Five books that impressed me this year

There are some books I have read this year that have made a lasting impression on me. And since Christmas is coming up, some of my readers may be looking for good books to give to friends and family or read themselves over the holidays. Thus, I have decided to give you a short list of five books that I found deeply interesting and insightful.

My readers sometimes ask me for book recommendations. Usually, they want to know which popular finance or investment books I recommend, but I have to disappoint them. I don’t read popular finance books anymore. This is not because I am a snob about these books, but I am working 12 hours a day on investment topics, including reading on average two academic papers a day. So, in my spare time, the last thing I want to do is read more finance stuff.

Hence, none of the books in this list are finance or economics books. Here they are in alphabetical order:

Baltic (Oliver Moody)

The War in Ukraine is ongoing, something that I didn’t expect at the start of the year when Donald Trump seemed ready to throw Ukraine under the Russian bus. I still think that this war will end in the next 12 months, but no matter how long it lasts, it has become increasingly clear that Russia will not stop with Ukraine. Drone incursions into NATO member states are becoming increasingly common, and intelligence services estimate that an attack on a Baltic country may be possible within two years after the Ukraine war ends. But Vladimir Putin may not even wait that long…

This is why Oliver Moody’s Baltic is a critical book to read. In it, he covers all the countries bordering the Baltic Sea, which means the classic Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, but also Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Poland. He describes in vivid detail how these countries deal with the threat emanating from Russia, not just in military terms, but by hardening civil defence as well. How do the countries deal with the increasing number of cyberattacks on their civil infrastructure? How do they prepare the civil population for the possibility of war? And what do countries like Latvia and Lithuania do with their sizeable Russian ethnic minority, many of whom sympathise with Russia?

But don’t get me wrong, this is not a dry analysis of military procurement, defence strategies and the like. Instead, it shows how eight different countries organise their society and their way of life in general.

In the UK, we are debating whether it is a good idea to have an electronic ID to control immigration. I suggest everyone should read the chapter on Estonia and how the country transformed itself into the world’s most advanced digital society with the help of its e-identity cards. These e-ID cards are incredibly useful things that reduce vulnerabilities to cyberattacks and data theft while simplifying the lives of Estonians on a daily basis. If there is one book I read this year that I think is a must-read, it would be this one.

Blood and Power: The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism (John Foot)

We live in a world of hyperbole, and when it comes to the rise of populist right-wing parties, you won’t have to wait long until someone pulls the Nazi card. I guess it is a special case of Godwin’s Law, but I think it misses the point because it blunts the attack on right-wing populists and their ultranationalist ideologies. Instead, I think the test that needs to be applied is whether these populist parties are fascist.

Most people are completely ignorant about the differences between fascism and Nazism and hence use the terms interchangeably, but that is wrong and dangerous because it lets populists who flirt with fascism get away with their actions by claiming that they don’t kill Jews like the Nazis did.

For the uninitiated, here is a side-by-side comparison of fascism and Nazism, but the short version is that fascism is an ideology that emphasises the importance of the nation-state and the historical and cultural roots of the nation as the defining characteristic to define who is a member of the nation and who is not. This nationalist ideology also justifies autocratic leadership to enact the ‘will of the people’ without democratic checks and balances, and the use of military force to defend the nation against both internal and external enemies. Nazis are a variety of fascists, but their ideology adds a belief in racial supremacy over other groups (most notably the Jews) to the mix, which justifies imprisonment or murder of people, not because of what they did, but who they are.

I will let you decide if any of the populist right-wing movements in the US and Europe have crossed the line of becoming outright fascist or just flirt with it by emphasising nationalist values.

If you want to know what it feels like living in a country that is slowly being taken over by fascism, I recommend John Foot’s Blood and Power. Based on the story of his Italian ancestors, Foot provides a lively picture of what it means when the state gradually erodes individual liberties. Not in one big bang like the Nazis did after the Reichstag fire, but gradually through bullying and intimidation until one day, people wake up in a completely transformed world.

How to Die in Space (Paul M. Sutter)

While the four other books on this list are all rather depressing, if you are looking for something that will make you laugh and teach you things you didn’t know, then check out Paul Sutter’s How to Die in Space. Paul Sutter is an astrophysicist and science communicator. And boy did he do a great job communicating science in this book. The book explains all kinds of astrophysical phenomena from asteroids and comets to supermassive black holes, quasars, and blazars. He even explains the physics behind theoretical concepts like wormholes.

But he does it from a perspective that I never thought of. If you were to go to these places in space to observe them up close and personal, what would happen to you? Practically always, they will kill you, which is why it is a good idea not to get too close to them, but read about it in a book on planet Earth.

And no, none of this is depressing. Think of what would happen if Bill Bryson wrote a book about space, and you get an idea of what this book is like.

But to be perfectly honest, while all the chapters on what happens if you get close to a white dwarf, a supernova or a quasar are incredibly entertaining, my favourite chapters were the last two on extraterrestrials and wormholes.

In the chapter on extraterrestrials, he clearly lays out the maths why we are probably not alone in the universe, but also why we are never going to meet aliens. They will never visit us, nor will we ever visit them. Even exchanging a simple ‘hello’ and answering, ‘nice to meet you’ is going to take hundreds to thousands of years, as everyone who knows something about physics will tell you.

