What I Read in December

A note on my reading patterns and these reviews

Some months I read quite a bit, others I don’t read at all. So these reviews will be inconsistent. Additionally, reading a book is quite a significant investment in time, therefore I am a fan of giving up on some books. With that in mind, I won’t be including any books that I do not finish. So the reviews will all meet a certain personal or subjective baseline of interest on my part. The ones I do review will be categorized with the following broad ratings:

1. Would recommend
2. Recommend if the topic or genre interests you
3. Would not recommend Lastly, calling these “reviews” is generous on my part. The idea is just to jot some quick notes down and give you an idea on what I’m reading.

December Reviews

The holidays always bring a little extra free time. This allowed me to do a little more reading. Additionally, a better title of this post may be something like “What I Read since around Thanksgiving 2025”, but “What I read in December 2025” is more simple. I stuck with nonfiction during the holiday period. I dove into some marketing books, which was a new topic for me and did not disappoint. Out of the 5 books covered, 3 I picked up purely based on judging covers at the local bookstore. One was a gift and the last was suggested in a presentation I saw at work.

VC An American History

Rating: Would recommend

The bookends (no pun intended) on this list were tough to put down. This one was fascinating. The earliest example given in the book about the American whaling industry really stood out. Just learning about the risk-reward proposition of those investments, the participants in the investments, and how the incentives aligned. I was expecting the book to be a little dull, but informative. It wasn’t dull at all.

Contagious

Rating: Would recommend

Not another pandemic story, but a book about ideas gaining traction. It has a catchy acronym explaining the reasons why things catch on (STEPPS) and goes through little anecdotes for each. What stood out to me though is how it seems marketing is all about using language or text to try and elicit feelings or memories or other ways humans experience the world outside of language. This is what makes something stick with you. This got me thinking more about “world models” in the AI world or the new types of foundational models Fei Fei Li or Yann LeCun are working on. No direct conclusions there yet, but both this book and world models are fascinating stuff.

For those wondering about the acronym

• Social Currency: People share things that make them look good or smart, making them feel like insiders.
• Triggers: Associating a product or idea with common cues in the environment makes it top-of-mind.
• Emotion: Content that evokes strong feelings (awe, joy, anger) is more likely to be shared.
• Public: Making things visible and observable encourages others to imitate them (e.g., visible brands).
• Practical: Sharing useful information, tips, or deals that genuinely help others.
• Stories: Embedding ideas into compelling narratives makes them more memorable and shareable.

Extreme Economies

Rating: Would recommend

The author believes by looking at economies on the margins we can learn more about what the future will bring. The book covers economies that fall into 3 camps.

1. Economies that showed resilience to some sort of shock or event
2. Economies that showed potential but never materialized
3. Economies that are at the forefront of Global trends.

Each vignette grabbed my attention, but to quickly give an idea of the types of stories let’s go through 1 from each camp.

Aceh, Indonesia was hit by a devastating tsunami and was able to bounce back. I wouldn’t be able to summarize the bounce back properly here, but one interesting piece was how the local economy fell back to a gold economy immediately after the tragedy. Aceh being a historically important trading post gave the community a history with gold that was part of their culture.

Glasgow, Scotland once had a booming shipbuilding industry that put Glasgow on par with London in the UK for things like economic opportunity or the arts. The industry was eventually surpassed by foreign competitors and the economy never diversified or recovered.

Tallinn, Estonia is at the forefront of embracing a digital or more connected world. They leverage digital identifiers and have a tech-forward approach to many of their institutions. It gives a quick peek under the hood on this and discusses how the data of Estonian citizens is stored by the government.

Made to Stick

Rating: Recommend if the topic or genre interests you

This book is very similar to Contagious. It has its own acronym and covers why some ideas stay with you, while others don’t. This one seems to build off of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell a little more directly and follows the same pattern where it steps through the acronym and has anecdotes for each.

• Simple: find the core of any idea or thoughts
• Unexpected: grab people’s attention by surprising them
• Concrete: make sure an idea can be grasped and remembered later
• Credible: give an idea believability and credibility
• Emotional: help people see the importance of an idea
• Stories: empower people to use an idea through narrative

If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies

Rating: Would recommend

This is the other book of December that was hard to put down. It argues that the implications of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) will lead to the end of humanity. I wouldn’t say I’m convinced, but I never dove into the supplemental material they provide at the end of each chapter. With that said it’s an interesting read and I think an important one. The more thinking we do about the implications of AI the better. Putting ourselves in the best position of flexibility or options is important. To do that I think our lawmakers and leaders more broadly need to be well informed on the subject.