Reading Archives

12 Great Books Written by People I Know and Admire

March 1, 2026March 7, 2026 Nik

In the mid-90s, the Russian artist duo Komar and Melamid conducted an interesting experiment. They hired research firms in 11 countries — including the US, Russia, France, China, Turkey, Iceland, and Kenya — to interview 1,000 people each and ask them: What do you most want in a visual work of art? Then, they painted the results. Here they are:

What was supposed to be a beautiful exploration of human diversity turned out to be, according to Komar, “a collaboration with [a] new dictator — Majority.” 30 years later, the duo’s People’s Choice series merely seems like the tip of the iceberg.

When opening his viral essay “The Age of Average” with their example, designer and strategy director Alex Murrell concludes: “The landscapes which Komar and Melamid painted have become the landscapes in which we live. […] Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.”

Murrell’s article about our statistical convergence mostly deals with the visual, but books do make an appearance. First, for their titles, which, among other trends, seem to love swear words these days, and second, for their lack of breadth in authors. Murrell quotes Adam Mastroianni: “In the 1950s, a little over half of the authors in the top 10 [of bestsellers] had been there before. These days, it’s closer to 75%.”

While I’m still waiting for my first top 10 bestseller, let alone repeat visits on those coveted lists, even being an aspiring self-published author has its benefits. Namely, you get to know other aspiring authors. The ones who haven’t quite made it yet but are taking their craft seriously. So, for today’s book recommendations, I have the incredible privilege of sharing titles written 100% by people I personally know and admire. Some of them, I’ve worked with. Others are old friends. But all of them are awesome writers.

ChatGPT would never suggest these books to you. You likely won’t find them on the New York Times Best Seller list or at the next airport bookstore any time soon — not that they don’t deserve it. But if you want to pick up some unique ideas from underrated people, look no further than these books.

Here are 12 great reads that’ll help you break out of the age of average.

My 10 Favorite Books of 2025

January 25, 2026January 25, 2026 Nik

Every minute spent reading is a minute of culture defended. That’s what I believe.

Therefore, I was both shocked and delighted when Goodreads told me I had managed to read 19 books in 2025. It was my first year of working a full-time job while still writing on the side, and I didn’t feel I read all that much.

Some of those books were short. Others were long. Six of them were part of a journey to read the classics that I began in 2024. The rest were a mixed bag of books written by friends, targeted research, and some bestsellers I picked up along the way.

Books are my all-time favorite gifts to both give and receive. Thoughtful book recommendations are almost as good. Maybe some of my 10 favorites from the year will make for beautiful presents for you as well. You can give them to yourself or whoever they make you think of — because the only surprise better than getting a book is getting a book on a random Tuesday when you didn’t expect anything, let alone the wisdom of a lifetime condensed into a few hundred pages.

You never know where your next great read might come from. Maybe you’ll find yours below. In no particular order, here are my 10 favorite books that I read in 2025, along with the ideas they inspired in my own writing.

Startups for Outsiders by Amardeep Parmar (Nik’s Book Notes)

December 1, 2025December 1, 2025 Nik

Ordinary people have the most billion-dollar ideas.

Think about it: A billionaire is just a normal person who executed a plan and succeeded on an extreme scale. Don’t believe me? I’ve got proof.

As of mid-2025, only one third of the world’s 3,000 billionaires inherited their money. Meanwhile, around 70% have either founded or co-founded the business that made them wealthy.

What’s more, most billionaires build one billion-dollar business, not seven. Quiet Elon! So even if you already have all the capital in the world, scaling a global business ain’t easy. It takes more than money to make money.

Why does this little fact check matter? Because it shows the playing field is more level than we think. Innovation is not the prerogative of the rich.

My friend Amardeep Parmar understands this. “Humble startups founded by people like you have changed the world,” he begins Startups for Outsiders.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (Nik’s Book Notes)

November 2, 2025December 1, 2025 Nik

It’s good that I didn’t expect anything when I first opened Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s not that I thought it’d be bad. I just happened to know absolutely nothing about either the book or its author. Sure, I’d heard the name Kurt Vonnegut before, but thinking it was a remarkably German name for an American author was where my judgements began and ended.

