Early Access Script: My 10 favourite books of 2025

I thought I would start posting my scripts here before videos go out as I think people might enjoy that :). This one should go out tomorrow or Tuesday:

It’s coming to the end of the year now, and there have been a number of books I’ve read that have truly stuck out to me as exceptional, so here they are.

My name is Joe Folley, and this is Unsolicited Advice.

1. The Red and The Black by Stendhal

This is one of the greatest psychological novels of all time, and I really don’t see people talk about it all that much online. It follows an extremely clever socially-climbing young man named Julien Sorel, as he interacts with French society of the 1830s. I don’t want to spoil it because unlike some of the others on this list, the plot is genuinely a huge part of its appeal. But the reason I am recommending it is because it explores a whole number of frustrations and ideas about love that are hugely relevant today.

Stendhal is, in my view, one of the most perceptive writers on the topic of romance ever. This comes out most clearly in his De L’amour (or, On Love), which is a collection of his first-hand observations about romantic and erotic love, but most of those insights are manifest in The Red and The Black, but in a more entertaining narrative form.

One of the truths about love and attraction that Stendhal explores, which I don;’t see many people today talk about, is that attraction is not really up to you. We are often attracted to people for very strange reasons that are sometimes completely peculiar to us. Maybe they fill some emotional need we did not know we had, maybe they feed into some unnurtured aspect of our identity, maybe we love them simply because they seem to not love us, and we want to prove to them that we are lovable. Stendhal’s characters often get caught in these frustrating cycles of attraction, and if like myself, you too have ended up in deeply embarrassing situations in the pursuit of romance, then The Red and The Black will give you some ample material for reflecting upon that. I do plan to make a video about it at some point, but I would really encourage you to read it first-hand, as it is also just really funny and well written.

And Stendhal generally is an incredibly underrated writer. In some ways he is like the Machiavelli or Thucydides of human relationships. His commitment to an empirically grounded view on love, displaying it with warts and all, is honestly kind of refreshing in the sea of idealistic narratives. At the same tim, he is not unrealistically cynical either. He is astute and perceptive enough to capture both the highs and lows of romantic companionship, and I really appreciate that in him.

If you need any more motivation to read Stendhal, his writings were the inspiration for the modern psychological theory of limerence: a kind of obsessive, vaguely unhealthy attraction that completely captures those who feel it. It was in the novels and writings of Stendhal that Dorothy Tennov found some of the germs for her now very influential theory. I have often thought that most of us have a touch of the limerent in us, even if we don’t carry it to a pathological extreme, and Stendhal can help us better understand this part of ourselves.

Also, the nice thing about The Red and The Black is that it is neatly split into two halves, and you can pretty easily read the first half as a semi-standalone novel if you want to. I don’t know if this is sacrilege to admit, but I much prefer the first half of the book, and while I have read the whole thing, I’ve often re-read just the first half of it because it is just that good.

1. Michel de Montaigne, Essays

De Montaigne was a French nobleman who did what almost every bookish nerd has wanted to do at some point - shut himself up in a castle with a metric ton of books, and write about whatever took his fancy for a decade and change. The result of this is a work that spans an enormous number of topics, written by a complete genius who has something worthwhile to add on each of them.

There really is something for everyone in this book. For lovers of learning there is his essay on the education of children. One of my favourite essays is one of his early psychological ones, where he argues that, psychologically speaking, we naturally seek to discharge our passions in nearby targets, and that if we do not do that we get incredibly frustrated and may even turn these destructive passions inward. You can recognise in this the germ of Nietzsche’s theory of drives turned inward, which would later be developed by Freud into his theory of repression. I know that Nietzsche read Montaigne, and I have no idea if this inspired his own psychological observations, but either way it is a real mark of the prescience of Montaigne’s thought.

Perhaps the thing Montaigne is best known for today is his revival of scepticism - an ancient Greek school of philosophy that emphasised the doubt and fallibility of all human knowledge. This, in turn, made Montaigne one of the earliest proponents of religious tolerance, since he thought that we should be wary of thinking our own religious beliefs are certain. He thought this despite being a devout Catholic during the European wars of religion, so this alone makes him a very interesting thinker to read.

