The World Has More Than One Measure — There's Also the Dimension You Open Up | 5Y New Year Books & Film Recommendations
How to start the new year.
As 2025 draws to a close, this year may have brought unforgettable highlights or been filled with real-time unknowns. Reading, at any moment, offers room for inward exploration.
The following reading list comes from recommendations by our colleagues at 5Y Capital. The selections are eclectic: an AI engineering guide for the future, investment insights for navigating complexity, the legendary lives of scientific giants, historical close-ups, and social observation. This diversity reflects the wide-ranging curiosity inside 5Y Capital. These books don't claim to hold standard answers about the future, but we hope they offer some reference and enjoyment.
Wishing you a happy new year in advance.
(The list is sorted alphabetically by title)
- 1 -
AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models
Author: Chip Huyen
Recommended by: Addison Ji
Chip Huyen's new book this year. It offers extensive practical use cases and hands-on guidance, covering core concepts from large model pre-training and post-training to RAG, agents, tool use, and evaluation methods. It also systematically summarizes common failure patterns and viable optimization strategies in real-world implementation. Highly recommended for AI builders who enjoy getting their hands dirty but have been looking for a systematic reference book.
- 2 -
The Guns of August
Author: Barbara Tuchman
Recommended by: Jiangyun Jin
At one of history's most critical junctures, the darkness and brilliance of human nature under immense pressure were magnified exponentially. What appears contingent in retrospect became de facto inevitable. The struggle, myopia, and courage in human decision-making will play out again and again.
- 3 -
Beijing Fahua Temple
Author: Li Ao
Recommended by: Bosen Xu
People rise and fall in the torrents of history: "A temple is a fine place — for prayers, for deliverance, for making wishes, for confession; for discussing ghosts and spirits, life and death; for navigating the sacred and secular, court and countryside, entry and exit, family and nation, recluse and official, sovereign and subject, self and other, right and wrong, reason and feeling, constancy and change, staying and leaving, cause and effect, and the governance of the world."
- 4 -
The Innovator's Dilemma
Author: Clayton Christensen
Recommended by: Jingran Zhu
Without understanding the underlying logic of "disruptive innovation," the very experience we pride ourselves on may become the biggest obstacle to missing the next great company. In the new year, strive to unlearn those business logics that are "doomed to fail because they are too correct," and genuinely seek out disruptive technologies that seem marginal, even somewhat "rough" around the edges.
- 5 -
The Great Way: Duan Yongping's Investment Q&A
Author: Duan Yongping
Recommended by: Mengqi Ji
Systematically organized by topic from Duan Yongping's online Q&A sessions, more readable than the Snowball special issues, with insights for both investing and business operations. The book's reflections on compound interest merit long-term, repeated contemplation. My阶段性总结: a bucket of principal, a dose of patience, sufficient time horizon, doing the right things, and doing things increasingly right.
- 6 -
Variable Thinking: Mathematics and Creative Thought
Author: Heisuke Hironaka
Recommended by: Liqiang Wang
Entrepreneurship, VC investing, and technology product innovation are fundamentally akin to sudoku, Go, and NP (nondeterministic polynomial-time) problems in computer science — all share the property that results are (belatedly) easy to verify yet extremely difficult to solve. The core challenge lies in: the search space for "finding the correct path" is vast, while the criterion for "judging whether a path is correct" only becomes visible at the endpoint. From this core perspective, one can distill a broadly generalizable underlying methodology. Open this slim volume and you may find inspiration and intellectual pleasure; scattered cognitions suddenly connect like dots snapping into lines, brightening all at once. Much like unexpectedly encountering in the Collected Works of Hanshan the verse "Today attaining the Buddha-body, with urgent haste as an order decrees" — it mirrors and resonates with the first-principles thinking and rapid action championed in innovation, entrepreneurship, and VC.
- 7 -
The Thinking Game
Author: DeepMind
Recommended by: Yunfeng Shi
DeepMind did something: they gathered people who genuinely care about science, gave them abundant compute and freedom, and pushed the boundaries of human knowledge. Not to capture market share, not for quick monetization — simply because protein folding is beautiful and fundamental, worth solving.
This is what AI research should look like — GPUs, algorithms, engineering capabilities shouldn't be used merely for ornamental refinement, but to change the world. I hope looking back ten years from now, I'll have been part of something like this.
- 8 -
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
Author: George Packer
Recommended by: Jing Li
Reads like a novel, yet the protagonists and stories are all real. More than a record of thirty years of American social transformation and individual fortunes rising and falling, it's like a mirror — everyone within it is being slowly buried by the dust of the times. A person's fate, of course, depends on self-struggle, but one must also consider the course of history.
- 9 -
The Garden of Forking Paths
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Recommended by: Yanqiu Yan
A detective novel as外壳, wrapped around a prescient philosophical core about time. Borges uses literary imagination to sketch a labyrinth of "forking time," his conception of "parallel realities" predating related scientific theories. It reveals a world of infinite possibility: "Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures." There is always a unique path to be found, leading to infinite possibilities.
- 10 -
Why Fish Don't Exist
Author: Lulu Miller
Recommended by: Mengqi Ji
A scientist devoted his life to classifying fish, yet "fish, as it turns out, don't exist." Absurd yet profound. Some spend their lives insisting on dividing right from wrong, only to lose their way in obsession. The most refreshingly odd and fluidly readable book I've encountered this year. For me, it shows how beauty and destruction coexist in a chaotic world — one must allow for emptiness, and guard against the imbalance and catastrophe brought by extreme attachment.
- 11 -
Yang Zhenning: The Beauty of Gauge and Symmetry
Author: Caijian Jiang
Recommended by: Yaopeng Xing
From war-torn Southwest Associated University to the Nobel Prize's highest podium, this is the authoritative biography personally endorsed by Yang Zhenning himself, featuring nearly a hundred private archival photographs — about this scientific giant's magnificent century-long life.
- 12 -
The Writers' Castle
Author: Uwe Neumärker
Recommended by: Xuechen Wang
A book about the post-WWII Nuremberg Trials, but rather than focusing on the courtroom, it turns its gaze to the audience — writers from around the world tasked with documenting and reporting this pivotal historical event. Watch how each employed their own language to inscribe this moment into history: a reckoning with the old world, and a prelude to the Cold War.
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We welcome you to share your 2025 reading reflections or book recommendations in the comments. We'll select 2 featured comments to receive a gift prepared by 5Y Capital.
5Y Capital seeks out, supports, and inspires lonely entrepreneurs, providing support from spirit to all operational matters. We believe that if the "crazy" you in others' eyes begins to be believed in, the world will become refreshingly different.
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