I’m glad I went blank into Slaughterhouse-Five because whatever expectations I might have had would have been subverted immediately. It’s one of those books you can never quite put your finger on, yet even though its parts seem disorganized, those parts don’t just add up to a whole, that whole makes you feel and reflect on many things.

For example, you could say Slaughterhouse-Five is about the bombing of Dresden in World War II. Technically, that’s correct. And even though the city and its destruction are mentioned all the time, the supposed main event ultimately takes place on less than a handful of pages. It is anticlimactic not only in its presence but also its description. Bombs fell. Our hero stayed in his shelter. He came out, everyone was dead. So it goes.

The 3 Shades of Eternity

September 21, 2025November 22, 2025 Nik

The German word “Steppenwolf” describes a kind of wolfhound, half wild animal, half domesticated pet. In Hermann Hesse’s 1927 novel of the same name, protagonist Harry Haller claims to be a specimen of this very variety, forever torn between an idealistic life outside society’s expectations and the comfort of hiding his values in plain sight.

If he could find the courage, Harry would write his soul out, live like a monk, or die on some principled hill, perhaps even literally. But he can’t, and so he resigns himself to only letting his lofty ideals shine through on occasion. While drinking with people at the pub, for example. Or when discussing politics over dinner. Or as he goes through any of the many humdrum, mundane repetitions of life most of us are bound to as well.

Of all the books I’ve read in the last 12 months, this nearly 100-year-old one has left the biggest mark on my soul. One lesson in particular stuck with me, and it starts taking shape when Harry notices an embellished painting of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe during a visit to an old friend’s house. Harry adores Goethe, a great of German literature, but he despises the stylized, framed icon sitting on a small round table like a piece of decoration. So much so, in fact, that by the time the after-dessert-drinks roll around, he starts arguing with his hosts about it until his only escape seems to be running out the door — which he promptly does.

Later, Goethe visits Harry in a dream only to tease him about his snobby attitude earlier that night. Goethe playfully evades Harry’s questions about morality, dances, and even pranks him by holding a live scorpion in front of his face. Eventually, he claims that “eternity is but a moment, just long enough for a joke” and fades into darkness with “a still and soundless laughter that shook him to the depths with an abysmal old-man’s humor.”

I didn’t understand these words at first, and, like most of the action in the book, none of it seemed to make sense in the moment. But I did notice later on that both eternity and eerie laughter became recurring themes.

Choosing To Get the Education I Deserve

August 23, 2024September 16, 2024 Nik

It was one of those weeks where one and one just add up to three.

First, I woke up at 5 AM one morning. Groggy, unable to sleep, I dragged myself to the couch and opened a new fantasy novel. I struggled with a phrase on the first page. Then another on the second. I read and read, and by page 24, I was scratching my head so hard it started hurting: “Is it just me, or is this written so badly, it’s barely comprehensible?”

Between the multi-paragraph sentences, needlessly verbose descriptions, endless adverbs, and backwards unwinding of the action, I gave up on The Atlas Six right then and there. I confirmed with several friends that the writing was indeed atrocious, and after some googling, I found out why: It’s a self-published book that became a bestseller because the 15-year-olds on TikTok are all over it. Now, I’m not too old for a Booktok recommendation, but I am too old to read bad, unedited writing. Aren’t we all?

A few days later, my friend Franz sent me a list of the top 100 literary classics, aggregated across a decade of rankings. “How many have you read?” he asked me. I did a quick count. The answer was five. Ouch! Here I was, a writer with ten years of experience, apparently wasting my time on TikTok drivel, yet having read almost none of the all-time greats of English literature. “What the hell am I doing?” I thought.

In that moment, something clicked — and then so did I. I proceeded to Amazon, loaded my shopping cart like a kid on Christmas with an unlimited budget, and hit “Order.” Over the next week, box after box arrived, and while I watched them pile up, I finished two early birds — Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Turning those pages felt like taking a big breath through my nose after stepping outside for the first time in days. “Ahhhh! That’s better.”

