Books I Loved Reading in 2024
thoughts.wyounas.com
thoughts.wyounas.com
* Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction by Peter Atkins. Now that I'm into physics I had a hunch that I would now also appreciate chemistry. This book delivered.
* Philosophy of Mind: A Very Short Introduction by Barbara Gail Montero. I recall it just being a really well-written overview of an interesting field.
* Systemantics by John Gall. Very entertaining musings on why systems fail.
* Hard-Boiled Wonderland by Haruki Murakami. Read this while in Japan. A very strange and interesting noir detective story.
* All Systems Red by Martha Wells. <3 Murderbot <3
* Desert Oracle Volume 1 by Ken Layne. American southwest folklore. Read it while in Joshua Tree.
* There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. Biggest brainfuck I've read in a long time, probably ever.
* Fundamentals: Ten Keys To Reality by Frank Wilczek. Physics musings from a Nobel winner.
I really like the Very Short Introduction series by Oxford University Press. I've read 30 of them so far (just counted). At this point they basically have a book on every aspect of physics that has interested me at one time or another: black holes, gravity, quantum theory, waves, time, thermodynamics, chaos, etc. Really love being able to literally put the book in my back pocket and read a few pages whenever I have a spare moment. Each book can be very hit-or-miss, though. Some of them are badly written and fail at their basic value proposition (providing a concise and reasonably complete overview of a field).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Very_Short_Introduct...
My initial reading led me to believe that qntm was a group aliased as Sam.
Policing other's pronoun usage is ideological, but that's your argument, not theirs.
The only one being 'ideological' here is you, getting worked up over basic grammar that's been around longer than Modern English. Go out and touch some grass.
Thanks for reminding me.
The English translation of a second book in the same universe (well, one of the two universes) was just released---The City and Its Uncertain Walls. I've only just started reading it, though, so I can't offer any commentary beyond that.
If you like Murakami, you might like Convenience Store Woman or Earthlings, both by Sayaka Murata. Mieko Kawakami is also great. Killing Commendatore (by Murakami, again) is my favorite of his. I have no idea why it's my favorite, though. To be honest I can barely remember the plot of any of his books; it's just a feeling.
I think I read or consumed almost 25 of her books last year.
They’re short reads and the series is still ongoing. I’ve seen indications she’s under contract for at least one more book. It’s useful I find especially if you read a lot of things, to be able to revisit the story shortly before the next book is published. The same way many people rewatched Ted Lasso each season. I think I managed to only reread the early books in The Expanse twice but Robert Jordan is slow and his books are loaded with foreshadowing, so when he was still alive there were a lot of people rereading those fat books many many times.
The most recent murderbot book I had to reread because I got my wires crossed on what the backstory was, I combined two different arcs and hallucinated a third one entirely. Never did figure out what I borrowed that story from. But they’re very short. I think I reread the entire thing in ten to twelve days, and not even working that hard.
I kind of hate this mindset. Why does reading always have to be with the goal of self improvement? When someone binge watches a new TV series on Netflix no one asks them what skill they were trying to sharpen by enjoying that media.
why does it upset you so that someone else wrote their own personal reasons on their own blog?
Daily creative writing, journaling, (trying to) learn to dance, reading books in Spanish when I'd get more enjoyment reading in English. These are all things I've done with goals in mind beyond leisure. In fact I don't particularly enjoy them enough to do them without an objective, else I wouldn't have had to go out of my way to do them.
You don't enjoy everything or else you wouldn't have to try at anything.
> When someone binge watches a new TV series on Netflix no one asks them what skill they were trying to sharpen by enjoying that media.
But they weren't demanding this of anyone else. It was an objective for themself. You are actually the one demanding something of someone else just because you have different preferences. ;) Is that a great mindset?
People should be able to have hobbies and self improvement separate and each one delivered in whichever medium they happen to prefer.
(And I'm not trying to say bad things about either of the books I mentioned, but rather illustrate that certain types of books aren't going to make you a scholar, just because you read a lot. Read what you enjoy.)
