Unlike the last time, I do plan intend to read all of them!

1. You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts by M. John Harrison, who is among my favorite writers. I will also most likely re-read Viriconium, which is among the best short story collections out there, just make sure to get the edition with the “correct” story order. He also has a blog through which I learned about at least two good books.
2. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick, while re-reading Ubik, The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which are part of the same collection.
3. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which got on my radar after seeing One Battle After Another and learning it was based on several of Pynchon’s stories. So, I picked up an easy one to get acquainted with his work.
4. Letters from an Imaginary Country by Theodora Gross, as recommended by Cory Doctorow whose Enshittification I very much enjoyed.
5. Apple in China by Patrick McGee, which I am reading now and is making me realize what a horrible corporate citizen Apple was and most likely is, though all of those issues are probably more salient so soon after reading Enshittification. Still, you don’t get to a $1T valuation by being a minnow!
6. Breakneck by Dan Wang. At this point I have read so many podcasts and essays by, with and about Wang that I wonder what would be the point of reading the book itself, but I am a completionist.
7. Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg, which was itself recommended in Thinking With Tinderbox, from a journalist embedded in a software development team for a new type of a PIM app (remember those?) called Chandler. Just seeing a few screenshots of the never-quite-released app will help you realize why I have the book.
8. Tools and Weapons by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne. This book is six years old which from its mini-review in the FT seems to be a good case for regulating big tech written by someone from big tech (the author was Microsoft’s general counsel for 17 years).
9. Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark. I don’t remember who recommended this but I love reading about style guides and writing tips, if not necessarily implementing them.
10. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Book 1 by John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro. A very good friend has been hounding me for years to watch Vervaeke’s 50-part lecture series of the same name, but who has the time? Let me know when he has a book out, I told my friend, and so here we are.
11. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurus by Steve Brusatte, as recommended by Matt Wedel of the SV-POW blog. Just keeping up with my kids' interests!
12. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow, which I picked up at random at last year’s National Book Festival after seeing it has at least a few pages on Twain’s friendship with Nikola Tesla.
13. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, just so I could learn what on Earth happened with his cancer (non)treatment.
14. Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparaouhova and The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet by various authors, both released by Metalabel. Dark forests, of course, being very much top of mind for me lately.

Another great year of reading, and with a back log the length of human history why would every year not be as great?

Fiction

1. The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, which if I were being pedantic should be books 1–3 but I view this particular trilogy as really just the final book, That Hideous Strength, with two extended prologues.
2. Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer, last in the Terra Ignota trilogy, made me want to read The Illiad.
3. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, even better than I remembered it from 20 years ago.
4. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir will make for a good movie but please do not watch the trailer unless you want to see a major mid-story spoiler.
5. Babel by R. F. Kuang felt rushed and ultimately forgettable.

Science and technology

6. Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows was the best introduction to systems thinking for people in your life who are not into systems thinking.
7. How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg, a slice of Incerto applied to large projects.
8. The Notebook by Roland Allen, better than I expected.
9. In the Beginning… Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson, an essay that aged very well indeed.
10. A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins, a billionaire turned neuroscientist.
11. Thinking With Tinderbox by Mark Bernstein will be useful only to users of the Tinderbox app but if you are reading this you may want to take a look.
12. Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, a much needed antidote to the pro-big tech authors I tend to listen and read.
13. The Occasional Human Sacrifice by Carl Elliott, an antidote to the pro-clinical trial authors I tend to follow, though I still question whether it was needed.
14. The Billion-Dollar Molecule by Barry Werth, yes, biotech is broken by design.

