman in The Dunes (1962) by Kobo Abe. A schoolteacher is trapped in a remote desert village where he is forced to live with a local woman and work ceaselessly to keep the sand from engulfing their home. Truly Kafkaesque.

Finally, and more recently, Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki (2017) describes a series of interviews with an alleged murder about food, love, and the role of women in Japan. A window into the pervasiveness of childlessness in the East? Hosting friends and raising children require many of the same inputs: space, snacks, and a loss of control over one’s time.

Tokyo defies easy description. But Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City is perhaps the best place to start. The book directs attention to the most distinctive aspects of Tokyo’s urban form and provides the bewildered tourist with a framework for understanding how such chaos can possibly hold together.You can also hear one of the authors discuss the book on Russ Robert’s podcast, EconTalk.

India

A look at the human side of India’s rapid growth is White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008). A poor villager’s entrepreneurial ambitions can only be unleashed after blowing up a rigid caste system, his familial obligations, and his moral scruples. Rent-seeking is pervasive and implicit income taxes (remitted to his grandmother back home) approach 100%, strangling economic growth.

Grander and more ambitious is Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995). Trust is scarce and life precarious for four strangers forced to share a cramped apartment during India’s Emergency period of the mid-1970s. Corruption and religious conflict limit the gains from trade, and even a modicum of stability is soon upended by senseless violence. Startlingly, hope persists, even without the balm of reproductive futurism that one would find in Octavia Butler.

What I Learned

• Eligibility for welfare programs is hard to determine. To economize on this cost, some administrators argue for a simple initial screen like “Made less than $X last month? You may be eligible.” While a handful of applicants will ultimately be ineligible, the question offers a quick way for households to decide whether completing the full application is worth their time. The old application for SNAP benefits in California, for instance, involved answering 212 questions, uploading multiple documents, and then waiting for a phone interview. From Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better (Jennifer Pahlka, 2023).

• The largest bill in circulation in China is the 100 yuan note, or about $13 USD. This makes storing cash difficult for corrupt officials. In January 2005, the vice chief of the Wuhan Railway Bureau was caught with 50 million dollars in cash, real estate, jewelry, and art that he had accumulated through embezzling ticket sales. His mountains of cash were so large and unruly that the bills had started to rot. From Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (Evan Osnos, 2014).

• One explanation for dismal productivity growth in the construction industry is that scale is elusive. US automobile manufacturers sell 15 million cars a year, but residential home-builders only about 1 million. These low production volumes are further fragmented across many geographic markets. Off-site construction is unlikely to help much since transportation costs of basic building materials or modular components are extremely high relative to their weight. Finally, volatile business cycles in construction reduce the incentive to invest in specialized equipment that would sit idle during downturns. From The Origins of Efficiency (Brian Potter, 2025).

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