> People should be able to have hobbies and self improvement separate and each one delivered in whichever medium they happen to prefer.
Agreed.
> Read what you enjoy.
Semi-agree on this one.
There are different reasons to read. You can read for pure entertainment. You can read to learn things. You can read to be motivated. You can read to calm down. You can read to be part of the conversation.
Reading what you enjoy is good advice, and it's a valid approach, but so is reading something that's a little but hard and not very enjoyable, because you want to expand your knowledge, to learn and grow.
Read what you want for whatever reason you want, would be my recommendation.
(I personally mix most of the reasons above.)
My minor counter here is "don't let the reason you read [something] be because someone has made you feel like you should"?
I (personally) observe pushing through a thing you actively don't enjoy for external validation etc will just demotivate and bleed into the entire activity. That's not to say you should not try a book because somebody suggests/recommends it. But try, don't feel obliged in order to gain approval.
In the same vein, don't avoid reading "trash" for fun because people are asses. Be it young adult swashbuckling, adult romance or elves and wizards - don't let anyone make you feel bad about your preferences.
if Shakespeare interests you, that’s fine. If you find him tedious, leave him. Shakespeare hasn’t yet written for you. The day will come when Shakespeare will be right for you and you will be worthy of Shakespeare, but in the meantime there’s no need to hurry things.
I don't know why this is, but every single documentary I have seen on a subject that I know something about has been factually atrocious. I strongly discourage people from watching any documentaries. Maybe a few nature-following-animals documentaries are OK, but for some reason I don't understand the average documentary is completely mendacious, with facts altered, twisted to be dramatic, omitted because they contradict some narrative, set pieces completely wrong, the creation of some narrative that doesn't even make real sense, etc.
It's not that there aren't awful books, of course there are, but documentaries seem to be almost uniformly awful, even ones very highly rated, where books are usually the actual source material anyway. On top of this, documentaries are much better suited as propaganda vehicles, and are often used that way.
Of course, it may be I am more sensitive than most people to these issues; other people may find lower truthiness levels acceptable if it's the only way to garner their attention.
Revisiting old audiobooks is especially good for those times you are doing a mundane task or just need something comfortable for one of those days/weeks.
Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2024?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42508087
Ask HN: Best non-fiction book you read in 2024?
For those that have tried, but cannot penetrate these types of books, start with any Nobel Literature winner that looks interesting. They are the gateway to serious literature, and by reading the recognized "best written intellectual novel of the year" you'll be gradually exposed to the writing structures used in harder to penetrate literature.
Don't be fooled into thinking that a Nobel Literature winner is difficult to read, none of them are and that is why they have the award. They are also white knuckle rides through tragic human lives where the main character wins against incredible odds, and these novels demonstrate the critical thinking and secondary considerations necessary to prevail when others are crushed. Great literature teaches one first hand how to use critical thought, a dire need today.
After reading that, you’ll no longer think that Nobel Prize winners for literature write books that are difficult to read and understand.
That said, people who read less tend to believe that more and bigger words equal better writting. My (usually scientific) texts are described as "telegraphic", and heavily expanded without adding any real content. E.g. "the house was white" gets transformed to "the paint that covered the beautiful house was pure white".
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is another recent literary favorite
Girl, Woman, Other is one of my overall favorites from the last few years. Th character work is phenomenal. Do try to read a hard copy, rather than on an ereader, if you can. The book uses punctuation and the layout of text on a page creatively, and I’m not sure how well that gets preserved in an ebook.
If you want to see the other style of writing in Rushdie, I can suggest Shalimar The Clown or The Ground Beneath Her Feet. But these are nowhere near as grand as Midnights Children.
In either category, a fair amount of interest in history helps to enjoy his books.
He also did the screenplays for most of Bela Tarr’s movies
Easy to read but provides a profound understanding of the unique historical situation it describes. A famous and heartbreaking sentence: ‘(…) I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.’
