Jan 3, 2025

19 min read

2024 Reading List and Recommendations

2024 was not the greatest year for my reading goals. I did manage to polish off 28 books, though. Started off amazing, softened in the middle, and then finished off strong again at end of year, but definitely noticed my habit was highly affected by the quality of the books I read (and maybe I need to get better at abandoning books I find derivative, sensational, or unnecessarily dense).

Reads whiplashed between fantastic and terrible. Here’s the Good, the Possibly, and the Unreadable for the year. Anything not mentioned explicitly, but scoring 4 stars you should also consider a Perhaps if you’re on the fence about them.

For 2025, my plan is to interleave more novels into the mix and stick to the list I’ve got rather than new adds. You can follow along on goodreads or Hardcover (note: does not include textbooks.).

Must Reads

An Immense World
Americanah
The Guns of August
Fire Weather
Born a Crime
King Leopold’s Ghost

Perhaps Read

Chip War
Chain Gang All Stars
Delta-V
How Infrastructure Works
The Greatest Benefit of Mankind
Central Banking 101

Don’t Read

Building Insanely Great Products
Simple Rules
The Mosquito
This is Strategy
Guiding Star OKRs

Here’s the whole 2024 Year in books:

Life Time by Russell Foster ★★★
An Immense World by Ed Yong ★★★★★
Building Insanely Great Products by David Fradin ★
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind by Roy Porter ★★★
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ★★★★★
The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman ★★★★★
Chip War by Chris Miller ★★★★
Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyeh ★★★★
I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong ★★★★
Simple Rules by Sull and Eisenhardt ★★
No Plot, No Problem by Chris Baty ★★★
Delta-V by Daniel Suarez ★★★★
How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra ★★★
Fire Weather by John Vaillant ★★★★★
Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan ★★★★
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds ★★★
How to Take Over the World: Supervillains by Ryan North ★★★
T: The Story of Testosterone by Carole Hooven ★★★
Oranges by John McPhee ★★★★
Invisible Rulers by Renee DiResta ★★★
The Mosquito by Timothy C. Winegard ★
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah ★★★★★
The Botany of Desire by Michael Polan ★★★★
This Is Strategy by Seth Godin ★★
Guiding Star OKRs by Staffan Nöteberg ★★
The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias ★★★
King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild ★★★★★
Central Banking 101 by Joseph Wang ★★★★

Must Reads

An Immense World

I loved this book on the world of animal senses. Not only for my geeky love of animals and learning things I did not know or realize, but also for the sense of wonder it brought back to me about the natural world. This idea that we are in a world awash with signals, vibrations, and forces, but we ourselves perceive only a narrow slice of them through it.

And the animals we share our planet with see and hear other slices of that world that we are never even aware of.

Much like Americanah below, I recommended this book to so many people (and even bought copies for people). It was both geeky and made me feel smarter reading it. Great scientific book. Must read. Great gift as well. Ed Yong did a masterful job here in my opinion.

Americanah

I don’t read anywhere near enough novels (something I hope to fix in 2025). This is because so many of the ones I’ve been recommended in past years have been meh.

But I loved this book fiercely. It follows the immigrant and return story of a young Nigerian woman and her time in America and her return home. It’s sharply and insightfully written and in reality, a winding love story about identity, dislocation, alienation, and finding oneself in a modern world all too intent on trying to define our identities for us for its own means. The restless, under-the-surface anger of the protagonist really struck a chord with me.

Also, Chimamande can write, omg. I wish I had her fluid prose and observational powers or ability to distil the essence of a person into a compact sentence to make you understand them down to their core. It’s fantastic writing.

The best thing I can say about this book, despite it being a novel, is I felt it gave me a slight insight into some of my friends who emigrated to wherever I happened to know them from and their internal world coming from other places. I recommended this book to anybody who would listen and were not anti-fiction.

Probably my favourite novel of the last five years. Heartrending and cathartic and beautiful. Read. This. Book.

The Guns of August

This Pulitzer prize winning book I feel is a little pat in its blame on the war, and Germans make an easy villain over a more nuanced and broad rendering of the preventable tragedy that marked the beginning of our modern world.

Why should you read this book? WWI was the defining tragedy of the 20th century. The gross miscalculations that led to the worst war and slaughter in human history after nearly 100 years of an uneasy peace, destroyed the old war order of imperialism and empires, and set the foundations for WWII 21 years later, the cold War, and set in stone many of the problems we are still dealing with today from the carve up of the Middle East, has eerie situational overtones to recent world events and the shattered post-world war II order that the US seems unable to provide leadership on in the 21st century. In a sense, WWI cemented many of the foundations we have built our modern world on and still affects it today.

