7 Books to Change Your Life in 2025 (No Self-Help)

Some reading recommendations that I hope are a little different

This is a script of a video from my YouTube Channel, which you can find here:

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“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.” - Groucho Marx

I don’t know what I would do without books. They occupy an awful lot of my waking hours, and even more of the channel. And over the course of this year, there have been a few that have really stuck out to me as not just enjoyable, but extremely valuable.

So here are 7 books that I truly believe can change your life in 2025. And, as a bonus, not a single one is a self-help book.

1. Deceit, Desire, and The Novel, by Rene Girard

This is an absolutely cracking work and one that I wish I had read far sooner than I did. For those of you who haven’t come across him, Rene Girard was a sort of 20th century French Polymath who wrote on almost every topic under the sun. He did some work in literature, some in anthropology, some in philosophy, and some in psychology. And in this book he introduces perhaps his most important concept: mimetic desire.

I’m going to do a whole video on this topic soon so I won’t go into too much detail. But Mimetic desire is, in effect, a desire that is mediated through another person, be that a present person, or a personified ideal. So a Christian who attempts to be humble and kind through the imitation of Christ is experiencing a mimetic desire, as is the person who finds themselves wanting a type of phone because everyone else has one.

In general Girard’s work is pretty cool, and this book is no exception. It breaks down the different types of mimesis, discusses how some mimetic desires are much more harmful than others, and then draws out different political, social, and existential implications of this.

Additionally, Girard heavily criticises the idea that most of our desires stem from within us. In other words, he thinks that a huge amount of desire is mediated through some other person, and we ought to be aware of this. He ultimately suggests that we should try to gravitate towards mediators who are distant from us. That is, someone who cannot compete with us for the fulfilment of our desires. That is a bit abstract so let me give an example.

Say you are imitating a great spiritual leader like the Buddha, in order to become more compassionate, calm, and non-attached. In this case, the Buddha cannot “compete” for this goal, because he is not there, and these also are not the kind of things you even can compete for. Girard talks about Don Quixote, and how he imitates the legendary knights in chivalric novels, who cannot rival him because most of them are fictional, and the ones that are real are long dead. On the other hand, say you had a mimetic desire for a particular romantic partner purely because they are desired a lot by other people, then in doing this you immediately enter into a rivalry with those people in your attempts to win this person’s heart. And then if you do win them over, you might not even enjoy that outcome, since the mediators of their other suitors are now gone.

Perhaps my favourite point Girard makes in this work is the concept of “double mediation”. This is when two people have one another as the mediator for their desires. Take the example of romantic rivalry again. It sometimes happens that although two people begin their rivalry by desiring the same person, the enmity between them eventually breaks away from the specific situation, and kind of becomes its own beast. Then rather than desiring things in and of themselves, the two rivals become consumed with their desire to beat one another. That is, they must desire everything their rival does, because they want to show how they are better than their rival, stronger, more capable. But for Girard, this immediately puts both parties on the path away from real fulfilment. Because there is no real lasting pleasure in simply taking something away from another person - it is a mirage that promises peace but delivers only further conflict. Within his framework, it becomes easy to see why. And it is applying the theory of mimetic desire to particular situations like this which makes Girard’s book so brilliantly valuable.

For me, it also contributed to a general critique I am working on about the sort of extreme individualism we have fallen into in our value system. Girard discusses how mimetic desire is difficult to discover because we have made it so embarrassing. In our quest to become these self-sufficient, individual agents, we actually lose some psychological insight into the inner workings of our minds. I think this is a very interesting idea, and also made me reflect about the various ways in which our values can seep into and distort our own self-perception, clouding our ability to think clearly about what makes us tick.

Oh, and if you can’t get your hands on this, there is the penguin collection of some of his essays called “All desire is a desire for being” which is also very good.

So yes, full recommendation, 5 stars!

2. The Plague by Albert Camus

As I am sure many of you know, Albert Camus is a French philosopher who is probably most famous for his two works: The Stranger, and The Myth of Sisyphus. Each of those deal, in some way or another, with the pointlessness of life, and how we can learn to cope with it while still whole-heartedly accepting it. The Myth of Sisyphus ends with the famous line “We must imagine Sisyphus happy”. That is, that despite our life resembling an endless, pointless task, we should slowly embrace that pointlessness, becoming happy with our absurd state. However, this is not where Camus’ philosophy ends, and The Plague deals with a very different angle on the problem of meaninglessness - that of unjustifiable suffering.

