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.
Talent by Tyler Cowen was more useful than I thought it would be, though it mostly caters to the tech bro crowd.
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis was a re-read, and I shall re-read it again.
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.
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.
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.
Writing to Learn by William Zinsser was a bit of a waste of time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Useful Not True by Derek Sivers is out now and you should get it.
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.
Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis was surprisingly poignant and Lewis too will be on the 2025 list.
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.
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.
December 30, 2024
🍿 The Wild Robot (2024): beautifully made, needlessly violent. Crazed chases and shootout spectacles push out a sweet children’s story. Too bad.
Still, moods shift and if I listen to more of anything next year it may be one or more of these:
The VPZD Show, which is back, intermittently, with more cursing than ever, but also some interesting viewpoints that differ enough from my own to make things interesting.
Plain English with Derek Thompson is very much outside of my preferred format, being over-produced and a bit too highfalutin' with its choice of guests, but some of those guests do seem interesting so it may become one of those skip-more-than-I-listen-to shows.
Rose O’Neill 1874-1944
Born Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
Rose O’Neill invented the internationally famous “Kewpie” cartoon character. It made her a millionaire and the highest-paid woman artist in the world. In Paris, she revealed a very different artistic side. There, she exhibited visionary artworks inspired by dreams and the unconscious.
O’Neill first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1906 and was immediately elected to its prestigious membership. Fifteen years later, Parisian critics praised her one-woman show. It featured fantastic images influenced by pagan mythology and evolutionary theory.
O’Neill championed women’s economic independence and sexual liberation. She blamed fashion for constraining women, asking “How can they hope to compete with men when they are boxed up tight in the clothes that are worn today?” She once pretended to be pregnant to persuade a French clothier to make a corset-free, loose-fitting gown, like the one worn in this portrait. Her nonchalant pose and defiant gaze express O’Neill’s supreme self-assurance.
Here is the portrait, even more remarkable in person:
And yes this is the same Kewpie that endures as a brand of Japanese mayonnaise on sale at your local Costco.
Tracing phenomena through time is a humbling experience. The same exhibit dedicated a whole section to Josephine Baker — just try to categorize this.
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.
December 28, 2024
Man-made things don’t get better on their own, and without care and attention will in fact get worse. A post from Patrick Collison on X about important historical novels is a good example, not just because of the topic (19th century novels had more complex language, more intricate themes and had more respect for the characters than their modern counterparts) but also, well, just look at the teXt itself: a supposedly text-oriented platform has no formatting, no links, and is an insult to the eyes. Enshittification in action.
Updated the now page for the first time in two months, with a list of board and dice games we played this week. It is more than I’ve played since, well, this time last year!
I’m going to wane philosophical for a minute. In general I’m very sympathetic to Adam Mastroianni’s line “don’t worry about the flood of crap that will result if we let everyone publish, publishing is already a flood of crap, but science is a strong-link problem so the good stuff rises to the top”. I certainly don’t think we need stronger pre-publication review or any more barrier guardians (although I have reluctantly concluded that having some is useful). But when fraudulent stuff like this does in fact rise to the top in what seems to be a strong-link network — lots of NIH-funded labs, papers in top journals (or, apparently, “top” journals) — then I despair a bit. Science has gotten so specialized that almost anyone could invent facts or data within their subfield that might pass muster even with close colleagues (even if those colleagues aren’t on the take, he said cynically — there is a mind-boggling amount of money floating around in the drug-development world).
There is indeed. Lots more at the link, mostly about paleobiology, ending with these wise words:
So if you want to do good work — in this metaphor, to be at the top where the good science floats (eventually, alongside a seasoning of not-yet-unmasked bad science) — then I think you have to be aware that other cells exist, and occasionally peer into them, if for no other reason than to make sure you don’t accept an idea that’s already been debunked over there. And you need to read broadly and deeply in your own cell — there’s almost certainly valuable stuff you don’t know because the relevant works are stuck to the bottom of the pot. Go knock ’em loose.
📺 Ars Technica’s list of best television in 2024 goes on and on (and on, and on). This is why I barely watched anything this year, and most of what I did see were Modern Family reruns.
Thagomizer, “the distinctive arrangement of four spikes on the tails of stegosaurian dinosaurs”, is a word that made the most unusual jump from a cartoon panel into scientific texts. I recently learned of another word that is making a similar jump: hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, a faux Latin word to describe a made-up condition — fear of long words.
The wikipedia article shows to references, one reviewed by a Doctor of Psychology and a cursory internet search shows one more, “medically reviewed by an MD”. How these people approved these articles to come out and validate hippopoto… as a medical condition is beyond me. I heard about the word from my 2nd-grader who in turn heard it from her science teacher (who, I assume, gets her own scientific information on TikTok), so the damage is real. This phobia doesn’t exist, people, and if you do get symptoms listed here upon exposure to a long word, well, here is another word for you.
I empathize. This should be a real word! But unlike the thagomizer which was a real part of actual dinosaurs there is no medical condition equivalent to “fear of long words”. So let’s please find a better definition for it.
