Some books I read in 2024

Books I read in 2024 that were actually published in 2024:

• On the Edge Nate Silver. The elections had me checking FiveThirtyEight more than I’d care to admit ¹, so I was curious to hear the personality behind it. And, Nate Silver narrates his own audiobook, laying on some delightful accents when quoting his interviewees.
• The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris Heartbreak and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War Erik Larson. The subtitle says it all. Larson contextualizes the advent of the American Civil War, which he ties back to the Jan 6th capital riots.
• Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World John Vaillant (more late ‘23). A retelling of the 2016 Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada fire. The thesis is that global warming caused by the petrocene age is fueling a new, more severe generation of fires.

Most of the books I read weren’t published in 2024:

• Deep Work Cal Newport. Begs the question: what is my deep work topic?
• Indistractible Nir Eyal. Frankly, if I had to pick between this and Deep Work, I’d go with the latter. I found it more of an inspiration and less of a checklist.
• Nixonland Rick Perlstein. Perhaps these last eight years weren’t as extreme when compared to the Vietnam War era.
• Three Tigers, One Mountain Michael Booth. My hesitation with this book is that as a Westerner’s take on Japanese / Korean / Chinese relations like it came up short on the insider’s perspective I was hoping for. Translations might be a better path to this “insider’s perspective”.
• A Brief History of Black Holes Dr. Becky Smethurst
• The Black Swan Nassim Taleb. Excellent in turns, though I’d get distracted by Taleb’s contempt towards the unenlightened. Antifragile is on the reading list for this upcoming year.
• White Noise Don DeLillo. A midlife crisis in a book.
• Time Travel James Gleick. Not always the time-travel I expected, Gleick dives into the cultural underpinnings of the concept. Brought me to Borges.
• The Undoing Project Michael Lewis. The Trump administration’s “undoing” of government institutions was particularly interesting to me given the 2024 presidential elections and my sister’s CDC job.
• Going Infinite Michael Lewis. The Michael Lewis treatment of Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX.
• Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon Thomas Pynchon. Gravity’s Rainbow was particularly affecting in the context of P(doom) and Yudkowsky’s claim we’ve already passed the point of no return.
• Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov. My first Nabokov left me enchanted.
• Erasure Percival Everett. American Fiction brought me to Everett’s mind-warping source material. It also started me on a post-modern dive that ended with Pynchon, DeLillo, and existential confusion.
• Dr. No Percival Everett. But I want Nothing, Mr. Bond.
• The Mountain in the Sea Ray Nayler. Some light & fun eco-science-fiction that read like a mash-up of Vernor Vinge, Michael Crichton, and Paolo Bacigalupi.
• The Land of Milk & Honey C Pam Zhang. More eco-fiction, featuring particularly stand-out synaesthetic prose on food.
• Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Hirohito Araki. Psychedelic.

Some books I’m looking forward to picking up in 2025:

• Antifragile Nassim Taleb.
• Why Machines Learn Anil Ananthaswamy.
• Lolita Vladimir Nabokov.

The SCC library system along with the Libby e-reader has been incredibly enabling this past year.