The other reason I love this book is that you can dip in and out of it pretty easily, and Montaigne writes in a very entertaining and witty way. I have had my copy of Essays on my coffee table for the past few months, and it is wonderful just picking it up when I am bored or procrastinating, reading an essay that is probably less than 10 pages, and written very clearly, and then going back to whatever I was doing.

The fact that Montaigne writes on so many subjects, and is so anti-dogmatic, means that you will almost always come away from reading one of his essays having developed your own thoughts on the subject, that may be very different to Montaigne’s. For instance, take one of his essays on human pride. There he argues that pride is a particularly pernicious vice because people who are in the process of improving themselves and becoming more virtuous are particularly susceptible to it. It makes vice something that you cannot just “work your way out of”, because any improvement has the potential to grow your pridefulness as well. Nonetheless, Montaigne seems to recommend trying to avoid communicating your own glories as much as possible, listing off many examples of those who have deliberately done this, and received praise as a result. The irony of course being that if this was your aim, then you would be avoiding glory while secretly hoping that this will lead to even greater glory. You may not agree with Montaigne, but he becomes a very clever interlocutor for your own thinking. It helps that he does not write in riddles, and is pretty easy to understand, so you don’t have to worry too much about misinterpreting him. Like any thinker it is possible to get the wrong end of the stick, but on the whole Montaigne is a very clear writer, and you are less likely to get stuck in an interpretive quagmire.

My newest copy of the Essays also has his letters and travel journal attached and while they are less straightforwardly philosophical, it is just lovely to see how Montaigne observes the world. You really get a sense for his love of Greek and Roman literature, since not only does he reference them continually in his essays, they feature in his travel journals as well. At one point he approaches some Italian peasants to ask them about some finer points of the work of Pliny the Younger, as if he expects everyone to have read everything he has. I just like little stories like this, they really humanise Montaigne.

My copy is the everyman classics version and I really like how the pages feel, so would recommend.

1. Realism for Realistic People, by Hasok Chang

If you’ve been hanging around the channel a while, then you’ll know that I am a big fan of philosophical pragmatism. I plan to make a whole video on the subject at some point, but coming up with a definition of pragmatism is really hard to pin down. It doesn’t help that when someone hears “pragmatism” they immediately think of ideas like “you should believe whatever is useful” or “the truth is whatever works for you”, which are either strawmen of what real pragmatists thought, or reflect one or two controversial lectures that William James gave, that probably do not even reflect his own views.

And my favourite aspect of Realism for Realistic people is the simple fact that it tackles these misconceptions about pragmatism head on, and runs with them. I should admit a personal bias here - Hasok Chang supervised me for part of my Masters, and in addition to being incredibly clever, he is also a really nice guy.

Essentially, Chang argues that we can capture most of what we want from realism in philosophy of science, like theory convergence, reliability, and solving the so-called “no miracles” objection, with a pragmatist view instead. Chang’s thesis is specifically in the philosophy of science here, but his arguments are applicable to far far more than just this. Among other things, he comes up with a definition of our empirical usage of the word “true” in terms of maximising “operational coherence”, which is the ability of something, be it a theory, proposition, or otherwise, to perform coherent activities in the world.

I can’t really summarise Chang’s thesis in any adequate way here, so I’ll just highlight one particularly perceptive observation. Oftentimes in debates around realism and anti-realism, people assume that under a non-realist position, anything goes. But Hasok points out this is just not true. It is perfectly possible to account for the peculiarly human elements of inquiry with the more minimal concept of “mind-framing”, while explicitly denying any element of “mind control”. I use this example all the time, but check out the Wittgenstein duck-rabbit illusion.

Some people see this as a rabbit, some people see this as a duck, and you can switch between the two based on your conceptual framing. How you perceive the duck is mind-framed. However, this does not mean it is totally mind-controlled. You cannot suddenly force yourself to picture a gorilla, or a banana, because our perceptions are not entirely “up to us” whether you are a robust realist or a Kantian or a pragmatist. Aside from his main points, Hasok’s book is absolutely filled with little “aha” moments like this. As I said, while it is a philosophy of science book, its observations apply to so much more. In fact, if I was to recommend everyone read one book written by a still-living philosopher that would fundamentally re-orient how they perceive philosophical inquiry, it would be this one.

