📚 2024

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.