What I read in 2024

Every year since 2016 I've published a list of what I've read that year. This year, I've created a virtual bookshelf that aggregates it all in one place - you can get your own access link here. These lists become a journal of what I was thinking about over time.

Here is what I read and what I was thinking in 2024 in rough order of preference colored by recency bias.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert Caro - In strong contention for the greatest book ever written. This is my second reading of the masterpiece. I wrote some notes here. There will be a third reading.

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry - A long dusty tale of cowboys. It gets bleaker as it goes. I am positive the Deadwood team was highly influenced by this book. Some memorable lines include:

"They don't know it, but the wraith of the lord is about descend upon them. I dislike bold criminals whatever race and I believe I'll go see that they'll pay their debts." - Augustus McCrae

"Man is foolish to give up the stable pleasure of life just to follow a bunch of shitting cattle." - Augustus McCrae

This book makes me think that the wild west was basically the middle ages more or less.

I am fully Lonesome Dove pilled.

I loved this one.

Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World, Dan Davies - I love this book. Davies provides a taxonomy of frauds and famous historical examples of each category.

Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More than they Expect, Will Guidara - I love this book, which is part memoir part management handbook and looks at Guidara's experience in the restaurant industry. Specifically it focuses on the rise of Eleven Madison Park, which was named the best restaurant in the world. I love this book because it is about craft and care. The writing is fantastic, the anecdotes (my favorite involved Daniel Boulud hosting Guidara at his restaurant) are incredible, and the lessons are widely applicable. This is a must for anyone in management.

The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World, Sharon Brous - The amen effect is, "the sacred mandate to hear each other, to embrace each other, to love each other especially on the hard days and to say to one another amen." Through a series of adapted sermons and memoirs, Brous returns again and again to a story about a pilgrimage ritual from the times of the Temple. Pilgrims would enter the Temple complex and circle clockwise. However, pilgrims suffering in some way would enter and circle counter clockwise. Each pilgrim moving clockwise was commanded to stop every time they encountered a counter clockwise circler and open their hearts to them by asking, "What happened to you?"

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy - This is the bleakest and most violent book I've ever read. It's like McCarthy made some sort of deal with the devil - he gets the ability to write incredible prose, but only about the most horrific shit imaginable. This book is an exploration of the nature of man and man's relationship with violence. There is no plot. Nor are there any material comforts. There is only remarkable writing on terrible things happening over an over again in the wild west.

The Razor's Edge, W. Somerset Maugham - The book is set mostly in France in the 1920s and 1930s and follows a circle of connected upper class characters. According to the author, it is a success story - the interesting characters get what they all want in the end. I kind of loved the depiction of the upper class. There is a lot of philosophy in this one. "A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life." is a line I jotted down because I liked it so much. Thanks Tim Walz for the recommendation.

Polostan: Bomb Light, Book 1, Neal Stephenson - His Lordship astrally projected a 10,000 page magnum opus into his publisher's consciousness, of course killing him instantly. The publisher's assistant begged His Lordship to divide the manuscript into a series and His Lordship blessed us with Polostan Book 1. The story is set in the 1920s and 30s in D.C., Chicago, Petrograd, and Siberia. It is the origin story of a heroine spy. While short in both length and deep dives into technical minutiae, for His Lordship, you will come away from reading this with a better appreciation for the firing mechanism of a Thompson sub machine gun, polo tactics, and the discovery of the neutron. You also will be treated to a multi-chapter torture scene. When does Book 2 drop?

Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger - A collection of writings and speeches from Warren Buffet's partner Charlie Munger put out by Stripe Press. I especially enjoyed chapter two, which is a collection of essays written by his children. I hope one day my kids can write something like this about me. Many of the talks deal with topics like behavioral economics, morality, investment strategy, multidisciplinary thinking, and problems with government and academia. You know, rich, old white guy stuff.

The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How the World Lost Its Mind, Dan Davies - This book attempts to explain why everything is getting worse. The author posits that this trend that we are all feeling is the result of accountability sinks, which are systems into which accountability seems to disappear. As a result, systems can have the strange effect of producing outcomes that none of the individuals in the system desire. He uses an insane, but true, example of thousands of squirrels being thrown into a wood chipper. If that doesn't intrigue you, he also dives deep into the field of Management cybernetics and uses this as a frame for explaining the crises that we see today. I can see myself coming back to this one. This is my second Davies book, and he is now in the must read everything he writes category.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson - Canonical counter culture. Short, fast-paced and funny.

Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, Kara Swisher - Swisher writes a memoir about her career reporting on tech. In it she shares her experiences interviewing the likes of Jobs, Gates, Brin, Page, Zuck, Musk, Thiel.... and more. She touches on themes including capitalism, passion, megalomania, sexism, queer identity, and living a good life. I liked it. Swisher is a tech optimist, but not blindly so. I liked this zinger at the end, "Do you want to know what some loud mouth VC with no expertise thinks about COVID or Ukraine or the tragedy unfolding in the fall of 2023 in Israel without any self reflection of their own role in cheapening discourse, take a seat boys."

The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin - A meditation on creativity. So much of this resonated with me and my experience writing and coding. Much of this also reminded me of things artists I know have told me. So much felt right that the parts I lacked first or second hand experience with I default to trust. So many lines stuck out or landed like explosions of truth for me. For example, "If you know what you want to do and you do it, that's the work of a craftsman. If you begin with a question, and use it to guide an adventure of discovery, that's the work of an artist." I can see myself returning to this book again when I need a jolt of creative inspiration.

Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner - The beautiful writing reminds me of Steinbeck. This book is about a married couple building their lives as academics at the end of the Great Depression in Madison, Wisconsin. Themes include young adulthood, friendship, marriage, aging, ambition, dreams, and academia. An early example of the writing style:

"There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters."

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Yuval Noah Harari - Harari is arguing that self corrective systems are important for the survival of humanity. He puts the creation of AI in the context of other self-corrective information technologies beginning with the story, writing, and governments. Chapter 1 attempts to define information, but I found it hard to find a clear definition. It's not truth. Chapter 2 introduces the idea that stories are humanity's definitive advantage and the vehicle by which we evolved to share information. Chapter 3 looks at writing as the second great step in information technology and goes on to discuss the challenges of document retrieval at scale. Chapter 4 explores the canonization of the bible and posits that this was an attempt to solve the problem of fallible record keeping. But canonization also was not infallible particularly over long stretches of time, so you get the oral law in Judaism. Also, he discusses the idea that more information does not necessarily mean progress with early modern witch hunts as the example. There was lots of information written about witches, all of which was fantastical, but had the affect of making it harder and harder to challenge. Harari concludes part 1 with a discussion of the differences between totalitarian and democratic states. There is a section that is similar to the book Seeing like a State. Honestly the jump from information to governments is a little confusing to me. I think Harari is arguing that democracies vs. totalitarian states handle information differently, which is of course true. Part 2 "The Inorganic Network" makes the powerful observation that no written document could produce a new written document without passing through the mind of a human until now. AI can generate new information and real world actions (trading bot suddenly selling or buying stock). He also discusses how facial recognition is used to find stolen children in China and enforce religious dress codes in Iran. I think Harari is trying to answer the question, what sorts of systems are best at getting us to truth. For Harari, this means the system must be self-corrective - democracies have a self corrective mechanism, but totalitarian regimes often do not. Harari provides an interesting discussion of utilitarianism vs deontology. Utilitarianism seeks to optimize utility. Deontology seeks to find universal truths, like don't murder. Both are flawed in that it's impossible to accurately define utility or universal truths. The end of the book forecasts the future of AI.

The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change, Tanya Reilly - A superb book for career-focused software engineers. I liked the discussion of navigating organizational complexity and planning and executing projects.

Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter, Zoë Schiffer - I love the metaphor of Elon as a petulant child kicking over another group of children's sand castle on the beach. This book is not kind to Elon in its reporting of the story of his acquisition of Twitter and his moves as owner. It all makes me happy that I've deleted all my tweets. I'm sure there are some liberties taken, conclusions reached without adequate evidence, but this book is utter catnip for me.

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, Byrne Hobart, Tobias Huber - A new Stripe Press book that looks at the idea of slowing economic, technical, and even spiritual progress and some historical bubbles that can teach us lessons on how to progress. The book looks closely at what it calls "bubbles", some of which are positive, like the Manhattan Project, the Apollo space missions, the transistor, fracking, and Bitcoin. The authors share a framework for understanding when bubble are good and when they are bad, as in the housing crisis of 2008. They also dive into Rene Girard's ideas about mimetic desire as a necessary factor in creating human progress. This quasi religious causal factor of progress was unexpected and less interesting to me than the exploration of historical step leaps.

