Winter Reading List 2026

Following my fall reading list, here’s what I’ve been reading this winter. This season’s theme emerged naturally: people consumed by ideas. Whether proving a theorem, building a dictionary, or fighting concepts that erase themselves from memory, each of these books follows someone gripped by something larger than themselves.

Fermat’s Last Theorem

by Amir Aczel

Aczel traces the centuries-long quest to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, from that famous margin note in 1637 through generations of mathematicians who tried and failed, all the way to Andrew Wiles’ proof in 1995. Wiles spent seven years working on it in secret, barely telling anyone what he was up to, which is almost unheard of in academic math.

The book is short and doesn’t require a math degree to enjoy, which is good because I certainly don’t have one. What makes it compelling is the journey through history and the hundreds of people from different cultures and times who’s work combined to the final heroic outcome.

The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

Winchester tells the story behind the Oxford English Dictionary, specifically the unlikely partnership between its editor, James Murray, and one of its most prolific contributors, Dr. W.C. Minor. Minor was a brilliant Yale-educated surgeon who happened to be a convicted murderer locked in an asylum for the criminally insane. He contributed thousands of quotations from his cell at Broadmoor, and Murray had no idea about his contributor’s circumstances for years.

It’s one of those true stories that’s so strange you’d never buy it as fiction. Winchester is great at this kind of narrative nonfiction, taking a piece of history that sounds dry on paper and turning it into something you can’t put down.

There Is No Antimemetics Division

by qntm

This started as a series of stories on the SCP Foundation wiki and got collected into a novel, and it’s one of the most original pieces of fiction I’ve read in a long time. The premise: antimemes are ideas that resist being known. They’re not secret because someone is hiding them. They’re secret because the ideas themselves fight against being remembered or communicated. The Organization has a whole division dedicated to containing these things, except nobody can remember it exists.

It’s horror fiction built on an epistemological puzzle, and it’s way more fun than that description makes it sound. The author does a great job of making you feel the disorientation of the characters as they try to fight something they can’t hold in their heads long enough to understand.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

by Douglas Adams

The second Hitchhiker’s Guide book. I read all of these in middle school as part of a school project where we had to pick a book for our parents to read to us. I picked Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and if my mom didn’t already think I was a weird kid she certainly has since.

I’ve read the original book probably a dozen times over the course of time since but haven’t reread the other 4, so I’m working my way through the whole series again.

Breakneck

by Dan Wang

Dan Wang spent years living in China writing his widely-read annual letters about Chinese technology and industry. This book is the full treatment. His thesis is pretty straightforward: America is run by lawyers, China is run by engineers, and that difference explains a lot about where both countries are headed.

Wang makes the case that China’s engineering-first approach to governance and industry has produced genuinely impressive results in manufacturing, infrastructure, and increasingly in technology. He’s not naive about it, and covers the costs and trade-offs honestly. But the core argument that we’re underestimating what an engineering-driven society can accomplish stuck with me.

Slow Burns

These three are all collections of shorter essays and writings, and I’m reading them more as a practice than straight through. I’ll read one piece, sit with it for a bit, then come back for the next. I’m probably a quarter of the way through each and will continue to work through them over the course of the year. All are excellent.

• Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charles T. Munger
• The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush by G. Pascal Zachary
• The Essays: A Selection by Michel de Montaigne

Wrap Up