Philosophy and religion

15. The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis will be on my yearly re-read list because sadly the anti-human movement has gone from strength to strength propelled by useful idiots who think that this time it’s different.
16. The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis was hilarious.
17. A Guide for the Perplexed by E. F. Schumacher opened my eyes to Shumacher’s work which is as timely as ever.
18. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Ernst F. Schumacher, the world could have taken a turn for the better in the late 1970s but then something happened.
19. Good Work by Ernst Friedrich Schumacher was not as strong as the first two and has an uncomfortable addendum about superior people tacked on at the end so I still don’t know what to make of it.
20. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, who sounds like a delightful person to be around and the half-lotus is in fact my preferred position for reading books but that is as far as my Earth-locked self will go into Eastern mysticism.
21. Books - A Manifesto by Ian Patterson, delightful.
22. Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds was a better introduction to Wittengstein and Poppper’s works than any formal biography.
23. Feline Philosophy by John Gray, mediocre.

And here are years past: 2024 — 2023 — 2022 though of course the book reviews go way back.

Behold the survivors of my November podcast purge:

Lindy

The Talk Show With John Gruber is, I think, the first podcast I ever downloaded, at a time when a white 1st generation iPod Nano was the only Apple product I owned. I haven’t missed a single episode since, though I am still waiting for one that matches its November 2016 peak.

Accidental Tech Podcast is one that I have listened to since the very beginning, when it was the after show of the host trio’s short-lived car podcast Neutral. I did drop it at some point but am now back to being a supporter, if for nothing else then to continue listening to John Siracusa kvetch about various topics. Though that, too, is yet to reach levels of his first and now retired podcast Hypercritical

Dithering is the only one I actually pay for. Like the two above it is about mostly about (Apple) technology, this one with a tinge of sports and geopolitics that Ben Thompson brings to the table.

Maybe

New Creative Era got me interested because of its second season, which is about the Internet as a dark forest. The whole Metalabel enterprise is worth checking out, though it’s too late to browse it for Christmas presents. ⊕ Unless, of course, your church’s December 25th falls on January 7, in which case I am willing to bet your “Christmas” gifts are exchanged on New Year’s Day and you may still have some time.

Old School with Shilo Brooks brings a new celebrity each episode to talk about a book that changed their lives. Although a part of The Free Press, it has no politics and much nostalgia. I don’t care much for the host, but where else would I be able to hear Nick Cave talk about Pinocchio?

Cortex has lost my favorite YouTuber as a co-host, but in its stead has a series of Internet personalities talk about their daily routines and productivity. Yes, please.

Will try them out, one of these days

Hard Drugs started off great, with the first two episodes being under 20 minutes and about topics that are essential for drug development (proteins and the development of insulin). The streak didn’t last: episodes 4, 5 and 6 are 54, 60 and 274 (yes, really) minutes long respectively. The young people who made it clearly had time on their hands; sadly, I don’t.

Statecraft, a podcast about American domestic and foreign policy, ⊕ I will take a moment here to note that Serbian and the adjacent langages — “naš” or “our” language in modern parlance — use the same word for both policy and politics, which is politika. Much evil has come from this confusion in terms. goes out of its way not to be about politics, focusing on the successes and lessons learned from the recent history. This is why I am on the fence about listening to any of it: maybe a podcast about the domestic policy of the late 1800s would be more applicable to the present day.

In Our Time is, on the other hand, a timeless podcast which I plan on listening well into my retirement. Not having retired yet, this year I only had time for Italo Calvino and Slime Moulds

And here are years past: 2024 — 2023 — 2022 — 2021 — 2020 — 2019 — 2018 — 2017 — The one where I took a break from podcasts — The very first one

Always fun. Unlike the last two I made the entries explicit and tried to include a link in each one, because this isn’t Instagram.

• Dec 15 - Frost
• Dec 16 - Cozy
• Dec 17 - Firelight
• Dec 18 - Evergreen
• Dec 19 - Beard
• Dec 20 - Sparkle
• Dec 21 - Solstice
• Dec 22 - Grinch
• Dec 23 - Baking
• Dec 24 - Travel
• Dec 25 - Feast
• Dec 26 - Home

More end-of-year lists coming in the next few days, as ever.

• autoeq.app which will give you the most pleasing equalizier settings for your brand of headphones and EQ software
• QuickNotes, a simple voice transcription app for iOS from Matt Birchler
• Luminar, unapologetically Japanese photo editing software
• Andrej Karpathy’s interview with Dwarkesh Patel, for a dose of techno-realism
• The Empire Podcast, for its 10-part series on Gaza

Have a good weekend, all.