How to Build a Car: The Autobiography of the World's Greatest Formula 1 Designer, Adrian Newey - I did not know a lot about racing going into this one, but given the rise of the sport I thought it would be interesting to read about some of the engineering that goes into Formula 1 cars. I enjoyed learning about the features of Formula 1 cars, how rules impact design, aerodynamics, the forces that engineers try to optimize, and their rowdy victory celebrations.

One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey, Sam Keith with Richard Proenneke - If you like Alaska reality tv, you might like this one. It is based on the journals of Richard Proenneke during a year and a half period he spent building and living alone in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness. It is a reminder of the beauty of nature and the things that matter most in life.

Not the End of the World: How we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet, Hannah Ritchie - Ritchie writes a sober and optimistic piece about sustainability and how to be an "effective environmentalist." I love the first anecdote about Hans Rosling and how Gapminder changed her world outlook. Same. I worry that Ritchie's arguments encourage complacency because overall she is optimistic. I also worry that Ritchie's prescriptions put too much emphasis on individual choice and not enough on systemic changes.

How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth, Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin - This is a survey of the latest scholarship on why the world is wealthier than it was in the past and why some countries are richer than others. It attempts to debunk old theories and question new ones. For example, it rejects arguments about culture as overly broad or racist. It looks at the development of industry, rule of law, war, geography, trust, women's rights, religion and other possible causal factors. Having one of these in your favor was not enough. This book has Guns Germs and Steal vibes with twenty extra years of context.

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, Heather Ann Thompson - A historical recounting of the Attica Prison Uprising with themes of racism, governmental incompetence, cover up, police brutality, and the general shittiness of the American carceral system. This one kind of feels like a Hardcore History episode where Carlin discusses an event in the category of "Gee, aren't you lucky you didn't witness this hell on Earth?" Attica is a poignant example of elites exploiting racial schisms in the working class. White prison guards brutally retake the prison from mostly black and latino prisoners. Hostages, prisoners, and families suffer for decades and a literal Rockefeller is never really held to account. Side note, it's really interesting how prominent Nelson Rockefeller is in this book and The Power Broker and how differently he is portrayed each work. One of the benefits of reading a lot of books is that important subjects and ideas tend to repeat.

The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, Dan Stone - An exploration of the historiography, ideology, causes, and consequences of the Holocaust. Stone argues that the Holocaust was not monolithic. The character of its implementation depended greatly on local realities. For example, in Hungary Jews were deported to Auschwitz, which was different than Polish Jews sent to Treblinka, or shot in mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen, or starved in Ghettoes, or killed in local genocides in South Eastern Europe. He uses first hand accounts to paint a picture that is at odds with popular depictions of clean, industrial, gassings.

Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War, Erik Larson - There are some Civil War histories that seem to go out of their way to paint the Secessionists as reasonable people. This is not such a book. One of the main characters of the book is James Hammond, a Senator of South Carolina when it seceded. Some of the appealing facts we learn about this guy is his written handbook on how to discipline his slaves. We learn that he molested three of his nieces. Also, this loser, like all of his peers, obviously raped his slaves and went out of his way to purchase slaves for this exclusive reason. In general the Southern elite are painted as entitled, quick to take offense, and incompetent - all in contrast to Lincoln. We get a view of Major Robert Anderson who commands Fort Sumter and seems to be barely holding on to his chill for much of the book. Of course we get Lincoln, but not the Lincoln of A Team of Rivals or A Narrative History of the Civil War. Those Lincolns are in the peak of their power. This Lincoln is dipping his toes into the Presidency and presents as softer and more hesitant. We get plenty of Seward, who has not yet come to heel as Lincoln's right hand. He'll learn. I did not enjoy this one as much as The Splendid and the Vile - naked, martini toting Churchill is going to be hard to top. Still, Larson delivers and retains his hallowed position on my "Read everything this author writes" list.

The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Financial Security, Scott Galloway - The book starts with a discussion of Stoicism which I'd summarize as find a way to be content without always wanting more. Next, the book takes a turn into the territory of Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You with the idea that "Follow your passion is latin for prepare to be exploited." Instead, the author argues that we follow our talents. The end of the book is more concrete personal finance advice, which will either be stressful or reassuring depending on your situation.

The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, Peter Leeson - I enjoyed this application of some fundamental economic concepts to the world of 17th and 18th century piracy. In particular, I found the ideas of signaling, discount rate, credibility, governance, marginal cost, branding, labor relations, incentives and profit seeking a lot of fun. This book was published over 10 years ago, but holds up well. The tone is dry, but the subject matter adds plenty of color.