As a sort of special mention, I also highly recommend Cheryl Misak’s book Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein. I cannot include it on the list as I read it last year, not this year. But it is absolutely fantastic and, similar to Hasok’s book, it helps to dispel some of the more common caricatures about pragmatism. Now I’ve just got to bury myself in Richard Rorty

1. Albert Camus: From The Absurd to Revolt by John Foley

This was pretty much the first book I read this year and it completely changed the way I see Camus and his work. Like many people I had read a lot of Camus’ novels, as well as The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, and sort of did not know how to reconcile later Camus with earlier Camus. Whereas the earlier Camus seems basically unconcerned with ethics, and values the quantity of life over its quality, the later Camus seems much more worried about morality, solidarity with our fellow man, and valuing all life. This change even occurs in his heroes. Whereas Mersault in The Stranger is, ultimately, a murderer, Dr Rieux in The Plague even manages to stir himself to moral outrage, and is not indifferent in the face of pain, but fights against it with all his being. This can make reading Camus a bit of a bewildering experience. It is as if there are two writers, battling it out for the soul of Albert.

The topic of Foley’s book is reconciling this seeming contradiction within Camus’ philosophy, and charting the development in his work - hence the title “from the absurd to revolt”. How does Camus go from merely saying “imagine Sisyphus happy” to being one of the foremost humanists of the mid-twentieth century? For Foley, it was largely two events - the Second World War, and the atrocities committed in the USSR.

Both of these essentially shocked Camus out of his indifference. He could not remain placid in the face of the Nazi menace, nor the atrocious Gulag system. While Mersault may have shrugged his shoulders at suffering, Camus just could not keep this up. It is a pretty understandable shock to the system.

This caused Camus to try to see what ethics you can do within an absurdist framework. Is there room for things like resisting suffering, and caring for your fellow human being, without taking a dreaded leap of faith into positing an objective meaning to life? Camus thinks that there is, but it is an open question whether he is right. I obviously cannot go too much into it here but I have made two videos about Camus’ later thought this year and they both touch upon this development.

I want to recommend this book for a few reasons. The first is that later Camus is often overshadowed by earlier Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger are more widely read than The Plague and The Rebel, and even fewer people have read some of Camus’ bridging works, like Caligula or “Neither Victims nor Executioners”. This sort of means that our popular picture of Camus is stuck in the first two-ish years of an almost twenty year career. That is a real shame, and Foley’s book is a much needed correction to it.

Secondly, we get a wonderful chapter on the dispute between Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, including how they fell out and why it got so bitter. Foley compares different sources, as well as giving some much needed scepticism to the reports of Simone de Beauvoir, who as Sartre’s life partner, is obviously something of a biased source. Later Camus gets a bit of a bad rap sometimes and Foley cuts through the caricature to the character here.

And lastly, there just are not that many academic books on Camus’ work as a philosopher. For a thinker who often captures public imagination, he is often neglected by the academy. This is for a number of reasons, including but not limited to his falling out with a lot of French academics and the fact that much of his most lauded work is novelistic. So it is just refreshing to have a really high quality scholarly work on Camus. Low-key I think there is so much room for a PhD thesis about Nietzsche’s impact on Camus, but we won’t get into that here

1. No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

I was a bit sceptical about this book at first. It had been recommended to me a bunch of times, but whenever I looked into it further, it sort of seemed like it would be a bit “edge for the sake of edge” if that makes sense. But I was absolutely, monumentally wrong, and if I wore a hat I would eat it.

No Longer Human follows Oba Yozo, a young Japanese man from a fading aristocratic family, who cannot learn to connect with or relate to others. He interacts with the world as if he is behind soundproof glass. The exact reasons behind this are only ever hinted at, but the book explores the effects of this on Yozo’s life and his mental state, and suffice to say, they are not positive. The title is sometimes translated as “disqualified from humanity” and it comes from Yozo’s feeling that he was not quite like all the people around him - that he was something lesser and vaguely disgusting. The tone and overall feel reminded me a lot of Kafka’s writings, but instead of it being set in an absurd world, it is set in 20th century Japan.