Set during an epidemic in the town of Oran, The Plague follows a series of characters as they attempt to fight this horrible disease. One that is so far outside their power that at points it basically seems like their struggle is futile. They organise quarantines, go into plague houses, and expose themselves to extraordinary risk, all in an attempt to help their fellow man. And yet a question is posed through the novel: what is suffering even for?

There are various attempts to answer it. For the priest, Father Paneloux, he initially says the plague is a punishment, before relenting when faced with the death of an innocent child. He retreats fully into his faith, referring to his submission to God not simply as humility, but as humiliation: one he is willing to bear if it will help him make sense of the world around him.

On the other hand there are those like Jean Tarrou, who bears a passing resemblance to Camus’ prior absurd heroes, in that he is both relatively cheerful and yet slightly detached from existence, more alert to its emptiness than most people. He rather nobly decides to put his happiness on the line to run a group of volunteers who aid with fighting the plague. He is beset with a sense of guilt about his past, and yet manages to balance both being at peace with the disaster unfolding around him, yet also not complacent to simply let it happen without trying to save as many people as possible.

There is Rambert, a journalist who is torn between his duty to return home to his fiance, and his duty not to abandon this town of innocents without a fight. I won’t spoil it, but this internal conflict is so terribly relatable because it taps into the agonising reality of genuine ethical dilemmas. We do not just see Rambert reason his decision out like an analytic philosopher, he tortures over each step of it. It is gripping stuff, and I dare say many will see themselves reflected in Rambert’s eyes.

Then we have Dr. Rieux, our protagonist and a physician in Oran. He spends most of the book engaging with this issue of suffering in some way. He struggles with two ideas: first that the suffering caused by the plague is totally pointless and meaningless and second, that they are also near-powerless to stop it. This feeling of impotence pervades much of the novel, and eventually Rieux comes to a strange and almost paradoxical conclusion. The suffering is not meaningful in the sense that it was for some higher purpose. Instead, he thinks it is important because he chooses to care about it. He decides that he will remember and record the sufferings of the people in Oran. Not because he thinks there is any metaphysical reason to do so, but because in the absence of higher values, these are the ones he wants to live by.

I love this book because we are all going to suffer at some point, and through his characters Camus explores so many of the different ways people can try to cope, or rationalise, or just survive. If his earlier works deal with the mere meaninglessness of Sisyphus’ struggle, The Plague deals with the pains of having to roll a boulder up a hill over and over again, feeling your shoulders ache and your legs burn with each passing inch, and all for nothing.

But, with that image, let’s move swiftly on.

3. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time by Joseph Frank

This is often considered one of the greatest biographies in history. Unfortunately, it is 5 volumes long and, as a result, an absolutely insane undertaking for most people. But luckily, there is now a reduced version, which stands at a modest 900 pages. Now, I know that sounds like a lot, but I promise you it is more than worth it. It charts the life and writings of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, from cradle to grave.

The real strengths of this work are twofold: the first is that it gives you an insight into where the philosophical ideas of Dostoevsky came from, and gives an overview of each of these ideas. In itself this is already fantastic. Most people have not read every one of Dostoevsky’s works, but this gives a short synopsis of each of them, as well as a thematic analysis drawing from Joseph Frank’s years of expertise. It also situates Dostoevsky within wider 19th century Russian literature, philosophy, and intellectualism.

The other thing that strikes you reading this book is just how troubled Dostoevsky was over the course of his life. Frank combs his letters for particular insights on how the man was feeling during his prison sentence, his gambling addiction, his doubts about his faith, and his intellectual spats with other members of the Russian intelligentsia. It helps explain where some of his antipathy towards intellectuals comes from, as well as why he had such confidence in the ability of Orthodox Christianity to transform the hearts and minds of the people of Russia.

As a biography, it also cuts the perfect balance between academic rigor and understandable writing style. Every claim is backed up by reliable sources, yet at the same time Frank has no trouble forging this into a compelling and coherent narrative. As one biographer of Albert Camus pointed out “each man’s life could fill a thousand biographies”, and Dostoevsky’s perhaps more than most. Frank, and the editor of this abridged edition, manage to home in largely on the areas most people will be interested in. Much of the work is based around Dostoevsky’s personal experiences as it pertains to the themes of his books.

We also get numerous extracts from, and analysis of, his articles from his journal Diary of a Writer. We don’t necessarily see these examined very often today, so it is a real treat to have this less appreciated aspect of the man’s work brought to life, and linked with his other projects.