The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, Coleman Hughes - Having read 3 Kendi books, I thought it'd be interesting to read a refutation by a young black man. Overall, I think Hughes does a lot of straw manning by either cherry picking cases and quotes, or not reading anti-racist writings with enough good faith. That said, one of his most persuasive ideas to me was that Harvard and other well-endowed colleges put their endowments behind their commitments to diversity by funding high quality pre-k and k-12 schools in low income communities.

Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America, Talia Lavin - A dive into the world of Evangelical Christianity and the ways its fundamentalism impacts American society. There are strong themes of patriarchy, child abuse, and sexual assault. This is result of terrible ideas rooted in magical thinking. This does not make Evangelicalism distinct amongst fundamentalist and cultic religions, but given the demographics and idiosyncrasies of American democracy, this theology has significant sway on America. This also makes me think about issue salience. The book presents almost no statistical data, only anecdotal testimony. It could be that a large portion of fundamentalist Evangelical homes are places of child abuse and sexual assault. It could also be quite uncommon. I have no way of knowing - and yet it is easy to come to the conclusion that we should ban home schooling or take some other action hinted by the book. This is because the issue of religion driven abuse is highly salient for me and many leftists. There are of course many issues of high salience on the right, with almost no statistical significance, and yet these issues are drivers of modern political campaigns. The question this raises for me is how much should I need data and statistical significance to care about something versus how much should I trust my gut.

A Mathematician's Lament, Paul Lockhart - What if we taught music by requiring that students learn music notations and scale exercises before we let them play even a simple song? Lockhart compellingly argues this is the current state of mathematics education. You can find most of this short book online with a google search.

Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War, Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff - The author's tell their story running an experimental procurement program in the Department of Defense. I found the topic of drone warfare most interesting. Suddenly commercially available drones that cost thousands of dollars make tanks, ships, and planes that cost many hundreds of times as much obsolete. The book was not strictly on the subject of drones, however. There was a lot of narrative around how the authors navigated the Pentagon bureaucracy and applied lessons from silicon valley to the military.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yang - I love the idea of "Umwelt," which is a German term to describe how different animals perceive their environments coined by Jakob von Uexküll. This book isn't a recitation of which animal has a better or worse sense of smell. Instead it argues that perception is fundamentally different across species. For example, bee sight is made up of pixels the size of your thumb nail - not great. But, they can taste with their legs which to us would be a psychedelic experience to say the least. Other sections I found fascinating were chapter 9 on echolocation, chapter 10 on sensing electric fields, and chapter 11 on sensing magnetic fields). The author documents examples of blind humans who develop echolocation and how the phenomenon in bats was first discovered. The author sheds light on how the hammer head shark's unique shape is useful for detecting electric fields and prey. And we also learn about how sea turtles, whales, and birds are able to execute near errorless feats of global navigation by sensing the Earth's magnetic fields. To date, it is still a mystery how biological organisms detect magnetic fields - or what that even 'feels' like. I typically reach for a book about animals and nature once a year (I've done beavers, octopi, forests...) and this is definitely one of the better ones in that genre. It gives me a lot more appreciations for what a dog might be thinking about when it walks by me on the street.

The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism, Adam Nagourney - A modern history of the New York Times with a few points that stood out to me that I want to highlight. First, early on in the book is the controversy over the Times refusing to print non-marriage-status signifying titles when referring to women in print. It read to me as an identical take to the losers who are skittish about using preferred pronouns. Next, I enjoyed the reminder of the specific lies the Times was responsible for proliferating (aluminum cylinders that were supposedly used for refining uranium story) that helped lead the US to war in Iraq. I was politically conscious at that time, and it looked to me and everyone around me that this was going to be a disaster. And it was. And very few people responsible for the disaster have suffered any real consequences or even mild reputational harm. I found the discussions on digitizing the Times pretty interesting, though there is not much technical depth beyond mentioning servers crashing over big news stories on the site. Part of this section looked at the paywall decision, which I also found interesting. Finally the overall vibe of the book's portrayal of the media elite and the Sulzberger family was very in line with the image I got from watching Succession. There is just a lot of the day to day business interactions of people with incredible wealth and influence – the restaurants they go to, their travel, the emails they send each other, their conversations etc. I found this voyeuristically fascinating. Overall, though the book is quite long, and while I've highlighted pieces that I liked, there were many more pieces that could have benefited from a more forceful editor.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, David Grann - A historical crime thriller with some G-man overlap. I enjoyed the sections on the investigation, trial, and aftermath more than the start of the book when the murders were occurring. I might give the movie a shot out of respect for Mr. Scorsese.

