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.

• “Let me know…” → “Tell me…”
• “No problem” → “You’re welcome”
• “Excuse me” → “Get out of my way”
• “They’re reasonable” → “They agree with us”
• “That makes sense” → “I acknowledge what you said without agreeing or disagreeing”

What else?

From McSweeney’s SELECTIONS FROM H.P. LOVECRAFT’S BRIEF TENURE AS A WHITMAN’S SAMPLER COPYWRITER:

Chocolate Cherry Cordial: You must not think me mad when I tell you what I found below the thin shell of chocolate used to disguise this bonbon’s true face. Yes! Hidden beneath its rich exterior is a hideously moist cherry cordial! What deranged architect could have engineered this non-Euclidean aberration? I dare not speculate.

Toffee Nugget: Few men dare ask the question, “What is toffee, exactly?” All those who have investigated this substance are now either dead or insane.

There are others as well and they are all outstanding. (ᔥAlex Wiltshire in a footnote of a rather excellent blog post which I don’t want to spoil here but is also to do with Lovecraft)

In anticipation of the new edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack arriving by mail — alas, the new delivery date is February 15 — I have been mulling over the more unusual mental models I’ve adopted since first reading about the latticework. The latticework is a mental model of its own — a meta-mental model, if you will — and you would do well to adopt some all of Mungers. The five I list here aren’t the models you will find in the Almanack, but I would not have identified them as such and remembered them were it not for Munger’s wisdom. ⊕ The links are to Wikipedia and journal articles, for now, but I hope to write a detailed account of my own for each, you know, once I get around to it.

1. C.H. Waddington’s probability landscape, which has applications far beyond developmental biology, where it was first introduced;
2. Activation energy, especially as it relates to motivation and administrative inertia;
3. Epiphenomena as real and tangible things and not nuisances to be brushed aside, which I realized via both Hofstadter and Girard;
4. Phenotypic plasticity, which we take for granted at the level of an organism (in an environment of caloric abundance mammals will get fat) but not so much at higher and lower scales, i.e., cells and societies;
5. Carcinization, the nature’s attempt to evolve every crustacean into a crab five separate times, or, as I like to see it, nature’s way of telling us that hyper-optimization is seductive but ultimately a dead end — and again, mind the scale.

These five are interconnected in interesting ways, and if you arrange the arrows just right they do for a mini-lattice. Kudos to Munger for finding the right term. Munger discussed his own mental models in detail in the Almanack and they form a larger, but still loose, network.

The web of mental models is, of course, Nassim Taleb’s Incerto, built so densely and interconnected so profusely that Branko Milanović was right to laud is as a new type of writing. And in fact of the five models I listed, the first one — Waddington’s probability landscape — is a neat bridge between Taleb’s investigations and the other four. But that is a discussion for a future time.

My list for the year, ordered by similarity. All are physical prints already on the bookshelf, just waiting to be snubbed for whatever else catches my attention.

1. The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
2. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
3. Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
4. Neuromancer by William Gibson
5. That We May Live by various authors
6. Liberation Day by George Saunders
7. You Should Come With Me Now by M. John Harrison
8. Dark Gods by T.E.D. Klein
9. False Dawn by John Gray
10. A Theater of Envy by René Girard
11. Philosophy and the Real World by Bryan Magee
12. Order Without Design by Alain Bertaud
13. Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
14. Toxic Exposure by Chadi Nabhan
15. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
16. A Man of Iron by Troy Senik
17. The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya
18. Metamathematics by Stephen Wolfram
19. Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails by Nassim Taleb
20. Towards a Theoretical Biology by C.H. Waddington
21. Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin
22. Seeing with Fresh Eyes by Edward Tufte
23. A Guide for the Perplexed by Werner Herzog
24. Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino

Here are the wishlists for 2022 and 2023, and the respective outcomes.

At the beginning of the year, I set out to read 23 books. Mission accomplished? As expected, my favorite of the year was not on that wish list.

Here are all 23, ordered by some semblance of category.

1. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison: Harrison at his best, just don’t expect a neat resolution.
2. Empty Space: A Haunting by M. John Harrison: a fitting end to my favorite sci-fi trilogy.
3. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka: if Harrison awards someone a Booker, I’d better read their book.
4. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino: the translation was good, but I imagine the original was even better.
5. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline: I think about the Bronze Age collapse more than I do about the Roman Empire, actually.
6. On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt: the year of LLM-generated garbage was a good time to refresh BS knowledge.
7. The Revolt of the Masses by Ortega y Gasset: prophetic.
8. Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber: bad.
9. The Dao of Capital by Mark Spitznagel: investing should be left to the professionals.
10. Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand: half of the book is good, but only time will tell which half.
11. How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia: got me to buy an actual CD player, just so I could listen to this anthology.
12. Against Method by Paul Feyerabend: his statement that in science “anything goes” could have been controversial only to those who willfully misunderstood.
13. Fundamentals of Clinical Trials by Lawrence M. Friedman: too pedantic.
14. Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott Scheper: almost a year in and I am still using index cards, although not in the way Scott intended.
15. Writing with Style: The Economist Guide by Lane Greene: more fun than a style guide should be.
16. Zombies in Western Culture by John Vervaeke et al: true and unnerving.
17. The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success by Albert-László Barabási: don’t be fooled by the self-help title, it is a good book.
18. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis: the most influential of the books I’ve read this year as it led directly to my favorite.
19. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard: the best book I’ve read this year, and one that I’ve been thinking about the most.
20. Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton: I should read it again.
21. I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter: how a scientist deals with grief.
22. A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken: how a Christian deals with grief.
23. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard: I still can’t believe she was in her 20s.

Not too bad, considering we had a flooded basement and our second move in three years, with some writing wedged in between. And here is last year’s list.

I look forward to removing other people’s requests from Apple Music recommendations. Maybe the 2024 Top 10 list will reflect my actual (poor) taste. Until then:

1. The Schuyler Sisters (Hamilton cast)
2. Peaches (Jack Black)
3. Alexander Hamilton (Hamilton cast)
4. History Has Its Eyes On You (Hamilton cast)
5. Wait For It (Leslie Odom, Jr.)
6. Satisfied (Hamilton cast)
7. Viva La Vida (Coldplay)
8. Aaron Burr, Sir (Hamilton cast)
9. A Sky Full of Stars (Coldplay)
10. You’ll Be Back (Jonathan Groff)

And here is last year’s list.

Only six movies that came out this year made it to my watch list:

• Oppenheimer: three movies in one, and only one of them was good.
• Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken: forgettable.
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: easily the best of the lot.
• Elemental: initially a disappointment, but has more depth the more I think about it.
• Barbie: better than Oppenheimer but also too long and not very good by the end.
• The Family Plan: a fun throwback to the 1990s, but also forgettable.

I did not see Killers of the Flower Moon yet, but I hope to do so soon. I did watch a bunch of older movies, some of which were quite good, but naming them all here would not mean much (and you can always go to the movies tag). Let me instead list the movies I rewatched this year, in the order in which they came out:

• The Godfather (1972)
• Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, extended ed. (2001), and notice the 1980s and ’90s-sized gap there.
• The Ring (2002), the rare horror movie that is actually scary.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), which is the parents' best friend when in need of a teachable moment.
• Gone Girl (2014), in which Ben Affleck is watchable (a rarity).
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), and I still won’t forgive myself for watching this movie on the plane the first time around.

Every year I time myself that I should watch more movies, and every year television wins out. May 2024 be the same.