I started reading this because of a conversation on how WWI started. The pat answer we (perhaps, I ) was taught in school was that it was the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, but the big question never really answered in my high school history classes (which focused a lot more on WWII and the Cold War) was the WHY. Why did the war start and what horrible confluence of calculated events led to this war which formed the basis of our modern world? And the fact is, it was the inevitable lead up to the assassination which perhaps made the war almost inevitable, but certainly preventable.

It was a series of gross miscalculations on all sides that led millions to their deaths in an era that had not at the start of the war) even discovered penicillin. It was thought at worst, the war would be a 3 month conflict, largely based on the idea of cavalry charges and logistical superiority (railroads were phenomenally more important than they are today) and imperial ambitions, Instead it devolved into the horror of four years of horrific trench warfare that saw the beginnings of mechanized death (machine guns, gas warfare, tanks, planes) and millions of lives lost in a preventable and foolish conflict.

I learned a great many things I didn’t know while reading this book so despite its heft and reading time I felt it made me a smarter, more informed person. I was actually shocked to find that the German army was within a 2 day march of Paris in the first August of the war and it was only a series of lucky incidents that turned them back and eventually led to the stagnating trench warfare of the rest of the conflict.

Most of all though, I read it because of the parallels I see in the current more modern geopolitical situation we are currently facing and where a lack of understanding on both sides and miscalculation on both sides may lead to the outbreak of a new conflict in the near future despite best intentions to peace from the outside.

So, really… I think everyone should take the time to read this book or another choice on how this conflict came about from a series of unfortunate events that destroyed a generation and then put the world on the path to another war a short 20 years later. While I think there is a lot to learn from the global situation that preceded it (particular the Crimean War/WW0 and the Franco-Prussian war) there are lessons here on understanding what ends up paving the road to war and hopefully how to avoid it.

Fire Weather

Shortlisted for the Pulitzer.

Subtitled A True Story from a Hotter World, Fire Weather covers our onrushing climate change catastrophe through wild fire catastrophes we’ve seen consume cities from California to Australia to Europe, to Canada. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, this is amazing non-fiction that reads more like a thriller. Page-turner in ways few non-fiction books are. Talking about the nature of fires and how they’ve gotten worse, both through climate change and as we’ve expanded society to the edge of wilder zones (known as the

It warns like a beacon through the foil of the worst forest fire in Canadian history and the city it nearly destroyed, which ironically is also one of the cities whose unabashed “dirty” industry is most contributing to the type of climate change that these fires are a result of.

A page turning non-fiction thriller, if you can call any non-fiction book that. It is a terrifying and prescient cataloguing of the consequences of industry and profit over common sense in the face of all scientific evidence and a 50 meter wall of flame bearing down on your town.

It’s written more like a cautionary morality tale for the modern world and is a great read. Should almost be required reading in the face of the types of evacuations we see now constantly happening in California, Canada, Australia, and Greece, Spain, and Portugal.

Born a Crime (audiobook)

The autobiography of comedian Trevor Noah and his growing up in South Africa in and after apartheid and as the child of a single mother and fact his very existence was illegal under its regime (thus the title, “Born a Crime”). It’s really good.

I highly recommend getting the audiobook. I rarely listen to audiobooks but the extra narration and voices from Noah on this make it a treat and a bit like his excellent standup and comedy, in general.

The book was shockingly great and emotional and just has some fantastic insights into race, identity, growing up, the injustice of systems, racial politics and what it does to people and their ambitions, and reflections on domestic abuse in society and is just a great listen/read. Loved it.

King Leopold’s Ghost

Enraging, unjust, and depressing, the excellent but horrifying accounting of the exploitation of the Belgian Congo Free State for one man’s greed and ambition, and the horrors perpetrated should be a Must Read. It’s not a happy book. But few people know anything of a lot of the exploitation of many countries in the rush for colonialism and the Congo Free State was one of the few that took place during the advent of age of photography and telegraph.

The lies and subterfuge of the Belgian’s King drive to have an overseas colony he could loot and the human rights horrors that resulted as he let companies of concessionaires exploit local black African populations as forced slave labour to loot 1/13th of Africa for ivory and rubber is as depressing a read about man’s inhumanity to man as you’re going to find in the already ample excesses of colonialism. To this day, many of the official records of this time are sealed in the Belgian national Archives to prevent embarrassment to the king and country.

