I’m going to be honest with you. In 2025, I had a horrible year for reading. All in all, I read 72 total books. That’s the smallest total number of books I’ve read in any given year since I started keeping track way back in 1996.
I’m not making excuses, but my cancer played a big role in the dramatic drop in annual book totals. I spent a lot of time in 2025 researching cancer treatments. On average, I probably spent five to ten hours a week reading cancer studies on PubMed. That’s an hour a day I spent reading papers rather than books. Combine that with lots of doctor appointments at UCLA and MD Anderson and my reading suffered quite a bit in 2025.
With that said, I also spent way too much time mindlessly scrolling on social media. No excuses for that.
I’ve come up with a plan to remedy my deficiencies for 2026. I’ve cut out a lot of my doom scrolling and have integrated structured 60-90 minute reading blocks into my daily schedule. We are only five days into the year, but thus far my plan is working well and I’m really enjoying prioritizing reading dead tree books over the mind-numbing social media scroll sessions I found myself in last year.
In my world, only reading 72 books last year is an abject failure. I have to keep in mind that about half of Americans read ZERO books every year. The median number of books read per person (in the USA) is fewer than five books a year. In comparison to the five books a year that most Americans read, reading 72 books makes me seem like a literary rock star.
Every year I share a post containing my favorites from the large list of books I read. The books I listed below are the cream of the crop out of my choices. They are the most informative, enjoyable, and influential books I read last year. The books are ordered solely based on the date I read them.
I hope the list introduces you to some new favorites and helps to inspire you to spend more time with a book in your hand in 2026.
An excellent book about the early days of the FBI and the techniques they used to hunt down “America’s Most Wanted” in the 1930s.
I picked this one up after a trip to Rwanda a couple years ago. It interviews both the killers and victims’ surviving family members in one of the largest genocides in recent history. The book describes how one ethnic group can become enraged enough to kill millions of their own countrymen. Powerful stuff.
101 Drills for Handguns, Rifles, and Shotguns
My friend Mike Boyle wrote this excellent little book full shooting drills. Most of the other books on the market covering this subject matter do it from a perspective of creating drills for repetitive individual practice sessions. This one is a little different. Most of the drills Mike shares are very competitive. They are short round count stages that are all timed and scored. If you have a shooting club or are a police trainer looking to add some friendly competition into your shooting classes, you should pick this book up. If you look closely, you might find a drill created by yours truly.
Fen Follett is one of my favorite fiction writers. This book covers a realistic fictional narrative of how Stonehenge was created.
You might also like the author’s book The Armor of Light, the fifth book in his “Kingsbridge” series which began with his book The Pillars of the Earth, originally published 30 years ago. It kept me enthralled when I read it in college. .
My friend Justin published this MASSIVE tome consisting of over 300K words of valuable content covering every imaginable topic from physical fitness to everyday carry gear. The book goes into great depth instructing every basic life skill a modern adult should have. If I could recommend the single best non-fiction book I read last year, this would be it. Don’t balk at the price tag. When you realize that this huge tome contains more words than the last four books you’ve read combined, you’ll realize that the cost is a bargain.
I like to think that I’ve lived an adventurous life. Compared to the author, I’m incredibly boring. The late Charles Bowden spent most of his life chronicling the drug war and cross-border violence in the South Western USA. This book tells of his early exploits as a hippie smuggling guns, drugs, and electronics across the border between Mexico and the USA in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The author’s command of the English language is masterful and his adventures are incomparable. Fair warning. There is a significant amount of sex and drug use described in the book. I think a lot of my readers might also be turned off by the unapologetically liberal political views the author shares. If you aren’t locked into a purely binary political expression, I think a lot of you would enjoy this adventurous and tightly written descriptive autobiography.
Code Four: Surviving and Thriving in Public Safety
Dr. Glenn actually lives a few blocks away from my house. I met her this year and found her to be an incredibly knowledgeable and passionate person who is dedicated to her mission keeping cops, firefighters, and medics mentally healthy throughout their stressful careers. Her book should be a must-read for first responders.
As Ed masterfully describes in this book, active killer response shouldn’t be based on “feel good” solutions. Instead policy decisions and tactics should be based on modeling real-life successful active killer intervention strategies and math. The faster we can get a armed, willing, and capable defender to engage the killer(s), the lower the body count will be. Ed illustrates these indisputable facts extremely well.
With occupational experience as an army officer, a high school teacher, a part time cop, and a firearms instructor, he has a perspective that is unmatched in the tactical world. No one in our business has a better school shooting response paradigm. I’m proud to say that I’ve successfully completed Ed’s Active Killer instructor program If you are a firearms instructor, CCW carrier, cop, or school employee, you need to read this book.
A bit of a departure from the tactical books I often read, but if you are a male in the dating market (or a guy who wants to make his marriage better) the information in this book will be very useful.
The author of this book uses a unique question and answer style to impart some hard-earned wisdom about prevailing in violent criminal attacks. And since Hock mentioned my travel book and recommended some of my work on travel safety in the developing world, the book gets six out of five stars.
The author’s witty writing style and obsessive reading/research on the topic of old west gunfighting is ineffable.
A medical doctor describes his 30+year history of battling prostate cancer. Both he and I have Stage IV prostate cancer that came back and metastasized after surgical treatment. We’ve both been told by our doctors that there is no “cure.” Instead, the medical consensus is that all medical interventions at this stage should be considered “treatment” or “life extension” rather than a cure.
It’s an inspiration for me to see that someone can successfully navigate 30 years of frustrating medical procedures during his course of “treatment.”
If you are looking for a fast-paced and entertaining western where the author gets the gun stuff right, I’d heartily suggest that you pick this one up.
While you are contemplating book purchases, don’t forget my travel safety book. For even more great books, check out my Recommended Reading page.
Some of the above links (from Amazon.com) are affiliate links. If you purchase these items, I get a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.