Warning: spoilers follow that do not diminish the knock out punch this work delivers: It's written in it's own language, a mixture of Russian and UK slang, which one cannot read at first. About 3 chapters in, the language clicks and then a good reader starts the book over from the beginning. It is a popular book due to the film, and the ultra violence depicted within, but it is also ground breaking philosophical literature because the main character is a hardened criminal and is the narrator, he spends the entire novel explaining his philosophy of life, which by the end of the novel you realize is the same philosophy of modern politics, and the UK edition of the novel ends with the entire novel being the story of a senior member of parliament's youth origin story.
The fact that the novel is in a fictional language increases the reader's submersion in the story line, creating one of the most impactful novels I know.
Another great read, much shorter, more like getting into a street brawl: Notes From The Underground by Dostoyevsky. Practically the creator of self critical essays, and often the first read for people interested in Existentialism.
Anything from the "Beat Generation" authors, anything from Philip K Dick, anything from Herman Hesse.
* Animal Farm - George Orwell
* The Fall - Albert Camus
* Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
* One hundred years of solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
* The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
And that's why we see in the halls of our colleges, where these works are pored over day in and day out, that these humanities majors are the font of wisdom in our civilization.
BTW Nietzche speaks in goodreads quotes and meme-like aphorisms. If you can't get through Nietzche maybe reading isn't for you. (There's nothing wrong with audiobooks, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv5IyRuEVI4&t=10s either)
Wisdom does not equate with power, in fact: overt power is not the result of wisdom, but fanatical perseverance to wealth creation, often in opposition of wisdom in favor of simple dominance of others, and basic mental illness driving that individual.
Plus, my MBA was also to understand the world, as business is this world.
Aside from the fact that I doubt it's true, this seems a lot like panning The Third Man as derivative of later thrillers.
I understand that for some books specific quotes don't quite get across what makes the book great. But in those cases I expect the author to address that characteristic directly, and make an effort to try to explain why the book is great despite not being very quotable. And by quotes I mean quotes that can span an entire page if need be.
The only exceptions to this that I'm inclined to allow is when your descriptive writing skill is at such a pro level that the review itself is a piece of art. But most "professional" book reviewers are not even at that pro level frankly.
An example of actual "pro level" would be this Martin Amis line from one of his reviews:
"You can stir a vat of molasses with James Wood's Chekhov boner." (I'm recalling the line from memory)
Kind of a stretch there. No casual reader can handle Doctor Faustus (Thomas Mann) or the Glass beads game (Hesse) without serious effort. Sure, one can try, in the same way one can try running a marathon without training, with the same predictable results.
Edit: Just wanted to add that Aeschylus, Euripedes, and Sophicles are great reads. You can read a whole play in one sitting. If I could recommend one from each it would be Agamemnon, The Bacchae, and Antigone. Each of those plays deeply affected me and they're fairly accessible.
"I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom"
Highly recommend it to folks, especially if you enjoy Pargin's other works ("John Dies at the End", "Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits"). I am continually in awe at how he is evolving as a writer.
His characterizations and insights convey a unique and profound interest in the world we live in, and it’s clear he takes great care in understanding others and what makes them who they are.
It'll make you rethink some of your relationships / reactions to the current world (social media, other humans, etc.).
Weird thing is that "John Dies at the End" sounds like something I'd love, and yet I really bounced off of it when trying to read it. I've been meaning to give it another go.
He's no less funny, but he's honed in on exploring the human condition (in a natural way) in each of his books.
Most people "decide" to not develop their reading skills when they are young children without the ability to understand the long-term implications.
When I was growing up, teachers would assign one text for the entire class to read. Sometimes it was a book I enjoyed (like Canticle for Leibowitz) but more often than not it was some book I hated (like Great Gatsby which I reread as an adult and still think it’s terrible). If you really wanted to instill a love of reading and develop skills around reading, you would give students more choice.
