Books I liked in 2024

Roughly ranked within each section.

Science and technology

1. Not the End of the World (2024): Loved how this puts climate change and other environmental challenges into perspective—we need to do a lot more, but we've already made some progress, so we aren't doomed—and how it backs everything up with both analysis and empathy. (See a longer review here.)

2. The Emperor of All Maladies (2010): As good as advertised (by the Pulitzer). I appreciated how it built up the history of science that led to cancer breakthroughs and mixed individual stories in. It wasn't very dense with "oh wow that's interesting" moments, but I got a lot of background knowledge on cancer, which seems useful.

3. Normal Accidents (1984): A surprisingly compelling framework for complexity given its age, even if it doesn’t completely hold up to scrutiny. (See a much longer review than you ever wanted here.)

4. Why Machines Learn (2024): Mostly review for me, but if you don't know how machine learning works and want to get into the math then this is great. (But I think it's really about "how" machines learn, not "why." Also beware it doesn’t really say much about the current wave of large language models.)

5. Complexity: A guided tour (2009): Also mostly review for me, but easy to read given the complicated topic, with compelling examples.

Management and innovation

1. Skunk Works (1994): More personal and with more war stories than I expected, which made it a surprisingly easy read for the wisdom contained. (More in this review.)

2. High Output Management (1983): Perhaps the single most influential management book. It held up in a way some classics don’t—even though most of the main ideas have become conventional wisdom, I found some new framings that I liked.

3. Dealers of Lightning (1999): For a book about a place that invented great things (Xerox’s PARC research center), I liked how it also spent as much time if not more on its limitations (messy management, few commercial successes). I would have preferred it spend less time on each individual’s background and more on the actual innovation done at PARC, however.

4. The Idea Factory (2012): The history of AT&T’s Bell Labs research department, which invented a whole lot of stuff in the 20th century. The two chapters on the inventions of the transistor and information theory were very clear, but everything else came in bits and pieces and I couldn't follow what was important, which was disappointing for such a rich topic.

5. Working Backwards (2021): Very good, unless it's the first book you read about Amazon. That's because its weakness of this book is that, amid all the details about how the company works, it doesn't really communicate what actually drove Amazon's success. (The very first chapter is a tedious description of Amazon’s hiring process, except it admits they did things totally differently for their first decade, which still worked out okay.) Once you've gotten the big picture about Amazon elsewhere, then read this book to see all the details.

6. An Elegant Puzzle (2019): A book about engineering management that’s very dense with insights, which is good (I’d like to come back to several parts again) and bad (it's dense in part because the structure doesn't make a lot of sense so everything feels random). I’m a big fan of Larson’s blog, which covers most of the same content, but I found at least one new framework that I keep coming back to: paradoxically, managing at startups is more about execution—you already have lots of ideas, the limiting step is how quickly you can test them—whereas managing at big companies is more about innovation.

7. Scaling People (2023): It devolves into an overwhelming textbook eventually but I really liked the first chapter.

8. Bury my heart at conference room B (1999): This really is a “one big idea” book—everything but a small part of the middle feels like filler—but the big idea (understand your own personal values and genuinely live them at work) was good.

History

1. More Money than God (2010): The definitive history of hedge funds, particularly impressive for Mallaby rejecting traders’ (often generic) explanations for their own success and actually doing his own analysis.

2. The Big Roads (2011): One of the most important topics that I really didn't know much about. The main point is that although Eisenhower got his name on the US interstate system by signing the financing bill in the 1950s, most of the real planning happened decades earlier. And I now understand things like the difference between "US highways" and "interstates."

Other nonfiction

1. Recoding America (2023): This is nominally about a lack of user-centricity in government technology, but the same lessons apply to government processes much more broadly. (See a longer review here.)

2. Why We Love Baseball (2023): I gorged on the “random stories about baseball history” genre 25 years ago and thought I had outgrown it, but this book had novel angles on the classics and some brand new tales.

3. Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk (2023): The first half was compelling enough to make me miss my train stop, even if I didn't exactly want to be friends with him. But the second half was mostly just axe-grinding.

Fiction

1. The Dogs of War (1974): Mostly about the logistics of planning an illicit war, which is more interesting than it sounds, but there were also thrills throughout and an interesting ending. I loved every part.

2. Table for Two (2024): I liked the short stories a lot (Hasta Luego the best), and I loved the long story in the second half, although I’m not sure why it wasn’t a book of its own.

3. The Rachel Incident (2023): I started and finished it in one day, which said more about the day than the book, but still said something good about the book.

4. The Rider (1978): I'm not into cycling at all but I loved the pacing, the extreme detail about tactics and opponents, the flashbacks. It's basically Levels of the Game, but about an obscure event instead of a big one, and fictional. (Though I'm a little embarrassed to say I didn't know it was fictional when I read it.)

5. Loneliness & Company (2024): This gave me a lot to think about—not even the ending so much as the subplots (how would someone with no social life codify everything about social interaction; what if talking about an issue really does make it worse; how would you live to maximize new experiences). I also enjoyed the juxtaposition of futuristic ideas with things that we already live with today.

6. Tom Lake (2023): I enjoy pretty much anything by Ann Patchett, especially how this one covers so much ground in not very many pages. A few plot points annoyed me a bit after I was done though.

7. Bel Canto (2001): See above. Not at all what I expected coming in; it was a little hard to suspend disbelief at first, but when I did it was beautiful.

8. The Glass Hotel (2020): I only sort of liked the plot but I loved the exposition.

Parenting

1. How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen (2017): I really wanted a book for even littler kids (1-2 instead of 2-7, which is a pretty wide age range). But the advice felt promising and has been slightly useful.

2. Raising Securely Attached Kids (2024): The writing was a little annoying (too many random analogies, a lot of trying to sound scientific that didn't land), but it gave me one good point of motivation, which is all I ask out of a parenting book.

Children’s books (1-2 years old)

These are my own favorites, not necessarily my daughter’s, but I only considered books that she also liked a lot.

More fun at 1.5-2 years:

1. Kindness Makes Us Strong—A nice message and lots to look at on each page.

2. Triangle, Square—Aesthetically pleasing with just the right amount of whimsy. (Circle is fine but not at the same level.)

3. Go Dog, Go!—A quick read, and now I say “Go dogs go, it’s green ahead!” at every crosswalk. (The Netflix series is good too.)

4. Brown Bear, Brown Bear—A classic for a reason; it’s pretty and easy to engage with.

More fun at 1-1.5 years:

1. Peekaboo House—My favorite pop-up book.

2. Splash!—This became a really fun favorite before a beach trip—simple words and pictures with a solid rhyme and rhythm.

3. My First Words—Great for early speakers because of how it focuses on first-ish words but in the context of full sentences.

If you also want to see the books I didn’t like, find me on Goodreads.