The Books I Read in February and March 2025

In a world con­tain­ing TikTok, YouTube and a vast ar­ray of other apps that profit off hu­man at­ten­tion, it takes ef­fort to place our fo­cus on things that truly ben­e­fit our minds.

At least, that is what I would I say on LinkedIn as an ex­pla­na­tion for why I read. In re­al­ity: I sim­ply en­joy it.

Each month I go back and sum­ma­rize what I’ve learned from the books I’ve read. In do­ing so, I’ve found that I get both deeper in­sights and greater joy from the lit­er­a­ture.

Wait! What’s Up With February?

While I only fin­ished one book in February, I started read­ing sev­eral oth­ers that I ended up fin­ish­ing in March. It only felt right to com­bine the two months into a sin­gle post.

The Dinner by Herman Koch

Someone con­vinced me to read this book based on its sim­ple premise: the en­tire novel is an ac­count of a sin­gle din­ner. I was skep­ti­cal. It is a big book. How could they pos­si­bly fit that much plot into a sin­gle din­ner?

The an­swer: Koch drip-feeds you in­for­ma­tion about the eclec­tic char­ac­ters in at­ten­dance. They gain an ad­di­tional di­men­sion that you could­n’t achieve in an­other, more ac­tion-packed book.

I won’t spoil any­thing here, but the end­ing was a com­plete sur­prise to me. I did not see that com­ing.

Gold by Isaac Asimov

I re­mem­ber read­ing Gold for the first time on a camp­ing trip to the Great Sand Dunes National Park. I was cap­ti­vated by the dy­namic short-sto­ries con­tained within. At the time I be­lieved them to be pure sci­ence fic­tion.

Reading Gold for the sec­ond time re­vealed how wrong I was. More than one of the fic­tional ideas Asimov pre­sents in the col­lec­tion of short sto­ries has since come to re­al­ity.

My Grandma Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman

I’ll ad­mit: this novel was chal­leng­ing to fin­ish.

Pros: the main char­ac­ter (an al­most-eight year old girl) is ex­pertly con­veyed in the writ­ing. Back­man makes clever use of run-on sen­tences to con­vey frus­tra­tion, which is a lit­er­ary de­vice I’ve never seen be­fore. Fur­ther, the char­ac­ter has an un­usual de­gree of in­sight into every­day as­pects of life. I found my­self ap­pre­ci­at­ing my every day more plac­ing my­self in her shoes.

Cons: it takes a long time for the in­sights to start com­ing. An ex­ces­sive de­gree of unim­por­tant in­for­ma­tion is thrown at you right out of the gate. I had dif­fi­culty main­tain­ing my fo­cus un­til the sec­ond half of the book (when stuff starts heat­ing up).

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Garmus knocked it out of the park for her first novel. It fol­lows Elizabeth Zott, who, in all re­spects is the per­son I want to be when I grow up.

Lessons in Chemistry is a tes­ta­ment to the value of sub­trac­tion. The orig­i­nal man­u­script of this book was about twice as long as the fi­nal pub­lished ver­sion. The au­thor was forced to con­dense it down af­ter get­ting re­jected from sev­eral pub­lish­ers. It ef­fort shows.

I can­not cap­ture the nov­el’s el­e­gance of prose, cre­ativ­ity in fic­tion, or im­por­tance in moral­ity here. You need to read this book.