My kids had a similar experience so I don’t think much changed between 1985 and 2015. If anything, it’s worse now. It feels like schools do as much as they can to prevent kids from enjoying reading. They were assigned only books they had zero interest in and were given so much homework they had no desire or energy left to read for pleasure.
It took me a long time after high school to start reading for pleasure (thank you Douglas Adams and Michael Ondaatje). I hope it works out for my kids too.
So maybe the problem isn't kids who decide they don't like to read, but voters and taxpayers have decided that they don't want to pay for anything better.
Hey goal is to write a story with plot. Real characters. Arcs. As soon as she finds herself wasting time rolling sentences around her mouth, like toffee, with big fancy words, she is directly hurting the readers' flow. Sometimes it's nice to leave one or two, but in general you shouldn't try to be in love with every sentence you've written. But every sentence should move the story forward. Just tell the damn story. Because when you come back to your writing years later, it's those very stylish, witty, fancy phrases that will embarrass you.
I’m not making the argument that one is intrinsically ‘better’ than the other; rather that their goals are different.
I do tend to agree with the idea that you shouldn’t be ‘afraid to kill your darlings’ (cite needed). Flannery O’Connor was once asked whether she thought that MFA programs killed too many aspiring authors. Her reply was that she thought they didn’t kill enough of them.
It's funny to me that that line by O’Connor is both good writing and good business, at least in that it reduces competition with their own works. Furthermore, making quotable quips is the best kind of publicity for your writing you can do for free as an author. I wonder how many MFA programs are so explicit about the dismal prospects of writing as a livelihood or career, not that it was ever much better in the past. Arguably, it's easier than ever to get paid as an independent writer, but that doesn't make it any easier to make a decent living exclusively from one's published output.
Found the citation:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kill_one%27s_darlings
> A piece of advice to prospective authors that they must kill their “darlings”, i.e. suppress overuse of their favorite expressions, tropes, characters, etc. Often attributed to William Faulkner (1897–1962), but already expressed earlier by Arthur Quiller-Couch (murder one's darlings); more recently popularized by Stephen King.
Having said that, I don't think it's good policy to remove everything, down to the point where you have: Mary came in. She saw John. John saw her too. Mary said "Well, what now?". John replied "I don't know"
Sometimes it's hilarious to describe the body language and internal monologue of a particularly awful character, and sometimes it feels pushed.
Thank god I'm not a writer. It's hard enough writing something that passes a linters / CI tests and works in production without adding "how does it make you feel to read it?". Code is written to run on machines. That's is function. But it should be written to be understandable and maintainable to humans as a secondary goal. But taking a human, making them laugh, making them cry and changing their life? I wouldn't know where to start.
But oddly, I re-read my own post and now I have a strange desire to find out what happened between Mary and John.
2026: Ground breaking novel by raffraffraff, "The thing that occurred between John and Mary"
Not everything has to be written in digestible snippets of text.
There's actually some evidence that we are, in fact, naturally wired for reading. The below study, for instance, shows that the area in the brain used for visualizing words seems to be already hooked up to language processing areas in newborns.
How do you, as a techie, find time to read most of the books? Any tips or hacks? Ryan Holiday once mentioned that he managed to read extensively by always keeping books with him, allowing him to read whenever he found some spare time.
I also I have a huge backlog of tech books that I should work on because this career kinda requires it.
I tell both my kids "don't stay up too late" just before I go to bed (usually around 11pm). Beyond a certain age you can't force them anymore and they have to learn their limits themselves.
The unvarnished truth is that the answer to your question ("how do you stop your wife and/or kids interrupting you every 30 seconds?") for many people is "I don't". They don't stop them, that is. Because they don't have to. Because they didn't marry someone who interrupts them every 30 seconds and then have kids with them and then raise those kids to be the kinds of kids who interrupts them every 30 seconds.
The days when I keep my ereader nearby so I look at that instead I am much happier.
Read 10 pages per day? That's 10 books that year.