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, Matthew Skelton - Explores Conway's Law and makes the point that organization structure will drive the architecture of software systems and goes into some case studies and frameworks for building organizations. A good manual for people in the position to influence the structure of teams.

The Price We Pay: What broke American health care - and how to fix it, Marty Makary - This is an exploration of all the unfair market forces that plague Americans attempting to access health care from predatory billing, to price gauging, to unnecessary treatments and everything in between. Well, everything except the question, what if healthcare in America wasn't a market at all? Makary offers a blue print for a lifetime of neoliberal incremental gains in healthcare which I hope we skip entirely in favor of a universal healthcare program.

Lovely One: A Memoir, Ketanji Brown Jackson - The autobiography of the first African American woman to serve as a Supreme Court Justice. The story ends when she joins the Supreme Court, so if you are looking for stories of her dunking on any of the robed-reptiles you will not find them here. Some highlights of her life that stood out to me were that both her parents grew up under segregation. Her grandparents did not complete primary school. She attended Harvard, where she met her husband Patrick - a New England blue blood. She attended Harvard Law, served as a Clerk for Justice Breyer, and had an expectedly distinguished legal career. Her uncle was incarcerated for nearly 30 years during the three strikes and you are out regime of the 1990s. She has two children, the eldest of whom is on the autistic spectrum. She visited Kenya with her husbands family in a particularly formative trip abroad. Overall, I'm glad she is on the Supreme Court. We could get, and probably deserve, much worse.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, Nate Silver - I know Nate Silver from his popular election forecasting blog, 538. He suffered a tremendous amount of criticism in the wake of 2016, where his model gave Trump a ~30% chance of victory. At the time of Trump's depressing inauguration, many took this as evidence of his ineptitude. He has maintained that his prediction was correct in the sense that running the 2016 election over and over again would have Trump winning roughly 1 out of 3 times. From my perspective he's been relatively quiet since 2016 or maybe I've just chosen to ignore him. But he just released this book, which I interpreted as an attempt to revitalize his public reputation. The book covers a group of people that he calls "the river," who are from a number of interest-demographics who have an analytical strategy for evaluating risk. He contrasts this group with the rest of the population, which he calls "the village." I was not particularly taken by his Gladwellian weaving of popular social science studies. At the start, Nate let's us know that his greatest talent is really for professional poker - not election forecasting. After a lengthy section on the game of poker, its strategy, interviews with famous players and Nate's favorite poker memories, he moves into other domains of risk analysis which he is also apparently expert in. He covers sports betting, casinos, finance, crypto, moral philosophy, and AI. He even includes a section on Sam Bankman-Fried. There was one point in the book that might stick with me and it is the idea that overcoming adversity can be something we over-index on. At some point adversity has diminishing returns. I went in thinking that Nate was a washed up election forecaster. I left thinking that Nate is a washed up election forecaster trying to reinvent himself as risk-expert polyglot. I was not entertained.

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, Terence McKenna - This is like a less bougie version of Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind (which I loved). McKenna writes about the origins and ubiquity of psychedelics in Paleolithic society. He traces the history of plants and drugs including tobacco, coffee and alcohol. He introduces the idea of dominator society and argues for the legalization of all plants and decriminalization of drugs. He makes DMT sound pretty interesting.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, Lewis Dartnell - A fun thought experiment about what knowledge would be necessary to rebuild society after a terrible society-ending catastrophe. It's a good big picture guide, but I feel like we need some technical manuals for much of what he describes. Maybe it's intended to be an index rather than the actual steps necessary to survive and thrive.

The Mercy of Gods: Captive's War, Book 1, James S.A. Corey - The Kardashev Scale is a system for classifying a civilization based on the order of magnitude of energy it can harness. A type 1 civilization on the scale can harness and store all the energy available on its home planet. A type 2 civilization can harness the total energy output of its star. A type 3 civilization can harness the energy of an entire galaxy. A popular scifi trope is exploring what happens when different Kardashev type civilizations come into contact. Corey gives us such a novel. The pieces of the novel that touch on this theme are very compelling. However, the main characters are research scientists. They are very boring, unmemorable and unappealing.

Moonbound, Robin Sloan - When you can't decide if you want to read sword and sorcery or space opera, why not do both? This book has Labyrinth vibes so if you like a hero's journey with lots of strange characters along the way, this one might be for you. This also might pique your interest if you are an Ursula K. Le Guin fan. I only read A Wizard of Earthsea from her corpus, but Sloan does reference Le Guin by name in the story and some of the style is comparable from what I remember. In the end, this wasn't my favorite.

