Books of 2026

2026: Work-in-Progress.

H

How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going by Vaclav Smil is a cold shower for anyone intoxicated by techno-utopian optimism. The book dismantles fashionable narratives about rapid decarbonization, exponential progress, and frictionless transitions by grounding everything in physics, energy flows, materials, and scale. The book is brutally realistic: civilization runs on steel, cement, ammonia, and fossil fuels, and changing that is slow, expensive, and constrained by hard limits. I won’t say “pessimism,” but rather “unfashionable,” which is why it matters. Read it to recalibrate your expectations of the world around you, while, of course, still feeling inspired.

After decades of reading books, I figured it was time to go back in time to learn How to Read a Book. Its first publication dates back to 1940 by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, while the book that you and I will read is the revised one from 1972. This is a pretty serious book, an old-school manual that treats reading as a disciplined skill rather than a casual habit. It contains structured methods, from basic to inspectional, analytical, all the way to syntopical reading on how to extract real understanding from texts. According to the book, reading is an active, effortful process of questioning, interpreting, and judging the content, not passive consumption. Its core argument that serious reading requires work is hard to dispute. Extract the best from the book, upgrade your own process, but it is up to you; have fun.

N

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari is a familiar read if you have read his prior works, such as Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, or 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. You will go through the provocative claim, historical anecdote, philosophical zoom-out, mild warning, and the whole shebang. I found myself doing my quick speed-reading on many pages of the book. My interest, of course, was the section on AI. The book frames AI as the information network that can generate, modify, and act on information without human understanding or consent at scale; something categorically different.

T

Everyone who likes sci-fi seems to have read The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. I’m starting it just now. The book is a lot more science-sy, complete with physics, history, and philosophy. Read slowly, and enjoy the alien and intellectually bracing world the book takes you to.