I read a little less than 1 page per minute (depends on book), but the way I look at it is minutes per day = books in year. Read 30 minutes every day that's 30 books that year.
Audiobooks while driving. I easily do over ten a year this way.
Ultimately I find time for both. I completed 30 books in 2024. 2-3 of them were audiobooks I think. They count in my opinion.
It likely won't work for all kinds of books. I don't think I'd want to listen to an audio book of Thinking, Fast and Slow for example.
But for fiction and certain non-fiction, it can be a great experience. In fact, for fiction it is now my preferred mode of consumption. There are books (e.g. Ancillary Justice) that I know I would have not finished if I were reading the book directly (for various reasons). But the audio book narration was so good I stuck to it.
It really depends on what your goals for reading are. If you're reading a heavy nonfiction book where you want to annotate, etc, then obviously it won't work.
If you're simply trying to absorb a story or gain information, it works as well as a regular book. You will likely rewind often, though. It sounds a lot worse than it is, but you get used to it quickly.
The amount of "spare time" most people have, time they're doing random things that don't require full focus, is enormous, at least it is for me. Arranging breakfast for the kids before the school day, doing dishes, walking to and from places, working out at the gym, etc - all of those times become moments to listen to whatever you're reading.
I've never was a literary person (despite everyone else in my family reading a lot), but ever since this discovery I've been catching up on a lot of fiction, philosophy, psychology book, and pretty much anything that doesn't have code or equations. Highly recommended.
See here for screenshots: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...
I was surprised just how much you can read with this amount of time investment. I read 12 books during that year; with 600 pages on average. It’s much quicker than you’d think!
Put the book(s) on the bedside table so that it is right there staring at you.
If a book isn't interesting even after first 50 pages, dump and move on to a new one. Borrow books from library so that there is a forcing function of the due date.
30 mins a day is plenty to get through 10-20 books a year easily. Read only easy/fun/interesting books until the stamina to get into tougher reads arrives.
- They would never hurt a fly. Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic covered the Hague trial for military crimes in Bosnia war. The book made me rethink how I view the war in general and what motivates people to do absolute evil things.
- A primate memoir by Sapolsky. I can't stress enough how interesting, witty and overwhelming this book is. One of the rare reads I couldn't stop reading until the very end.
- Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante. Even though sometimes it might be felt like a boulevard novel, it gave me absolutely fantastic insight and the atmosphere of Italian Naples in the 1960-1970s.
(Get the paperback if you can, the edition I have is the most well-weighted and well-proportioned high-quality paperback I think I own. I hope they still print it like that.)
Just recently, after that SNL skit about the Five Timers Club, I found that Steve Martin was the fastest to reach the Fiver Timers Club, it sounds like in 1977 he was hosting SNL all the time.
Thanks for the recommendation, I've added it to my To Read list (currently working on Doctrow/Stross Rapture of the Nerds, I'm kind of Meh on it).
* The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Classic urbanist book that changed the way I see my city, and elegantly described so many things I didn't know I knew.
* A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. Short, beautiful sci-fi story.
* The first four Dune books by Frank Herbert, so full of intrigue.
The cells are computer that operated on proteins, the input is protein being present and output is specific protein that does specific job.
* Wisdom’s Workshop (2016) by James Axtell is a history of the American research university from Medieval times to the present.
* The Principles of Science (1874) by William Stanley Jevons (of economics fame) is a wide-ranging treatment of logic and philosophy of science that’s bursting with ideas.
* Ballyhoo! (2024) by Jon Langmead is a history of professional wrestling and combat sports from its outlaw roots in the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century.
* A Discourse on Political Economy (1824) by John Ramsay McCulloch is the first history of economic thought from the era of the classical economists.
Check it out in more detail here: https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-books-2024/
Annie Jacobsen's _Nuclear War: A Scenario_
A second by, at times, millisecond, tale of what could and would happen after a nuclear attack on the US is detected. Been a long time since I read a book in just over two days.