I have since read another novel by Dazai, called The Setting Sun, and honestly it is a toss up between the two novels which one I prefer. There are not many authors who can be as unrelentingly bleak as Dazai is, yet at the same time not seem trite of, as I just said “edgy for the sake of being edgy”. And to be honest if you just had the book described to you, you might think it is just voyeurism applied to suffering. But the book so clearly comes from such a personal place that it’s infused with so many little details of pain that it avoids cliche pretty much entirely. Instead you get the experience of Dazai laser-beamed into your head in exquisite, torturous intricacy.

I wouldn’t really describe No Longer Human as a pleasant read. It has its moments of levity but it took me a while to read it just because it would make me feel quite sad after a few chapters. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. If it is the hallmark of a great novel to make you feel, this certainly made me feel. Sure, the feeling it gave me was ennui, but I think that is probably the intended effect.

It also forces you to ask what I think is a vitally important question: what is authenticity and what does it mean to be authentic? A lot of Yozo’s issues come about because he cannot “act naturally”. He is so scared of the people around him that he only feels safe interacting with them through a carefully crafted persona. We must ask ourselves to what extent we do the same? Unrestrained authenticity is not necessarily a good thing in all cases, but neither is the kind of self-concealment pursued by Yozo. I am a complete sucker for questions like this in literature, and amidst all the tragic events, it is the part of the novel that has really stuck with me. Especially since, and this may come as a shock, I too am prone to a spot of overthinking from time to time.

1. The Right to Oblivion by Lowry Pressly

Pretty much everyone agrees that privacy is important. But why exactly? Surely if we have nothing to hide then we have nothing to fear?

Pressly’s book The Right to Oblivion, is an extremely detailed argument for the importance of privacy, both at the individual level, and at the societal one. I have a whole video going through this book piece by piece, so I’ll just give its broad contours here.

Essentially, Pressly argues that privacy is not about controlling information about you, but about ensuring that no information is created in the first place. To use his example, say you are staying in a hotel room, and someone spies on you while you re there. You don’t do anything that you would not normally be happy for people to see. You read a book, watch a bit of telly, and then go to bed. You never find out about the voyeur, and they never tell anyone what unremarkable things they saw. I bet you still think that this situation is undesirable. But what harm has actually been done? Pressly argues that the harm comes from the creation of facts about what you were doing at that particular time in your hotel room. If no one had watched you, then it would be totally indeterminate what you had done in that time. At the very least, no one could say either way. But since someone saw you, there are now definite and communicable facts about what you were up to. Even though they are totally unremarkable facts, Pressly argues that their mere existence is a huge part of why we would feel violated in this situation.

Later in the book, Pressly discusses controversial legal cases like a man in Germany who was granted the Right to be Forgotten after he was released from prison for a crime he had committed decades ago. Presly argues that having information about you die out over time as it becomes less and less relevant to predicting your behaviour now is exceptionally important, since it means that our characters cannot be frozen in someone’s mind for all time. We are then given the space and opportunity to change and grow, and for other people’s perceptions of us to change and grow with that. However, the permanence of the data about us stored online presents real problems for this in the future. Will there come a time when there is no way we could feasibly allow our pasts to be eroded by the sands of time? Pressly thinks there might be, and views this eventuality as downright dystopian. It is easy to see why.

This is a really good book, and it is also incredibly readable. While Pressly does bring in different philosophers, he is always very clear in introducing their ideas and in outlining where they are relevant. It is an academic work of philosophy, but at the same time it’s clear that Pressly has worked hard to make sure that you don’t have to have a background in philosophy to understand it. I am actually a good example, since I was not familiar with many of the thinkers Pressly talks about in his book, save for Hannah Arendt, and I found it both enjoyable and understandable.

1. Nietzsche: Life as Literature by Alexander Nehmas (with a twist)

I have always been a real fan of Brian Leiter’s interpretations of Nietzsche, and he was highly critical of this book, so in some ways I was a bit hesitant about it. But I really enjoyed it, and it made me see Nietzsche in a very different light.

