What I Read in 2024

Looking back, I noticed a couple of themes in my reading this year. One was biographies of people who had achieved success and then figured out how to change so that the drive that propelled their success didn’t eat them from the inside (Becoming Steve Jobs, Pep Guardiola)

Another theme was books that prompted some reflection that I would read (or listen to) in the morning as I got the kids ready for school (What We Owe The Future, Not The End Of The World, A Decent Life)

And then there is my normal mix of trying to better understand the world and pick up additional tools for functioning in it (The Laws of Trading, Thinking in Systems, Sludge, Noise, Stories that Stick). I’m happy with those books if I take away one mental model or skill that I can use.

January

• What’s Our Problem? - I love Tim Urban’s writing at “Wait But Why?” He has an inherent curiosity and explains things in a way that I find persuasive. And this book did spur me to action in that it convinced me to change my monthly donation from the ACLU to FIRE. It also succeeded in making me a bit more worried about illiberal tendencies on my side of the aisle. But I walked away pretty unsatisfied because I thought he got stuck on a false equivalence between the illiberal left (who shout a lot on the internet but are not representative of mainstream left and center left political power in the US) and the authoritarian right (who are very much represented in the mainstream of the Republican party). I remain a committed advocate for enlightenment beliefs.
• Verbal Judo

February

• What We Owe The Future - I started this book expecting to be a bit frustrated because the longtermism movement within EA seemed so dogmatic. My prior was that we should value the future more than we do today, but less than the longtermism movement within EA advocated for. I thought the book made compelling arguments and was more reasonable than I was expecting based on the longtermism arguments that had filtered out to me through the internet. I’ll say that it was successful in convincing me to update my prior to care even more about the future than I did before I read the book, but still not with the certainty that McCaskill was arguing for.

March

• Becoming Steve Jobs - This was a re-read, but I’d forgotten I’d read it until I was 2 chapters in so kept going. Not perfect but so very much better than the Isaacson biography which I still think is one of the worst books I’ve ever read and such a missed opportunity.
• Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet - I see a sense of doomerism amongst some of my friends that I find frustrating. I’m not pollyannish, I think that we face many serious environmental problems. But I think it is demonstrably inaccurate to think that everything is getting worse and we face extinction. This book was an excellent fact-based antidote to the thought that humanity can’t thrive while preserving the planet.
• Pep Guardiola: Otra Manera de Ganar - I liked this. I want to read an updated version with more information on how he has evolved in his time at Man City so that he can sustain greatness instead of working himself to exhaustion and near the point of physical collapse like he did at Barcelona.

April

• A Decent Life - Much of philosophy focuses on how to live an ideal life. I enjoyed this book’s more grounded ambition: how to live a decent life. I know I’m deeply flawed, but I aim to be a slightly better person each year. Reading a little of this each morning was a good way to keep that goal top of mind.
• The MANIAC - This book is incredible. It is a biography of John Von Neumann but it is told through a series of fictionalized first person narratives of people who knew him. It also is a metaphor for the coming of artificial super intelligence. Highly, highly recommended.

June

• The Song of the Cell
• The Laws of Trading: A Trader’s Guide to Better Decision-making for Everyone - The thing I took from this book was that there are several potential sources of “edge” (a sustainable advantage) and you need to be clear-eyed in evaluating what edges you may have.
• The Time-Travelling Economist: Why Education, Electricity and Fertility Are Key to Escaping Poverty - As I’ve taught my children “the past is a terrible place” and I wouldn’t want to have been born at any other time or any other place in human history. My hope is that we can continue to expand prosperity so that more of humanity can be as fortunate as me.

July

• El futbol a sol y sombra - For a classic book about soccer was a bit of a slog for me. It isn’t that it wasn’t good—it was very good—but for some reason it just took me several months to work through it. Two things stick in my memory. First, this is the first time I learned that the position of goalkeeper is sometimes referred to as “cerbero” (cerberus) and as a goalkeeper I think that is amazing: because we guard the gates of hell! Second, the running joke in the recap of world events before each World Cup from 1966 to 2006 that “Fuentes bien informadas de Miami anunciaban la inminente caída de Fidel Castro, que iba a desplomarse en cuestión de horas.” cracked me up.
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k - Read it in Spanish as a quick read while we were in Korea as a palate cleanser after El Futbol A Sol Y Sombra. It was fine.