With some hope, it also outlines how one of the first human rights movements of the 20th century came to be and how it attempted to combat (despite huge odds and a royal crown deploying counter propaganda) and keep pressure on eliminating the atrocities that were in plain sight for all to see.

Perhaps Read

Chip War

While not a 5 star read imho due to the jingo-ism and the insensible chapter pacing and foci, this is something you should probably read.

Perhaps even more interesting with the recent Trump regime returning to power in America and the looming China trade war and situation with Taiwan producing the majority of advanced chips globally that drive everything in the modern world as well as the advanced precision munitions which still drive military dominance by the US.

Sadly and slightly a bit jingoistic, this is more a tract on the geopolitical importance of the “new oil” and how it is used to both cement military advantage and critical for almost every sector of every economy. Key point: Most of its fabrication (if not, chip design) is now performed outside of the US.

The one super interesting aspect of the book is in understanding the current dynamic between how these chips underlie most of modern society (eg. a car has about 1000 chips in it) and particularly how they cement American military advantage with precision munitions. This advantage undergirds why the US is not worried about Russia (whose “copy it” strategy has kept their national semiconductor industry behind the US by 5-10 years) and the concern of China as belligerent, rising power attempting to create its own industry that underlies much of its military, and happens to be expansionist in reacquiring Taiwan which controls a whopping 90% (arguably) of all advanced microprocessor production in the world (largely through the fabless wonder TSMC.).

Chain Gang All Stars

Got lucky this year, with a second good novel in a single trip round the Sun, and while this is no Americanah, it is a good read.

Fast-paced, well-written, and almost plausible in its merging of the for-profit incarceration system in the United States and its modern love of reality TV shows, CGAS is a great, page turning read. It’s a brutal indictment of a carceral system that has little anymore to do with societal justice. A US system that keeps largely minority and especially Black citizens in jail and disenfranchised (for more on that, read another year’s recommendation, the eye opening The New Jim Crow then hires out their labour against their will in a form of neo-slavery. A loophole in the Constitution that abolishes slavery except for those convicted of crimes.

The book is a damning condemnation of a system that does not make things better, and diverts money away from other solutions, in favour of a form of punishment which removes the dignity of both individuals, family, and society.

Have to say I was impressed at the deft handling of a complex, faceted issue in novel form. I hope it becomes to US prisons what Sinclair Lewis’ The Jungle was to immigrant factory labour.

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind

Dense, deep, and exhaustive, this book took weeks to finish (it dragged, frankly), but as a full survey of the medical history of humanity (great subtitle).

The overwhelming sense you get though is that medical “science” was complete voodoo before 150 years ago, and even then it was really the bacteriological breakthroughs of Pasteur and the time between him and, say Banting that defined the modern era of medical intervention.

Frankly, it makes you realize what a discovery germ theory was and how much in the dark ages humanity would still be without it. And that besides that, most human health progress has not been medicine (though frankly we live in an age of miracles and wonders on the individual level now) and soap, clean water, sanitation, and better public health. Surgery was far more dangerous than the diseases until the advent of listerine (antiseptics) and anaesthetic. And epidemiology itself which we can thank for helping save us all from the Pandemic did not begin until Snow removed the pump handle at the Broad Street Pump.

Our modern medical world is a quite recent advent that people (esp anti-vaxxers) would be wise to remember.

I Contain Multitudes

Interesting, but vastly more speculative and not as tight as Ed Yong’s other book (that I recommended to everyone), An Immense World. While the science reporting is great and it does wade into the mysterious microbial world we all inhabit, and may even just be tourists in, the book somehow doesn’t get as good as An Immense World.

Probably the key takeaways from this book are that it’s really a microbial world, and the rise of more complex animals like ourselves are an aberration compared to most of life and history on Earth. The second thing is just how intense the interplay between microbiomes and people are. Bacteria and viruses massively influence us in epigenetic ways we don’t fully, but are only beginning to understand. The last is that the microbiomes is also our friend. So much of our bodies and what we’re finding out, from our gut microflora to our immune systems, use and repel microbial agents in complex and ingenious ways. The idea of a just “bad bugs and germs” has perhaps led to more problems as we seek to eradicate “germs” from our lives than it has helped. Possibly even leading to a greater incident of autoimmune and iatrogenic disorders (bottom line: go let your kid run outside and play in the dirt. And for god’s sake breastfeed.).

Not as good as An Immense World if you’re gonna to read just one; perhaps polish, perhaps pacing, perhaps succinctness, but definitely worth the read if this is an area you’re interested in.