I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants to take a deeper dive into the life and works of Dostoevsky. The only reservation I would have is that there are numerous spoilers for each of his books and short stories. On the one hand, if you are a very plot-focused person, this could ruin them. But on the other, if you are more interested in exploring the themes in Dostoevsky’s work, then in some ways getting some light spoilers does not really matter. As someone who almost always thinks Dostoevsky is more valuable on a second or even third read, this is not too much of an issue from my perspective.

Above all, this biography really helps to explore the psychological insight Dostoevsky had. Something Frank emphasises is that Dostoevsky lived so many different lives. He grew up in a very minor noble family, convinced they had higher origins than they did, then he was enmeshed in the intellectual circles of St Petersburg, and then a convict in a Siberian prison, and then a soldier in the Russian army, then returning to the world of intelligentsia with a renewed perspective, and finally heralded as a prophet, meeting with the Tsar and giving speeches at the unveiling of Pushkin’s statue. This partly explains his ability to step into the mind of criminals, aristocrats, sadists, and saints. And by learning about his life, we might be able to stand on his shoulders, and glean a little bit of this insight for ourselves.

But if I continue about this one we will be here all day. So I’ll move on.

4. Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

If there was one book I wish that everyone in the world could read, it would almost certainly be this. In this short volume, Aristotle addresses so many of the problems mankind faces both at the level of the everyday, and also that of philosophy. Here he puts forward his famous theory of virtue ethics, where both joy and goodness are found through the pursuit of particular virtues.

There are many concepts in this book that I think are genuinely life-changing. They are often things we already know deep down, but it is fascinating to see them explored and explained over 2,000 years ago.

The first is the notion of “habituation” or, essentially “you become what you do repeatedly”. For Aristotle virtue was not a theoretical exercise, but was instead a process of trial and error where you attempt to act virtuously over and over again until you get it right, before repeating that until it becomes automatic. I really like this because I think it reminds us that while we can think about the concept of goodness until the cows come home, at some point this needs to translate into practical action.

The second is the “golden mean” which is the idea that most virtues are about having just the right amount of a given quality. So if you are too courageous you might veer into being reckless or careless, but if you are not courageous enough you would instead be cowardly. Aristotle also points out that these are context-dependent. A soldier might need to be a lot more courageous than most other people, while it is more important that a rich person is generous than a poor person is, and so on. Again, this is a very practical way of looking at virtue, which is a concept that can easily become abstracted away from daily life, and as a result swiftly forgotten about.

The third is the idea of phronesis, or “practical wisdom”. This is the specific type of wisdom it takes to know what virtues are appropriate in which situations, and to what extent. It is a kind of tactfulness that does not claim ethical conduct can be reduced down to a set of ironclad rules that are followed in just the same way in every situation, but instead requires a careful, experienced hand to know what is the best course of action to take. I think this is an idea we are probably all familiar with. There is a kind of intangible practical knowledge that someone gets from having been in a whole bunch of different situations, and experienced various and complex ethical decisions. In putting a name to that concept, and making it a large part of his ethical system, I think Aristotle again observes the necessity of actually making ethical decisions to becoming a good ethical decision-maker. As much as I wish ethics was a matter of deduction from a set of axioms, I agree with Aristotle that it is probably more nuanced than that.

Lastly, Aristotle thinks the end result of becoming a virtuous person is Eudaimonia, or “human flourishing”. That is, he thinks being good is not just beneficial for other people, but for you as well. It will mean you’ll have firm and reliable friends, make wise decisions, and generally be more content with both yourself and the world. I think this is a very important observation because it has become accepted wisdom that being “good”, however we define it, is going to in some way be self-destructive. That good people will inevitably be taken advantage of, and end up the victims of so-called “bad” people. But I don’t think that is necessarily true, and neither does Aristotle. Would you really be able to live with yourself if you went around not caring about anyone? And would this even be a successful strategy for selfish gain in most situations? Aristotle challenges a common pessimistic cliche, and even for that alone I think this book is well worth a careful read, and a careful re-read.

But next I want to look at a totally different philosophy of life, but one that the internet seems incredibly interested in.

5. The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic, by Jean-Manuel Robineau

There are very few philosophers who inspire such extreme reactions as Diogenes the Cynic. He reportedly went to the toilet in the street, touched himself inappropriately in public, and would heckle passers by from the ceramic jar he lived in. And yet, he claimed this was the right way to live, and seemed strangely happy and content in this bizarre state. He is best known for trolling Plato and talking smack to Alexander the Great.