I’m currently enjoying J. R. R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion, and while I do feel like my literary train is finally heading in the right direction again, the whole incident made me reflect: How can someone who writes for a living cruise right past the most important works in their industry for a decade?

My 12 Favorite Nonfiction Books Most People Have Never Heard Of

June 30, 2023November 22, 2025 Nik

Imagine a city with one million inhabitants. It has everything you would expect from a city of that size: some skyscrapers, a decent transport system, and all the usual public and social infrastructure.

There is, however, a catch: Everyone in this city can only read the same 10 books. It’s a simple literary restriction, but what consequences might it have? If all of those books are mainly concerned with inequality and societal problems, chances are, the city’s citizens will spend most of their time bickering and fighting. But what if those books are instead filled with stories about community and kindness? Probably, people will be inclined to help one another, and everyone will get along on most days.

Regardless of their effect and how strong you believe this effect might be, however, with only 10 books, the people in that city will inevitably stop learning. Thinking, creativity, innovation — eventually, these pillars of progress will come to a screeching halt. Why? Because the pool of ideas is too limited! Try as hard as they may, the best those citizens can do is to rehash the same ideas from the same 10 books, over and over again. Sooner or later, to create more and better output, they’ll need more and better input. The same is true for you as an individual.

Haruki Murakami famously wrote that “if you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

Popular books are usually popular because they’re agreeable. They’ll get you social credit and remind you of what’s common sense, but they’ll rarely truly stretch your brain. There’s nothing wrong with reading these books, but they shouldn’t be the only ones you consume. If you and your friends all read the same few bestsellers each year, and you all agree on their premises, none of you will learn anything new! Where’s the discussion? The thinking? The sparring of ideas? If you all read different books, however, everyone has something to teach to everyone else.

Over the last ten years, I’ve read hundreds of nonfiction books. Without fail, the lesser known ones have been the most satisfying in terms of new ideas, memorable lessons, and, yes, I’ll admit it, making me look smart in front of my friends. So for more than one reason, I agree with Murakami: Don’t run the risk of becoming like the people in that city — set in your ways, a rusty thinker. Read the obscure, the questionable, the forgotten. Read what no one else is reading.

Here are 12 titles I believe will fit that mark. Even if you’re an avid nonfiction reader, I’m confident you won’t have heard of most of them. But if you give them a try, maybe they’ll enter the ranks of your all-time favorites. They sure have done so for me.

4 Tips to Forever Improve Your Reading

April 4, 2023November 27, 2024 Nik

Reading may not be your favorite thing to do, but you are still a reader. Every day, you read thousands of words. You read messages, notifications, and web pages. You read books, signs, and documents.

If you could retain 10% more of everything you read, your life would be a lot better. The following 4 tips took me years of daily reading to collect but will only take you 3 minutes to learn. You’ll be a better reader forever.

Choose a Life of Stories

January 31, 2022October 11, 2025 Nik

You want to make a change. A very small change: You want to have coffee. Coffee is how you start your day.

If you were to have coffee just for the caffeine, you could take caffeine tablets. No taste, no hassle. Just swallow and drink some water. You could drink a shot of an energy drink. It won’t taste as nice, but you’d get the kick. Hell, you could get a caffeine IV! You probably wouldn’t be the first.

Instead, however, you go to a café. You open the door, and there it is: a story.

How Modern Non-Fiction Books Waste Your Time (and Why You Should Read Them Anyway)

July 6, 2021October 25, 2025 Nik

When I first discovered non-fiction books, I thought they were the best thing since sliced bread. Whatever problem you could possibly have, there’s a book out there to help you solve it. I had a lot of challenges at the time, and so I started devouring lots of books.

I read books about money, productivity, and choosing a career. Then, I read books about marketing, creativity, and entrepreneurship. I read and read and read, and, eventually, I realized I had forgotten to implement any of the advice! The only habit I had built was reading, and as wonderful as it was, it left me only with information overwhelm.

After that phase, I flipped to the other, equally extreme end of the spectrum: I read almost no books, got all my insights from summaries, and only tried to learn what I needed to improve a given situation at any time.

So, do self-help books work? As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.