Drywalls weren’t a thing when I was growing up in Serbia and I don’t think they are used even now. I avoided putting up shelves as the whole stud-finding procedure was a bit of a dark art that could go very wrong in my inattentive hands, never mind that the placement was just too constraining — I didn’t want the placement of a towel rod to be decided by a home builder from 30 years ago. Then I discovered toggle bolts (also known as butterfly anchors), and I have been putting up shelves, hooks, screen mounts and other bits of hardware with wild abandon.

Now, using toggle bolts will leave behind a comically large holes if you ever change your mind about wall placement. This hasn’t happened to me yet, but when it does I will know to go to YouTube, which has become a living encyclopedia of crafts. Just in the last two months it has helped me with replacing a microwave circuit board and fixing a pair of broken shades, and I am no handyman. This is why I would never lump in YouTube together with TikTok, Instagram and other soul-sucking services, though it is always good to turn off the recommendations.

My third bit of advice is also wall-related: for anything you wanted to hang that’s too light to warrant a toggle bolt, use 3M’s Command strips. Yes they are just a tiny bit wasteful since you can’t reuse the one that’s stuck on a wall, but unlike nails or pieces of colored sticky rubber, they will not leave any trace once removed. They are a renter’s best friend.

And if you are renting, do not be afraid to change things around if you are in a managed property and don’t have the owner acting as landlord. Each time I moved out they person doing the walk-through was surprised by how unchanged everything was, and each time I thought to myself that I should have hung up that towel rod, or anchored that Kallax shelf to the wall.

When moving, the ideal is to hire someone to do everything for you, from packing to load to driving and the unloading. If you don’t have the means for it (and I haven’t), at least hire someone for the loading/unloading part, preferably someone with experience. Either way, if you pack yourself, packing everything save for large pieces of furniture into boxes — there should be nothing irregularly shaped that’s not in a box. And yes, I truly mean everything, even (especially!) the groceries.

So whenever you come by a trinket and wonder to yourself whether you should get it, for yourself or as a present for your children or significant other, picture yourself coming across it while packing for another move and try to imagine how would you feel: glad that you got to keep the memento, or resentful that it became just another piece of detritus that you have to stuff in a box.

• get alignment: agree
• add color: give an example
• bottom (something) out: to discuss (something)
• table (something): stop talking about something
• block and tackle: do actual work (antonym: think strategically)
• pressure-test: ask someone, preferably highly-paid consultants, whether your guesses are correct

Of course, every profession has its linguistic pearls.

A more modest list for what I hope will be a more modest year:

1. Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer
2. Feline Philosophy by John Gray
3. Human Action by Ludwig von Mises
4. How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess
5. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
6. The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
7. Defeat at Gallipoli by Nigel Steel & Peter Hart
8. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
9. A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor by John Berger
10. The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis
11. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
12. For Blood and Money by Nathan Vardi
13. The Billion Dollar Molecule by Barry Werth
14. Broken Stars by Various
15. The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer

Remember, it’s the books you don’t read that count. And here are last year’s wish lists: 2024 — 2023 — 2022.

I did not read as much as I hoped I would and the list I had set out for myself was wildly optimistic. And that’s fine. Books that were on my actual reading list for the year are marked with an asterisk. There aren’t many of them. Some of the entries have a sentence or two with my current feelings about the book, and the titles link to the fresh-off-the-reading thoughts.