Delta V

While it started off with a rather questionable economic reasoning for humanity’s expansion into space, I have to say I warmed quickly to this book quickly about a crew sent to the outer reaches of the solar system to be the first asteroid miners in history. While I don’t think the book is great per se I did like it’s discussion of how our expansion into space is perhaps adulterated by conversations about the Moon and especially the idea that Mars is a trap, and that we need to acquire the resources to create our Earth like habitats around us in the short term in order to expand into space.

More than anything though, I did like the way it characterizes humanity’s need to explore and expand. And the type of people, largely outcasts, that are wired to drive that (perhaps just cause it resonates with me, not necessarily that it’s true.).

It stops the story mid way (I hate the current trend for trilogies from a first book) There’s a second one which I’n not sure I’ll read, but if you’re a sci fi fan, and interested at all in the next steps into space after out long absence the last 50 years, you can do a lot worse than this one.

How Infrastructure Works

I had high hopes for this book since it covers an under-covered and important area that seems to be neglected these days, infrastructure. The services provisions which allow concentration and scaling and which we often take for granted but largely underpins, especially if you live in the West, much of the quality of life we take for granted in terms of things like transport, water, electricity, logistics and other essentials which make the operating of our modern world works. More so, how infra supports agency for individuals and groups in being able to live their lives (something I think it vastly underappreciated and undervalued.).

Sadly, the book seems to pull and rehash a lot from other works I’ve already read like The Grid, Energy and Civilization, and The Box which made it seem more like a combining of ideas, and more a survey of problems rather than providing new ideas and solutions on how to tackle the problems. Much speculation on the future, but little concrete fact beyond power generation. It also repeated itself and its ideas often and felt like it could have been a shorter, better, more succinct book rather than a professor’s passion project.

There were some interesting ideas in here though, for example, how the challenge of climate change is an opportunity to remake our world to be fairer and better. And the idea that this is not a problem to be solved, and but a predicament to be navigated and responded to. (another interesting idea was the Ayn Rand-ism that sustainability and maintenance are shunned in favour of building new things and creating a la Objectivism as a philosophy.).

Overall, I wish this had been a better book. It’s an important topic that gets no real play but infrastructure is a core glue that defines societies and countries and the agency and activities of individuals in those societies.

Central Banking 101

Short, but dense, this is a good read for people who have always wondered why Powell and the Fed in the US are so powerful and influential in terms of driving stock markets and the economy.

It’s surprisingly well written considering the subject matter though perhaps could have avoided some of the more in-depth market issues that the Fed uses for handling liquidity and stability of the US (and by extension, the world) economy as well as I would have loved to have seen a chapter or two on alternative money markets outside of regulatory control and how those affected the economy since the Fed had little choice but to rescue things in the wake of global economy killers like the sub-prime mortgage debacle and COVID crisis (for example, the emerging regulatory issue of “private credit” outside of the purview of banks or government is a possible risk that many industry experts are flagging.).

Also, as a small critique, the glossing over of the fact that national deficits are substantially more out of control than they should be since governments print the money required to manage the deficit, rather than having it tied to reserves like it was historically like gold, was probably a missed opportunity since it will most likely be an issue in upcoming elections across several nations.

The Fed has two contradictory goals: full employment (which you hear little about) and low inflation. It mostly controls inflation via the money supply and interest rates, as well as emergency measures like injecting liquidity and quantitative easing in crises.

So, if you wanted to understand more and in greater depth about the role Central Banks play in stabilizing our global economy, and especially the pivotal role of the US Fed in controlling the value of the world’s main store of value (many nations and global corporations hold much of their value or wealth in US dollars), this is a good, in-depth look at how and why things operate that way.

Fin

And that’s a wrap on the year that was. I’m hoping to make 2025 a bit more deliberate and perhaps even finally get better at dumping books mid-way (I’ll put them in Do Not Read) that I drag my way through hoping they’ll get better or giving them a chance.

In any case, I hope you found something interesting and useful in the above that you’ll pick off and add to your 2025 reading list yourself (let me know if you do). This year’s Must Reads were particularly impressive, so if anything piques your interest in that six, don’t hesitate.

If you liked this list, or are looking for some other inspo for your own reading, you can also check out the reading lists and recos from past years: 2023 , 2022 , 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , 2017 , and 2016 .

If this post was useful to you, please lemme know via mail or elephant below. Feel free to mention or ping me on @awws on mastodon or email me at hola@wakatara.com . Happy Reading!