August

• Red Mars - I loved this book when I read it in middle school. I’m not sure I’d finished the entire trilogy as a child because the later books get pretty deep into the politics of forming a socialist utopia. That part still didn’t really speak to me, but on this re-read I was struck by how much I’m desperate for advances in materials science (space elevators built from carbon nanotubes extruded from an asteroid! piezoelectric films that can tent canyons on mars and generate electricity from wind!) and biological science (the longevity treatment!). Also, no one can write descriptions of landscapes quite like Kim Stanley Robinson. It is so vivid I feel like I’m there. I was inspired to re-read these by Casey Handmer and enjoyed his accompanying technical analysis.
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack - Collection of essays and speeches by Charlie Munger. A very clear thinker. An edition by Stripe Press.
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer - A little dry but solid. I feel like this is descriptive of how I think but giving a vocabulary to it has been somewhat useful.

September

• Green Mars - See above.
• Blue Mars - See above.
• Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It - Sludge is like the evil twin of “Nudge” (I don’t think the rhyming names were an accident). Good reminder to be on the lookout for unnecessary friction that gets in the way of achieving what we want.

October

• One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon - I really enjoyed this. I like to be reminded that we can do great things. It also inspired me to watch the 2019 documentary Apollo 11 which was stunning. I grew up loving space. But I also was born after our last trip to the moon. This book made me think of all the thousands of people who worked on Apollo and didn’t know if it was going to work. And that made me think of one of my favorite pieces of writing from the last several years: 22 Goals. And particularly the episode about the 1970 World Cup and the part about Pele bursting into tears on the way to the final and trying to hide it by crouching down to look for a rattle and how “If one moment can change everything, the people who create that moment are living through it in the present. They don’t know the outcome in advance. The greatest soccer team ever assembled can also be a bunch of guys dealing with their nerves by singing on a bus on the way to the biggest game of their lives.”

November

• How to See - I don’t really know anything about art, but I enjoyed this collection of essays from painter and art critic David Salle. There were times that I didn’t have the context to fully follow what he was talking about, but for the most part I feel like I walked away with a greater understanding and appreciation for the practice of creating art. And I learned I really love Alex Katz’ nature paintings.
• On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything - I enjoy Nate Silver’s thinking and writing. I liked this as a book more than I remembered liking The Signal and The Noise. There is value in taking risk and understanding the world. I do think he fell a little too in love with is Village and River metaphor but he hit on a meaningful cluster of traits that don’t exactly map onto a traditional left-right view of US politics

December

• Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment - Key takeaway: Keep your facts and your values separate when making decisions.
• Stories That Stick - The structure of a good story is Normal, Explosion, New Normal and the key elements are having identifiable characters, authentic emotion, a significant moment (this is the explosion), and specific details. This was a book about a craft or engineering, not art. The goal was to help you use stories to achieve some concrete goal. A successful story is one that achieves that goal. A story that doesn’t achieve the goal isn’t successful, but can probably be tweaked to achieve the goal.
• The Portuguese: A Modern History - I’m going to Portugal later this month to see a Champions League match between Benfica and Barcelona. I’ve never been to Portugal (despite having lived in Spain) and realized I knew next to nothing about the country.
• Probably Overthinking It - Fun examples of statistical thinking and several counterintuitive traps people fall into.
• Why Machines Learn - Very good history of the development of machine learning. Unlike other popular science books this didn’t shy from walking the reader through the math that underlies machine learning. It’s been a long time since I took Calc so I’ll admit I can’t really do the math anymore, but I do at least still remember the concepts so I can follow along. There wasn’t a ton new here after I did my deep dive a few years ago, but the discussion in the last chapter of how massive neural networks don’t overfit and we have no satisfactory theory to explain why was completely new.