1. Talent by Tyler Cowen was more useful than I thought it would be, though it mostly caters to the tech bro crowd.
2. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis was a re-read, and I shall re-read it again.
3. I and Thou by Martin Buber: incomprehensible.
4. Too Like the Lightning* by Ada Palmer
5. Liberation Day* by George Saunders
6. Slow Productivity by Cal Newport can be summarized thusly: do fewer things, at a natural pace, obsessing over quality. You may now skip reading the book.
7. On Great Writing (On the Sublime) by Longinus was marvelous if for nothing else than as a reminder that things we now find commonplace used to be revolutionary — that is indeed why they are now ubiquitous — and I count the word “commonplace” among those things as well.
8. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt managed to change the world, as more and more American schools are banning phones as they should have done in the first place.
9. Writing to Learn by William Zinsser was a bit of a waste of time.
10. Toxic Exposure* by Chadi Nabhan
11. Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer
12. The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer, and with three of her books in 2024 this is the most I have read in a single year from any one writer. That is as strong of an endorsement as any.
13. Moonbound by Robin Sloan was too thin for my taste. If the foundation of your epic is pop culture you are building a castle on top of sand, so if it is to stay upright it can never be anything more than a sandcastle.
14. False Dawn* by John Gray ensured Gray would feature prominently in my 2025 reading list, now as to whether I will actually ready any more of his work is anyone’s guess.
15. The Friction Project by Robert I. Sutton, which was the only true clunker of the year. I fell for a good showing on a not very good podcast, so this should teach me.
16. Useful Not True by Derek Sivers is out now and you should get it.
17. A System for Writing by Bob Doto was like an expedition to a land in which people use notes to collect their thoughts rather than posting them on a blog like they should.
18. Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis was surprisingly poignant and Lewis too will be on the 2025 list.
19. Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman will turn out to be my book of the year, not because it change much of anything in how I operate but because it is the first book recommendation in my 12 years of marriage that my wife actually took and liked.
20. Order without Design* by Alain Bertaud

I try to wrap up any reading by December 31 so as not to have any book straddling the years but I am now in the middle of The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen and — spoiler alert for the first book I’ll finish in 2025 — it is right up my alley so it gets an honorable mention here. This is in fact where I learned about the origin of “commonplace” that I slipped in at number 7.

And here are the previous two years: 2023 — 2022. Brief book reviews go back to 2017 (here is the very first one); one day I may collect those into lists as well.

You wouldn’t be able to tell it from my recently published posts, but I am in a list-making mood. I have made an end-of-year list of podcasts since at least 2018 (possibly earlier) and more recently I have been making beginning-of-year lists of books I may read. Here is the one for this year and — spoiler alert — I did not follow the list. Regardless, it has been a useful practice and any book lists this time of year are more than welcome.

But anti-recommendations also work! Unlike straight up recommendations — a person you trust saying that something is good — anti-recommendations can get complex and to me more interesting. A still straightforward form is a trustworthy person saying that something is not worth your time. But how about someone you hold in low regard telling you about their favorite books?

Well, I hold one Eric Topol in low regard. Hints of why are here and here, and the short answer is that he is — much like Neal DeGrass Tyson — the stupid person’s idea of a smart person, and a doctor to boot. If a trend is a few years past its peak you can be certain that Topol is pitching his idea about it to a publisher, using third-order book digests about the idea as his source material.

So I was absolutely delighted when he published a list of his favorite books of 2024: flags don’t get much redder than that. Of course Yuval Harari’s new book was one the list — not a fan of his, either — and though I have never heard of the other books or authors, something dramatic will need to happen for me to change my perception of them as derivative dreck. Ars longa, vita brevis.

What makes this especially valuable is that these are mainstream books. An anti-recommendation is only valuable if it is a book you would at least consider and for better or worse these are the books in consideration. The flip side is also true: the most valuable recommendation is for an Amazon Kindle samizdat. For a fun mental exercise, please imagine what it would take for the likes of Topol to do this. Neither could I.

Here is another mental exercise: what if an unreliable person published a list of their least favorite books? Would those two minuses add up to a plus? Probably not: there are many ways in which a book can be bad and even if there was a weak signal for a book’s quality in that list it wouldn’t be enough to overcome the noise of thousands of books vying for attention.

Finally I should note that the delight of dunking on X made me miss the more important point: that any list of books published in 2024 is also a list of books to avoid in 2025, because there is no stronger signal of transiency of an idea than it getting oversized attention. The Lindy effect is real so unless you have a friend who is in the merciless writing business and needs a friendly reader, save your time and read old books.