The trouble with studying someone like Diogenes is that he was such a unique thinker that his legend has become more and more embellished over time, meaning the actual man and his ideas can easily become lost. But that is where this book comes in real handy.

The author is Jean-Manuel Robineau, who is a classicist and an ancient historian, and so he is adept at identifying which stories about Diogenes emerged at which times, what are the more reliable accounts of his life, and breaking down his philosophy into a set of core themes.

Whereas the popular conception of Diogenes is very “rebel without a cause”, Robineau explains that the cynic philosophy focuses around a particular conception of how humanity should “naturally” live. It was thus heavily critical of anything seen as socially imposed without good reason. In that way Diogenes was a sort of ancient anarchist or ancient nihilist, in the broadest possible sense of those words. His supreme value was freedom, and he thought that this freedom could be achieved by attempting to have as few needs as possible. You can even see the origins of Stoicism here as well.

The strange actions he took, like choosing to be homeless, voluntarily torturing himself, and refusing to own any possessions but the cloak on his back, were all in service to this idea. As far as he was concerned, if you needed something, then someone could use that need to control you. So he stretched this idea to its extreme, rejecting even regular food and shelter because if he felt he needed these things then someone could control him with them. Famously, he defined poverty not as not having enough, but instead as feeling the need for more than you have. We might not want to take this to the level Diogenes did, I certainly do not. But there is something comforting in learning about someone who gave up everything they had, and underwent extreme physical suffering, yet still seemed at least partially content.

Diogenes’ critical eye is also worth learning from. In modern parlance, we might call him a real sceptic. He was adept at looking at whatever the average Athenian or Corinthian took for granted, and subjecting it to careful scrutiny. He was harshly critical of the distinctions made between people, seeing everyone as equal in their natural state. His almost instinctive contrarianism would probably be very irritating if we found it in someone today, and yet I also think we ought not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sometimes it really is worth taking our base assumptions about how we ought to live, and examining them with a logical microscope. This book does an excellent job at exploring this aspect of Diogenes’ approach, and so it gently reminds us to do the same.

Lastly, learning about Diogenes reveals someone who was boldly committed to their own ideas. He scorned hypocrisy in the other philosophers around him, including Plato, and insisted on practicing every aspect of what he preached. He thought that Athenian and Corinthian society was unjust, so he refused to participate in it. He thought that comfort made you less free, so he went out of his way to scorn material comforts. He thought that there was no distinction between the powerful and rich and the poor and needy, so he treated them all with equal disdain, even when this put his very life at risk. This close link between his philosophy and the way he actually lived bears a pretty stark lesson for us all. How many of us truly live by our own values in every way we can? Where are we falling short of who we say we are? And where have we become like the hypocrites Diogenes found so unconscionable during his life?

I truly believe these are life-changing questions, if they are followed through to their conclusions. And this book will help you to ask them.

6. On Love by Stendhal

There are few things that bring as much joy and suffering to someone’s life as love. On the one hand a mutual passionate love can feel addictive, and indeed some neuroscientists have alikened it to taking a hard drug. But anyone who has been on the unfortunate end of unrequited love knows just how painful this can be. Today these extremes of emotion are often treated with derision, or mocked, but when Stendhal turns his mind to the issue, he brings a mixture of precise observation and empathy that sheds real light on a phenomenon that many of us will go through.

It is here that Stendhal puts forward his theory of “crystallization”. This is the propensity of someone in love to raise the object of their affections to almost the level of a demi-god. We ignore their less desirable qualities and only look at their positive aspects. And slowly the real person gets left behind and we begin to fall in love with our idea of someone instead of the flesh, blood, and mind that stands before us. This is why love can sometimes feel like a temporary madness in hindsight. A person who seemed so perfect only a few weeks before is revealed to be not so wonderful after all, and we sit there wondering how we could have ever fallen for them. It can also explain the extreme disappointment of some lovers as soon as they finally get together. When they are confronted with the fact that they are not actually ideal for one another, but they are each messy human beings who will intermittently bring one another joy, sorrow, irritation, and ecstasy. For Stendhal, love is as much about the game that goes on in our heads as it is about the particular person we love.

