5 Mind-Blowing Fiction Recommendations (H1, 2025)
Political satire, monetary dystopia, and more
Hello there,
If you’re new here, welcome to Learning Machine. This community is all about blowing our collective minds with new ideas, mental models, and ways of looking at the world every week.
Long-time readers know that an essential component of this endeavor is to read as many books across as wide a spectrum as possible.
If you want a powerful case to be made for this idea, drop everything and read this:
The thesis in this article, based on the wonderful book ‘Range’, forms the very foundations of my multi-disciplinary learning regime, and the name and essence of this newsletter.
But what many people miss is the importance of having good fiction as part of your learning diet.
In many ways, fiction surpasses non-fiction’s ability to make sense of certain historical events and develop empathy and understanding of different people and their life circumstances, which any academic work can.
That’s why I give fiction just as much weight as non-fiction in my learning journey. And so far in 2025, I’ve stumbled upon one mind-blowing work after another.
Here are 5 fiction books, across genres, that I’d strongly recommend:
A Fine Balance: Set in the 60s and 70s, and told through the POV of 4 struggling individuals caught in the crosshairs of history, this story offers an unparalleled perspective on how ordinary Indians struggled through the socialist era and the devastation & chaos they faced in the Emergency years. It’s almost guaranteed that if you’re reading this, you haven’t lived through that horrific era, and I reckon that to understand what happened, this book will do a much better job than any history book on the topic. Cycling between hope and devastating despair, the characters of the book (2 poor migrant tailors, a young student, and a beautiful but struggling widow) live through the worst tribulations. But the way they continue to march on and find the little joys that make life worth living is described beautifully. This book is a must-read not just for Indians but for anyone interested in a fantastic, realistic story grounded in historical facts.
The Mandibles- We’ve all heard horror stories about Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation, or how the currency keeps collapsing in other failed states like Venezuela. But what does it mean to live through a calamity like that? How does it all play out? And…what if it happened in your country- something you’d deem unimaginable? That’s exactly what this book delivers—an eerie, step-by-step descent into national collapse that feels uncomfortably plausible. The US has defaulted on its debt, the dollar is in free fall, and the nation is slowly waking up to a hyperinflationary nightmare. Given the world is undergoing a monetary reset, this is an extremely relevant (and terrifying) book that you MUST read to understand how these things play out and what one can expect, because when you run worst-case scenarios, you can always be better prepared. But it’s not just doom and gloom- it ends with a gut-punch twist and a moral that couldn’t be more timely. Who knows, this book might just get more famous and be hailed as prescient if we do accelerate into uncharted financial waters in the coming years.
Flowers For Algernon- If a scientist comes and offers a way to double your IQ via some brain procedure, would you do it? In what ways might that change you? The main character of the book undergoes exactly one such process, but from a starting point that’s much below normal IQ levels. The transformation is captured through his diary entries, starting with misspelled words and simple sentences, slowly becoming sophisticated—and then, heartbreakingly, unraveling again. The book raises some very important questions on the ethics of technology and the undue importance our culture places on intelligence. This one will also get talked about a lot when we reach a point where Neuralink brain chips will suddenly become accessible to everyone, and we’ll be forced to make a choice.
Submission: When an Islamic party comes to power in France, sweeping cultural changes follow. Our narrator—a disillusioned professor who has numbed himself with academic detachment and lots of casual sex—finds his world shaken. Is this a satire of Islam, or an indictment of the West’s spiritual decay? Either way, the result is unnerving. Highly controversial and thought-provoking, this is one of the most unique books I've read this year.
Yellowface: This one’s a very fast-paced read that’ll keep you hooked because it has a damn interesting premise. A young author who’s a bit of a loser and has hit a dead end in her writing career suddenly strikes gold. When her friend and superstar author dies, she decides to pick up a manuscript of her unpublished work from her house and publish it as her own book. Told through the lens of online discourse—think Twitter threads, thinkpiece takedowns, and Insta-driven backlash—this novel is razor-sharp, relentlessly modern, and impossible to put down.
That’s it, friends. If you’ve read any of these or have recos that shook you, hit reply. I’m always looking for the next mind-bender that changes the way I view the world.
And if you want some more book recos to sift through, dive right into these:
But hey- make sure you just don’t feel good reading about these books, and end up reading one ultimately.
Really liked Flowers for Algernon and Yellowface, will try out the others. Yellowface gave an interesting perspective of how a lot of authors we like today are actually presented to us in a way that makes us want to read them.