If you haven't seen the tv show Madam Secretary (minor spoiler warning), there's an episode that more or less films this scenario playing out. You can find clips on YouTube of just the "nuclear war is about to happen" part of the episode, and I highly recommend it as a dramatization of this kind of thing. (It's a great show in general, too.)
* The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. Maybe the best book about creative process in everyday life and art I’ve read. Positive vibes and meditations. Speaking of which…
* Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Timeless advice about life and death from a ruler/philosopher who seemed to have been actually good and uncorrupted by power. And speaking of that, at the top of my to-read list for 2025 sits On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder, also available in a visual graphic edition.
* Drawing on the Dominant Eye by Betty Edwards. Worthwhile, even if not as much as Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
* Not finished yet, but The Art of Game Design, A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell is eloquent and erudite so far.
The first trick was giving myself permission to stop a book I started in 2023. I’m about to start trying to finish it again later this week. The biggest was finding myself with too much free time which I don’t recommend. But all the physical books I read were strictly for pleasure and not self improvement. The half dozen books I consumed in the latter category were as audiobooks, and half of those were Goldratt, who cheats anyway by making his entire book into a fictional story about the moral of the book. Essentially a parable.
If you want to read a lot, then do it to have a good time.
Those guys really know how to concentrate.
There are also some good documentaries and books about the people working at Bletchley Park. A lot of them seemed to have been wired similarly.
It's organized and filterable by:
- fiction vs non fiction
- author
- general themes
It's about Beatrice Sparks and her unique genre of fake teen diaries, of which Go Ask Alice was the most famous. It chronicles her whole-cloth invention of tragic teens who succumbed to whatever the current panic is consuming late-to-mid-twentieth-century concerned suburban parents: from accidentally becoming acid freaks to ritualistic satan worship to HIV/AIDS.
* Fur Trade Nation by Carl Gawboy - a graphical history of the Ojibway nation between 1650 and 1850. Not a hard history with detailed discussion of evidence and possibilities but more of a grade school style overview of the history and really well done as that. I do better with text than most but I still think this style communication has a lot of advantages and should be used more.
* The Birchbark House series by Louise Erdrich (historical fiction, starting at the end of the period Fur Trade Nation covers) - I've read the first three books and while they are aimed at children they have complex characters and themes (and also some cute animals and a focus on the kids). I read her book Tracks a couple of decades ago and liked it well enough to remember her name when I saw a few years ago that she has a bookstore in Minneapolis called Birchbark Books. Their online store has a great selection of books by indigenous authors.
* The Gift is in the Making Anishinaabeg stories retold by Leanne Simpson - Traditional stories retold with a few recent references. This one has a few ojibway terms but is in english while I also read Plums or Nuts by Larry Amik Smallwood and Michael Migizi Sullivan Sr. which is fully in ojibway as well as english and the stories there are more personal by the first author. They are chosen primarily for language learning reasons but they are also nice "slice of life" stories and I recommend it even if you aren't trying to learn ojibway.
* Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot - The author has a breakdown and writes about it. A really rough read but well writen and has a lot of love for such a tramatic story.
* Bringing Joy: A Local Literary Welcome - I heard about Fur Trade Nation when it was first published and not widely available so I got it from the publisher at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College and found this poetry collection and decided to try it even though I'm not usually into poetry. There were a couple that I will hopefully never forget and more that I enjoyed reading. I picked up What Book!? later thinking I'd try a bit more poetry but haven't enjoyed that one as much so far.
* A Space for the Unbound - Technically a game not a book but very story focused and in my opinion the best game story (by quite a bit) of any game I've played. Again some severe abuse depicted and also a lot of love.
1. Right/Wrong - Juan Enriquez
2. Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl
3. How to Win Friends & Influence People - Dale Carnegie
So funny that my face was basically fixed in a smile the entire time reading.
If I were to just pick one favorite, it is not even a contest. Heck, challenge me to pick one favorite in a decade, it would still be this. Charlie Munger! Charlie Munger: Poor Charlie’s Almanack I even wrote about this: https://krishna2.com/munger
Just like countless others, I too grew up bewildered by Jackie Chan's movies and his stunts. And I liked his autobiography.
