To mark the season, here are twelve non-fiction selections for the twelve days of Christmas. These are books we enjoyed and found worth passing along, ranging from deep dives into semiconductor history to fresh looks at creative collaboration. Whether you need a companion for a long-haul flight, a thoughtful gift idea, or simply a quiet escape during the holidays, we hope you find something here worth your time.
Traces how Nvidia went from an also-ran in the 1990s graphics-chip wars to the most valuable company in the world. I was especially drawn to chapters on the early years: a crowded GPU market, real risk of failure, and a series of aggressive bets on parallel processing and CUDA that only later paid off in AI. This is a useful lens on how apparently unshakable hardware monopolies can shift just as Google’s TPUs and software stack start to challenge Nvidia’s dominance.
One of the quieter January releases I really liked this year is this biography of Masayoshi Son that has mostly flown under the radar. It tracks Son from the PC era through the dot-com boom, China’s rise, and now AI, while also offering a rare look at Japanese corporate culture and the experience of Korea’s diaspora in post-war Japan.
This is a clear, unsentimental look at how Apple’s search for efficiency helped build China’s advanced manufacturing machine — and left the company structurally dependent on it. The book makes a convincing case that once you’ve trained millions of workers, tooled thousands of factories, and wired up a dense supply chain in one country, the idea of simply “bringing production back” to the U.S. is close to fantasy. Apple is a case study in how corporate operations can quietly become geopolitical leverage.
This is a deeply reported corporate biography of the company that describes the fault line between China’s tech rise and Western security fears. I briefly consulted for Huawei during the big data era and found them hierarchical but effective. This describes the playbook for how a state-backed champion can offset U.S. export controls by stitching together ‘swarms’ of domestic chips to drive China’s AI ambitions.
Every Screen on the Planet offers a granular look at ByteDance’s internal machinery, moving beyond the usual geopolitical posturing to expose a corporate culture defined by aggressive iteration and speed. By dissecting mechanisms like “heating” — where staff manually boost content — the book demystifies the algorithm and provides a masterclass in modern user acquisition.
Breakneck contrasts China’s “engineering state” with America’s “lawyerly society,” arguing that true technological dominance stems from manufacturing scale rather than just lab breakthroughs. Wang is less interested in headline inventions than in factories, process knowledge, and the political choices that decide where real industrial and technological capacity ends up.
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This is one of the clearest, briskest guides I’ve seen to the world we’re actually living in: a politics reshaped by autocrats, tech billionaires, and professional fixers who treat rules as optional.
1929 retells the Great Crash as a character-driven thriller rather than a dry economic autopsy, following bankers, politicians, and regulators as leverage, optimism, and weak rules collide. For anyone hearing constant chatter about an “AI bubble,” it’s a useful reminder that crises are built from incentives, market plumbing, and governance as much as narratives — and that today’s financial architecture is very different from the margin-loan, gold-standard world that failed a century ago.
The Genius Myth looks at how the label “genius” is built as much by culture, PR, and prejudice as by actual achievement. Helen Lewis traces the idea from Victorian race science and IQ testing through to today’s cult of the visionary founder. For those of us in tech, where CEOs are routinely branded geniuses, it’s a reminder to focus on systems, teams, and incentives rather than halos around a few anointed individuals.
This is a clear-eyed history of how design expanded from ornament and objects into a sprawling ideology that promises to fix everything from user onboarding to urban inequality. The author shows, case by case, how “design thinking” became a corporate buzzword and why it routinely falls short in the face of politics, power, and economics.
This is no hagiography; it paints a complex portrait of Yvon Chouinard as a mercurial, often difficult leader who struggled to reconcile his anti-consumerist ideals with the reality of running a global apparel brand. Despite detailing his hypocrisy — from using virgin hardwoods for offices to his disdain for the very employees who built his wealth — the book ultimately left me still solidly in Patagonia’s corner.
I didn’t expect to enjoy a book about the Beatles, but this book turns their partnership into a sharp case study in how exceptional teams actually work. By tracing how Lennon and McCartney pushed, copied, rivaled, and rescued each other over years, it becomes a handbook on creative collaboration and co-founder dynamics as much as a music history. This book had me re-listening to the Beatles catalog with fresh ears.