Nehmas’ thesis is quite complex, but essentially the throughline of his thought is that his interpretation of Nietzsche sees life, and the world more generally, as analogous to a literary text. All of Nietzsche’s key ideas, from the Will to Power to the Eternal Return and his perspectivism, are seen through this lens. Nietzsche’s project, then, is seen as providing what he thinks is a truly life-affirming interpretation of reality.

As I said, Leiter heavily critiques this view for a number of plausible reasons. He says it does not do justice to Nietzsche’s admiration for German Materialism, nor for his avowed commitment to historical fidelity in works like the Genealogy of Morals. So I am going to actually make this a twin recommendation. Although I read Leiter before this year, I am going to recommend this book as a pair with Leiter’s Nietzsche on Morality. The two interpreters work fantastically as contrast media for one another, and I had a lot of fun re-reading Nietzsche on Morality while I was reading Nietzsche: Life as Literature.

The place where Leiter does praise Nehmas’ interpretation is in his treatment of the eternal recurrence, and I did think that was the strongest part of the book. Nehams sees the eternal recurrence as falling out of Nietzsche’s general scepticism about a division between necessary and accidental properties of objects, as well as a view of an object’s properties as the sum of their effects on other objects. This means that Nietzsche’s view of the world, at least for Nehmas, sees everything’s relationship with everything else as essential to making the world what it is, and thus to wish for one part of the world to be different would be to wish for it all to be different. Thus, for him the eternal recurrence becomes a thought experiment reminding the reader that they cannot pick and choose parts of reality. If they affirm part of it, they affirm all of it, and if they reject part of it, then they reject all of it.

I don’t know whether I wholeheartedly agree that this is what Nietzsche meant with the eternal recurrence, but even if it is not, it is still an extremely worthwhile philosophical argument in its own right. It essentially allows us to recapture some of the part-whole relationship of other philosophical systems like Stoicism, without positing an overarching telos to the universe.

Another Nietzsche book I wanted to shout out is Nietzsche’s System by John Richardson. It is quite a dense book and I’ve been reading it quite slowly, but I’m about two thirds of the way through and am loving it so far. Another one from near the beginning of the year is Maudemarie Clark’s Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, which is not just a good book on Nietzsche’s theory of truth, but the second chapter contains a pretty good survey of a lot of 20th century theories of truth more generally. Always a big fan of Clark and that book pretty much changed the landscape of how we view Nietzsche’s ideas about truth.

But anyway, back to Nehmas, I would read Nehmas’ book in conjunction with Leiter, as seeing where they disagree is in some ways even more valuable than reading them in isolation. They disagree on almost everything, but they each give very strong and plausible arguments for their view. It is also nice for elucidating one of the frustrating truths about Nietzsche: that there are a truly astonishing number of plausible readings of his work.

1. Letters to Milena/Letters to Felice by Franz Kafka

I know these are two books, but I read them together, and they are relatively similar. Each one is a collection of letters from Franz Kafka to women he became entangled with. His two-time fiance no-time wife Felice Bauer, and Milena Jesenska, a dear friend and possibly lover of Kafka later in his life.

Kafka is a surprisingly enigmatic figure, given that we know so much about him. His writings are full of despair, absurdity, and fear, while many of the personal anecdotes we have about him paint him as cheerful, upbeat, and sociable. But I’ve found it is in his letters that we find the closest bridge between the two Kafkas.

His letters to Felice, in particular, really display the full range of his character. One moment he is elated, and we can see that affable, joyous Kafka that Max Brod talks about. Then he will worry about what Felice thinks of him, or the state of his writings, and suddenly he is in despair, wringing his anxious hands over what he should do, and writing endless letters asking Felice to reassure him of her feelings. The Kafka of Joseph K and Gregor Samsa returns.

I have read a fair bit of Kafka’s diaries, and it is remarkable how similar the tone is in his diary entries and his letters. They are both very candid concerning his feelings and his desires. If anything, he sometimes comes across as more vulnerable in his letters - a great many of his diary entries are a bit more businesslike.

I think my favourite letters are those that deal with his relationship to his writing. Kafka is known for putting himself in his works, but in his letters it is so clear that his writing means more to him than anything else. Sometimes he even lashes out at his lovers because he is worried they will tear him away from his work.