Jackie Chan: Never Grow Up
I read "The Poppy War" - even though I liked it, I didn't want to go down a full-fledged series. I read "Yellowface" and loved it so much. I have "Babel" on my shelf - but (irrationally) I am not reading it thinking that it would be over if I read it.
R. F. Kuang: Yellowface
I can't wait for what R.F. Kuang's going to come up with next.
This is an old classic -- my son recommended this to me. I enjoyed it.
Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther
What an amazing biography. Very very inspiring.
Robin Marantz Henig: Monk in the Garden: Life of Gregor Mendel
I had gotten her "Ember in the Ashes" in 2016 or so but never got to it - but this story snipper caught my attention. What a lovely book. It is set in a Motel in a Sierra Nevada town in California. Loved the book. Promptly went back to read "Ember in the ashes". This book (all my rage) won the National Book Award for Young Readers.
Sabhaa Tahir: All my Rage
Everyone's bound to get on this train sooner or later (I think this is being made into a movie) -- 440,000+ reviews on amazon. I got curious and got this book. Liked it.
Freida McFadden: The Housemaid
I am keeping the recommendations to a general audience and hence skipping my Vedanta books (which I thoroughly relish/read and read again many times). Oh, there are a bunch of business books too, a bunch more fiction this year (than my usual ratio) including a few LitRPG and of course, some running related. As always, you can see the full list here:
Here's to a happy prosperous fulfilling 2025!
Happy reading!
This post is available at: https://krishna2.com/2024 Post on Jan 1, 2024 (2023 reading): https://krishna2.com/2023 Post on Jan 1, 2023 (2022 reading): https://krishna2.com/2022
* Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive - Philipp Dettmer.
* The Gene: An Intimate History - Mukherjee. Won't necessarily teach you much new if you've already read a few genetics books, but a fine read nonetheless.
* On Sophistical Refutations - Aristotle. Like anything by Aristotle, read it with a grain of salt and as historical document. Still, it's always a wonder how a text like this can be over 2000 years old.
* Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI - David Grann. Skip the movie and read this instead.
* 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles Mann. It challenges common misunderstandings of pre-columbian society without being anti-Columbus.
* American History, Combined Edition: 1492-Present - Thomas Kidd. Goes beyond just the usual narratives we are all familiar with. Not recommended as a first American-history deep-dive, but a fine supplement.
* The Man Who Saved Cincinnati - Peter Bronson. Entertaining civil war history book. It's not only about Cincinnati.
* Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power - Carwardine.
* The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets - Thomas Cech. RNA is now kinda required reading since 2020. This is a good starting point.
* The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie - Dawkins. His latest is definitely worth a read, like (nearly) all his previous.
* Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI - Harari. How information traveled historically, with modern technology, and in the near future. Enlightening and a little scary.
* Beauty and Sadness: Mahler's 11 Symphonies - David Vernon. Even if you haven’t listened to all of Mahler’s symphonies, still very interesting read on “the first modern composer.” If you /are/ familiar with all his symphonies, the book is even better, and it will show you layers you didn’t realize were there... in case the music isn't dense enough to absorb by itself ;-)
Fiction:
* Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir.
* Dark Matter - Blake Crouch.
* Red Rising - Pierce Brown. A light read, maybe will seem derivative at this point but it was fun.
* Rifters Trilogy - Peter Watts. Super bleak, very creative.
* You Like It Darker - Stephen King. Another fine collection of short stories.
* The Forest of Lost Souls - Koontz
* House of Leaves - Danielewski. I waited way too long to read this. As good as everyone said it would be.
(At least, they all seem pretty non-mystical from what I know of them; I am willing to be corrected by others who know more about their lives and minds.)
Don't Read the News" by Dobelli.
These two books complement each other surprisingly well in describing the media/marketing companies that underlie the Internet.