Books I Enjoyed This Year

Seasons greetings!

As 2026 approaches I thought I would take a moment to recommend to you some of my favourite books from 2025. They were not all written this year, I just read or re-read them, in whole or in part, and thought it may be of interest to some of you, and of use to anybody still scrambling for gifts.

Click on the title or image to buy any of these books, and I’ll also make a small fee, without costing you anything extra. Christmas cheer all round!

Essays in Love — Alain de Botton

Love is difficult to write about. It’s cliche, mushy, and often quite boring. Alain de Botton presents what is perhaps the best reflection on modern romance I have ever read. Funny, bold, and beautiful, somewhere between a novel and a philosophical treatise, Essays in Love has been one of my favourite books for some years now, but it also currently sits on my coffee table as I prepare to read it again.

The Master and His Emissary — Iain McGilchrist

Did you know you (kind of) have two brains? Our left and right hemisphere work in concert, but obviously have some reason to be kept relatively separated from each other.

If you have been playing Alex O’Connor Bingo this year, you will have scored high if your card contains ‘mentions split-brain patients’. I can’t stop talking about them. And can you blame me? These are individuals in whose brains the connective tissue between the two hemispheres—the corpus callosum—has been severed. Under experimental conditions, you can communicate separately to each hemisphere, and they each appear to have a mind of their own. The implications for consciousness and the self are profound.

I was first introduced to the importance of the hemispheric divide by Iain McGilchrist. Though I admit I have far from actually finished reading this book, I yet have no problem describing it as one of the most personally important non-fiction texts I have ever come across.

Battle of the Big Bang — Phil Halper and Niayesh Afshordi

What happened before the big bang? Scientists often tell us this is a nonsense question since time itself began in that instant. But recent cosmology offers a fractured picture: the big bang may best describe the universe’s growth from a hot dense state billions of years ago, but not any moment of actual beginning.

There are too many models of what the big bang actually is, what it consisted in, and what may have come before it to list here, but luckily my good friend Phil Halper and his co-author Niayesh Afshordi have compiled many of them into a truly fantastic and extremely readable book.

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The Resurrection of Jesus — Dale Allison

Christianity centres itself on a singular historical claim: Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. I am not convinced this event occurred, but am deeply interested in why some people are, and the best reasons to think either way.

In my reading so far, no book has been more comprehensive, fair, readable, and exciting than Dale Allison’s exceptional tome. Allison is a Christian but can tear apart apologetic talking points better than any atheist, and could make anybody at least interested in the events of Easter morning. Whenever I am asked for a book recommendation for anybody interested in Christianity, I point them here.

The Doors of Perception — Aldous Huxley

In 1953, Aldous Huxley consumed a psychoactive chemical called mescaline, found naturally in certain cacti. His subsequent psychedelic trip is recorded in this short book, which offers one of the best and most interesting accounts of altered states of consciousness available in English.

Reflections on the self, on space and time, on becoming a bamboo chair leg, on what painters reveal by the way they depict fabric, on panic, and on bliss—this account is enticing for those who have never experienced psychedelics, and expository for those who have.

The Experience of God — David Bentley Hart

Richard Dawkins has never written a single word about God. So claims David Bentley Hart in a book I wish I had read sooner.

The God attacked by the new atheists is an often anthropomorphic, complicated, malevolent designer of a mechanical universe, whose existence is dubious at best. Bentley Hart believes this to be a better description of the so-called ‘demiurge’ of various religious traditions, and not an approximation of the God most believers have worshipped for thousands of years.

Not an explicit response to new atheism, this book functions as a good antidote, spanning mysticism, philosophy, and various religious traditions, exploring God through three concepts borrowed from Indian philosophy: being, consciousness, and bliss (sat, chit, and ananda).

Mortal Questions — Thomas Nagel

I first encountered Thomas Nagel at university while studying the subject of death. Mortal Questions is a short collection of essays containing the one I read at the time—Death—which remains an instructive read.

More recently, however, I have revisited this collection on realising it contains perhaps Nagel’s most famous contribution to philosophy: an essay titled, What is it Like to be a Bat? It expertly argues the consciousness—my current philosophical obsession—cannot be reduced to scientific explanation. It is short, provocative, and extremely interesting. It is sandwiched between essays on split brains and panpsychism, and is a mainstay of my philosophy bookshelf.

The Idea of the Brain — Matthew Cobb

There are a few books on this list about the brain. This one is unique. Not a work of neuroscience or philosophy, this book is a history: how has our understanding of the brain changed in the past few thousand years?

Aristotle believed thinking was done with the heart, for very forgivable reasons. Not until relatively recently was a consensus reached that the strange fleshy object in our skulls (which Aristotle thought was a kind of radiator for regulating blood temperature) is the true seat of cognitive activity, and since then debates about its nature have raged.

Is the brain like a computer? Or do we just have a tendency to compare the brain to whatever is our age’s most complicated thing? How did the discovery of electricity, um, electrify our understanding of the brain? Is brain activity localised to specific regions, or are things more universal? What is memory, and how has our understanding changed?

Matthew Cobb writes a brilliant overview of the history of our idea of the brain—a great Christmas read, or Christmas present.

Elephant and the Blind — Thomas Metzinger

What is the absolute minimal possible state of consciousness? I have often asked people recently to imagine that I removed their eyesight. Picture it now (or, I suppose, don’t picture it?). Would you still be conscious? Surely, yes. Okay, what if I removed your hearing? It still seems like consciousness would remain.

What if I removed your memory, So that in every instant you experienced the world for the very first time? Not like having dementia: I mean nothing gets laid down whatsoever. What would that be like? It’s difficult to imagine—it would likely be an extremely rudimental existence, without any complex thought, emotion, or self-awareness. Yet it seems to me probably that you would remain conscious.

We typically associate consciousness with complex phenomena like sentience, memory, emotion, desire, and so on. But none of these things seem necessary for consciousness to be present. So, if we strip away these particulars, what are we left with? What is the most minimal possible state of consciousness?

We’re not exactly sure, but some people claim to have some insight on the question. In the depth of an intense meditation, or the peak of a psychedelic experience, or even sometimes in what has been called ‘wakeful sleep’, many individuals have experienced what might be called a ‘full absorption episode’, which at the very least offers an interesting psychological case study.

Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher who founded the Minimal Phenomenal Experience Project, the first attempt to systematically collect and study the reports of such experiences. Given my interest in minimal conscious states, I was ecstatic to learn that he had compiled and reflected on the results in a book called The Elephant and the Blind, named after the famous Indian parable.

A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 — Bill Bryson

I saw in a bookshop recently that Bill Bryson’s classic Short History of Nearly Everything has been revised and updated this year. I have not read this version, but the original remains one of my favourite books. This is perhaps out of sentimentality, as I read it while a teenager trying to learn about science, but I also revisited the chapters on geology and volcanism while on a trip to Yellowstone National Park earlier this year, and was reminded how fun this book is to read.

The Economist describes this book as ‘possibly the best scientific primer ever published’, and this is no overstatement.

I also want to include this with a particular emphasis on its suitability as a Christmas gift: anyone can read it (no weird split-brain or gnostic gospels stuff), and I am grateful to have encountered it during my younger years trying to make it as a YouTuber.

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