The letters really are a real peak behind the parchment at what made Kafka tick. I don’t want to say much more than that because I will go on forever about them, but I referenced them a lot in this video if you want to check it out.

1. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (+ the Cambridge Companion)

Okay, I am kind of cheating with this one, because I have read the Meditations before, but I was a teenager, and I actually had barely revisited it since. Marcus Aurelius has a strange place in Stoicism scholarship, because he just gets a lot less respect than most other thinkers. There is a quote from John Sellars, I think, that says he is seen as the “unimaginative disciple who somehow gets it wrong”, which is just a really funny way of putting it. But that is, in my experience, broadly how he is seen. The Meditations is held up unfavourably to more sophisticated texts like Epictetus’ Discourses, and judged lacking. And I have been guilty of this as well.

But on reflection, this is kind of unfair to Aurelius. This is his personal journal, and however we ended up with it, it is unlikely that it was intended for publication. So this is comparing someone’s private writings to another’s public ones. It is as if you pointed out the many contradictions within Nietzsche’s unpublished notebooks, and just dismissed him out of hand as a result.

I am currently writing a video on the Meditations, so I won’t go into too much detail here. But when I went back with a careful eye, I was surprised at just how interesting Aurelius’ thoughts were. Specifically, how he melds orthodox stoic teachings with other philosophers he is clearly interested in (like Heraclitus and sometimes Plato). And his quite instrumentalist view of philosophy more generally, whereby it is a means through which we achieve a good life, rather than something pursued for the sake of truth or as an end in itself.

I also wanted to give a shoutout to the Cambridge Companion to the Meditations, as it was pretty instrumental in helping me see some of the deeper aspects of the book. After reading the introduction, I was determined to give Aurelius another shot. It’s got some great essays that go quite in depth about the original Greek, and canvas different ways of interpreting Aurelius’ work. The final essay is also really interesting and covers the connections between the Meditations and modern psychotherapeutic techniques.

The thing I really came to appreciate this time around was the Meditations as less a work of traditional philosophical argumentation, and more an attempt to apply philosophy in practice. I know that sounds obvious, but it involves a whole different set of evaluative criteria when looking at the book. The repetitions and lack of rigor, and the lack of detailed outlines of Stoic principles make a lot more sense when viewed as a tool Marcus was using for, essentially, improving his own life and character. This means that a lot of interesting philosophy is assumed or alluded to rather than outright stated or argued for. But that is probably more in line with what Aurelius was aiming towards. So yes, I was deeply unfair to Marcus Aurelius, and have much more time for him after revisiting him this year

1. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

I almost don’t want to say too much about this book. It’s fantastic and horrifying in so many different ways and I also don’t want to spoil it.

Like some other of Steinbeck’s works, the story is set in, and is primarily about, the great depression of the 1930s in the rural US. We follow the Joad family as they attempt to escape the poverty-stricken Oklahoma for the sunny uplands of California. But when they arrive, they find they have been sold a false promise. It is kind of a difficult book to read, and not because it is badly written. It is written wonderfully. But it is just really unrelentingly sad and depressing.

But it is because of this that I want to recommend it. Steinbeck pulls no punches in his description of human misery and poverty and pain. The book made me furious more than once. But it was a good kind of fury. And as a pretty relaxed and upbeat guy, it takes a lot to make me upset or angry, so it is a real testament to the book’s quality that it managed to do that.

Again, I don’t really want to say more about the book, because I can’t without giving some of the main plot points away. I can only say that it has emotionally affected me more than any other book this year. And if that is not high praise for a novel, then I don’t really know what is.

Having said that, The Grapes of Wrath is quite a difficult place to start with Steinbeck, so if you fancy an easier route in, I would recommend Of Mice and Men. I know that it is assigned in so many schools that almost everyone knows what happens and how it ends, but it does get you used to Steinbeck’s particular way of writing, which can be a little bit unfamiliar if you’ve not read much of him before. Also, while Of Mice and Men is heartbreaking, it is a little less gut-wrenchingly brutal than The Grapes of Wrath.

So yeah, those are probably my favourite books I have read this year. If you fancy it, please leave your own lists of your favourites as well.

Thank you so much for watching, and have a wonderful day.