Based on this initial premise of crystallization, he then makes a whole series of insightful observations about love. For example, he remarks that if someone is kept at just the right distance from the person they love, they can be brought almost to the point of insanity. The separation helps to further cement this idealised image of their beloved by firing up their imagination, while the brief moments of contact give them the illusion that they actually have a chance at being with this person. We may have been in this sort of situation ourselves, always kept on the hook through little crumbs of affection, while at the same time held at arm's length. For Stendhal, this behaviour is not mysterious at all, but is explained by the crystallising forces at play.

Stendhal’s work here is so influential that it formed the basis for the modern psychological theory of limerence and its role in relationships. Limerence is seen as a kind of obsessive affection, where we allow the object of our love to occupy our minds to such an extent that we find it difficult to live the rest of our life. We daydream about them, pour over their behaviour for any sign that they feel the same way about us, and let work, friends, and family go by the wayside in the process. For Stendhal, and researchers like Dorothy Tennov, this is crystallisation at its most extreme. The lover has reified their own desire far above the person that really exists, and so their obsession can run roughshod over their inner world, causing immense pain in the process.

But that is just the start. Alongside the more grand, theoretical claims, Stendhal makes a thousand tiny observations about love. How the different countries in Europe approached love in his day, how the act of discovering someone’s inner depths is supremely romantic, and how we can easily become trapped valuing a person simply because they treat us with contempt. It is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand their own mind a little better. And personally, as a bit of a romantic myself, I tend to totally lose my head in the early stages of love. Seeing Stendhal explain what is happening with such extreme perspicacity can really help me make sense of my own experiences, and as a result prevent me from falling into the same traps as many of his characters.

7. Byung-Chul Han - The Burnout Society

If you’ve been watching the channel over the last 6 months or so then you’ll know I’ve been in a bit of a Byung-Chul Han phase. I find his writing style really compelling and his books are always just the right length to cover the topic he is talking about. But if I had to pick a favourite, it would still be the work that made him famous - The Burnout Society.

Now, you’ve clicked on a video that is about 7 books that will change your life in 2025, or whatever I have decided to title this. So chances are you might be very into the idea of self-improvement. I think that is all well and good. In fact, for a long time, the tagline to this channel was “thinking to improve your life”. But Han raises an important counterpoint to this idea: he worries that we can become so obsessed with our achievements and our improvement, that we burn ourselves out in the process.

Han is intensely critical of what he calls an “excess of positivity” in our approach to life. That is, we think that anything is possible, and that if we just try hard enough, our dreams are within our grasp. There is nothing wrong with this in principle: it may be just what someone needs to hear if they feel completely helpless about their life. But Han thinks that this too can be taken to an unhelpful extreme. If we believe that we can achieve anything, then if we have not yet achieved what we want, then we will conclude that there must be something wrong with us. But this is simply not always the case. We all have genuine limitations to what we can do, achieve, and control, and pretending like we do not is a kind of toxic positivity that leaves us forever beating ourselves up for not attaining the near-impossible.

Additionally, Han talks about all the things many of us have forgotten to value in our pursuit of individual achievement and economic success. For example, it encourages us to see our friends or our loved ones as vectors for our achievement, rather than people in their own right. It means we struggle to stop and immerse ourselves in the joys of thinking deeply about a topic, or allowing ourselves to truly rest. In one striking observation, Han discusseshow even the concept of resting has now been subordinated to the value of work. We do not rest because, as Aristotle might say, rest is noble and an important part of life. We instead rest to “recharge for our work”. For Han, many of us have ceased working in order to live, and have begun to live in order to work. And strikingly, for many of us this is not imposed from outside, but instead from within. Rather than being under the thumb of an external overseer, threatening to beat us if we do not meet a quota, we are constantly pressuring ourselves to achieve more, even at the point it is no longer making us happy.

There is a reason why Han’s essay went “viral” inasmuch as anything goes viral in the world of philosophy. It resonated with many people’s experiences. Many people have fallen into the habit of seeing themselves as a mere means to an end. They live in order to achieve, in order to improve. But this work warns us of the danger of going too far in this direction. It is all very well delaying gratification, and working for your future, but let’s ensure it is a future we want, and not one that consists of a whole host of accomplishments, none of which bring us a drop of contentment.

So, that’s my list. I hope you enjoyed it! I’ll leave some links to the books below. Luckily most of them are free, what with being well out of copyright, but some will also be Amazon links.

And if you want to watch my video on the burnout society, you can check it out right here,

Thank you so much for watching. Merry Christmas! And I will see you in the next video.