Noor's Top Reads of 2025

Explore the team’s favourite books of 2025! Choosing three from an entire year is a challenge and more recent reads tend to obscure what you read in February. Still, there are those that stay with you through the months. Why three? Because it's more than one but less than a list. The rules are: they don't need to have been published in 2025, but you need to have read or re-read it this year.

These are Noor's choices!

• Empire of AI - Karen Hao

Amidst the joyful uptake of AI-enabled chatbots and generators in nearly all unnecessary things, I really appreciated reading a well-researched and captivatingly written book about Silicon Valley AI and how truly systematically awful it is. Hao deftly weaves in the horrible reality of the human and environmental costs of generative AI around the gossipy-incestuous story of Sam Altman's OpenAI and literally all the other big tech companies. It's gripping, nauseating, informative, and really very eye-opening - I highly recommend this book!

• Mother Mary Comes to Me - Arundhati Roy

The life of this incredible woman never ceases to amaze me. We see her from a young girl observing the perplexities of the world, to a young student just barely scraping by, to the breakout novelist who wins the Booker prize with her debut, to the woman we know now: the bane of the Hindutva government and the clear-sighted trusted writer. Roy writes not just about her own life but about her difficult and complicated relationship with her own mother, Mary Roy, a powerhouse of a woman who devoted herself to the liberation of others but had little time or patience left for her own children. Nevertheless, Arudhati Roy writes about their relationship with dignity, love and respect, while honestly reflecting on the difficulties they had. I LOVED this book, and Roy retains her frank, funny and wry writing style that I love so much. Ps. I first read this book on libro.fm - Arundhati Roy reads it herself beautifully!

• Is a River Alive - Robert MacFarlane

If there is a book that has given me hope this year it is this one. MacFarlane journeys through Ecuador, Canada and India to answer the question - Is a river alive? But perhaps more important than this one question is what do we do if it is? How to we listen to it? How fo we protect the very natural environment that we depend on? And who are the people already doing this work? MacFarlane's prose is jaw-droppingly beautiful, writing about the gorgeous natural environments and animals of the Los Cedros cloud forest and Chennai and in the same breath making clear the political realities of trying to protect them and the toll that humans have had on the environment. Told with a cast of environmentalists, scientists, poets and all-round gorgeous people, MacFarlane draws you in to another way of seeing yourself in the world. (I also first listened to this one on libro.fm where Robert MacFarlane reads it! Listened to it three times in fact!)

• Intertidal - Yuvan Aves

If Is a River Alive? is a question, then Intertidal is an answer. Told through a series of short diary entries, young environmentalist and teacher Yuvan Aves embodies the way of living with nature, even in the highly urban environment of Chennai. Aves shows us that there are ways to make space for, and protect our natural environment with wasp colonies living on his balcony and carefully removing snakes from classrooms, teaching children to become citizen scientists and participating in beach walks to safeguard the nests of turtles along the shore. No matter how hard the crcumstances, we need to do it, and here is one way.