The chapter is the most wonderful rebuttal of the people who think that we will one day fly to other planets and other star systems. What’s the word for these guys again? Ah, yes, morons. Read this chapter and you will understand why I think manned space travel is the biggest waste of money, time and resources anywhere in the world. There is absolutely nothing we can learn from that that we cannot learn by sending unmanned probes or taking a look from our planet. But I guess NASA and SpaceX need funding, so they need to come up with stories about how manned space travel advances science and all that BS.

It gets even better when he talks about wormholes, which - spoiler alert - don’t exist. So say goodbye to your fantasies of Star Trek and travelling faster than light to get to distant galaxies. The physics just doesn’t work, unless you believe in some forms of quantum gravity, which is the physics equivalent of believing in Santa Claus, a man who comes to visit all the children in the world in one night. Admittedly, this entire stuff about quantum gravity is above my pay grade because in my studies I never made it past Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, Quantum Electrodynamics and Quantum Chromodynamics, so I never learned the details of quantum gravity. Still, I take his word for it, given that Paul Sutter is right about everything else in the book.

If you are an avid reader of popular science books on space, you may not learn that much new stuff, but even then, you will get a new perspective on things you have heard before and look at them very differently indeed. I know, I have.

Nuclear War: A Scenario (Annie Jacobsen)

Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is a great movie and well worth watching. But never mind that movie, though, because if you want to read a proper thriller, you should read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. It is entirely based on declassified material from the US Department of Defence and interviews with commanders in charge of the US nuclear arsenal. It describes in minute detail (some chapters cover only a few seconds) what would happen were North Korea to launch a nuclear missile targeting Washington, D.C.

It reads like a dispassionate report of the mechanics of nuclear war, and that is what makes it so utterly scary. Did you know that once a nuclear missile is launched against the US, the US military has less than two minutes to determine whether it is a real strike or a computer error? And once the President has been alerted, he has about six minutes to decide if the US will strike back.

Let me repeat that. If the US is attacked with a nuclear missile, Donald Trump has six minutes to decide whether to start World War III and kill millions of people.

More importantly, if you live in a city targeted by a nuclear missile, forget about learning about the strike in time to get out. An intercontinental ballistic missile launched in North Korea reaches Washington, D.C. within 38 minutes. If the strike happens at night and you live in Washington, you will go to bed and never wake up. And that is the best outcome.

If the strike is during the day, all you will see is a bright flash, and then you will be blown off your feet. There will be no radio announcements, no social media posts, no breaking news alerts. By the time the breaking news alerts come in, the missile will have already devastated much of its target.

By the way, if you want to know how bad a nuclear attack is, there is a website where you can drop a nuclear bomb on any place in the world. This isn’t a game, but an effort to demonstrate to everybody, anywhere in the world, how devastating a nuclear attack is. Try an airburst detonation of a bomb of your choice over your hometown, and you will see what I mean.

And the next time you choose the leader of your country (especially if you live in a country that has nuclear weapons like the US, the UK, or France), you may want to keep in mind that this person has to be qualified to make the call when under attack.

The Mission: The CIA in the 21^st Century (Tim Weiner)

I didn’t expect a book about the history of the CIA in the 21^st century would be as good as Tim Weiner’s The Mission turned out to be. OK, Tim Weiner won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the black budget spending at the CIA and a National Book Award for his first book on the CIA ‘Legacy of Ashes’. But sequels are always worse than the hit movie that created the franchise, aren’t they?

Not in this case. This is Terminator 2: Judgement Day, coming after the Terminator.

Based on declassified material and extensive interviews with former CIA executives and agents, the book provides deep insights into what was going on inside the legendary spy agency from the 9/11 terror attacks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It tracks the massive intelligence failure that led to the invasion of Iraq, the black sites where prisoners were waterboarded and the people responsible for it. But this is by now all common knowledge (at least if you were following the news on the subject).

What is less well understood is the gradual decline of the CIA thanks to incompetent leaders like Porter Goss and a white House that changed the mission without giving the agency the necessary strategic plans. The result was an increasingly demoralised workforce that was good at tactical intelligence (What is going to happen in the next couple of days or weeks?), but incompetent on strategic intelligence (What are the goals of the adversary?). This lack of strategic vision and competence is what caused the many failures of the agency in the first decade of the 21^st century.

Add to that that by waterboarding terror suspects, authorised by George W. Bush and by killing US citizens abroad, authorised by Barack Obama, the CIA took actions that were illegal and undermined the sense of moral authority that underpinned the actions of many of its agents.

The result was a gradual decline towards irrelevance in the first two decades of the 21^st century.

But then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the book provides details that I wasn’t aware of. The role the CIA had in warning not just the US government of an impending Russian invasion in Ukraine as early as September 2021 (five months before the actual event), but also in collaborating with Ukraine’s security forces and a range of other security forces in the region to prepare them for war. Reading this book, I get the impression that this was one of the highlights in the CIA’s history.

Indeed, it is the last five to ten years that I found most fascinating because they present explanations for events that to this day remain disputed, like the sabotage of the Nord Stream II pipeline in the Baltic Sea. How did the CIA deal with Donald Trump and his attacks on the deep state during his first term in office? What was the role of the CIA in the evacuation of Kabul? And finally (the book was finished in May 2025), how did current and former CIA executives react to Trump’s actions during the first few months of his current term in office? All of this and more is covered in chapters 20 to 28. If you read nothing else in this book, read those chapters.