A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan - I want to like this more than I do. This narrative format is really interesting. It jumps from character to character and scenes are not chronological. There aren't any transitions so as you start a new scene you have to figure out for yourself when the scene occurs and which side character from a previous scene is the main character of this scene. The writing is also really interesting. I feel like I need to re-read this because I'm not smart enough to fully grasp all the connections the first time through.

Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors, Matt Parker - A whimsical look at the consequences of bad math in the real world. Parker argues that since so many life sustaining systems rely on very complicated and non intuitive math, there have to be proportional safety systems in place. Overall, this book was a touch on the long side for my taste. I feel like I got the joke early and didn't need like the last third of the book.

Catch-22, Joseph Heller - At 60 years old, the satire, irony, and humor still hits. I love the cynicism, distrust of authority, corruption, and the critique of militarism, capitalism, patriotism and religion. Taken aback by the sexism. I think the gag gets repetitive though, so I found myself losing momentum the deeper I got.

The Secret That Is Not Secret: Ten Heretical Tales, Jay Michaelson - This book is very Jay! It is a series of ten religious but typically erotic, queer or both short stories. Jay is a great writer and it is nice to be reminded of religious Jewish culture without having to break out a kosher thermometer.

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout, Cal Newport - Pseudo productivity - the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort. Alternative definition: reading this book.

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connnection, Charles Duhigg - Folks, we just need to do more empathy! Honestly, not a ton of ideas in here that I disagree with, or feel like would be bad for more people to adopt, or for myself to do a better job implementing. The idea of understanding the type of conversation you are in is crucial. That said, nothing earth shattering in here and no discussion of why we should trust any of the cited studies. Social science studies are notoriously difficult to replicate and it is unclear how surveys from 20 college students extrapolate out to population wide generalization. Probably the discussion of the fall of Netflix's Jonathan Friedland was least interesting to me and read to me as reactionary. Folks, Netflix has solved diversity.

Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit - I wanted more hope. Solnit argues that our failures (the failure to stop the war in Iraq, for example) are far more salient than our incremental successes (proliferation of renewable energy, gay rights). This was published in 2004 and based on an essay, I believe. It was an excellent reminder of how awful the second Bush presidency was. Trump derangement syndrome occludes this plain as day fact. I'd love an additional update on how to be hopeful in 2024.

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Elizabeth Catte - This is kind of a takedown of J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and argument against some of the prominent stereotypes of Appalachia.

The Candy House, Jennifer Egan - I'm officially not a fan of Jennifer Egan's schtick. I don't like feeling like I need a schematic diagram to understand when, where, and who I'm reading about regardless of how interesting (or not) the subject matter appears to be.

Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything, Michio Kaku - I have a lot of love and respect for Kaku, who spoke at my high school some quarter century ago. I did not love this book. It was too broad - surveying nearly every conceivable field that might be revolutionized by quantum computers. I think I would have preferred one or two deep dives.

Fellowship Point, Alice Elliott Dark - A well-written, character driven novel about aging, health, family, nature, and womanhood. Not really my taste. I can tell that this book rewards close study, which I did not provide.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, Saidiya Hartman - I picked this up because it made it to the top 100 books of the twenty-first century NY times list that recently came out. I was underwhelmed. It is heartbreaking that black women in the early twentieth century faced tremendous discrimination. It is clear that they heroically resisted their oppression. It is really hard to tell the histories of the underclasses, but a lot of this work felt speculative due to the intimacy of the detail. Everyone seems to love this book, so what do I know.

Abandoned Books

The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback, Dan Olsen - This book felt dated. All of the examples and case studies were from many years ago. Olsen draws from his experience at Intuit which which makes one of my least favorite pieces of software of all time, TurboTax. This is definitely written more for product designers and product managers than engineers. Most damningly, The examples work off an unstated assumption that you have a sizable angel or seed round of funding. There is no acknowledgement that a solo developer could work through the so called lean product playbook without two or three other full time staff. Nor is there any consideration given to how to build a bootstrapped business - which I find far more desirable to accepting significant outside investment at this stage of my life and thinking. I guess I'd recommend this to you if you just raised 2 million dollars in 2009 or 2010.

The Comeback Quotient: A Get-Real Guide to Building Mental Fitness in Sport and Life, Matt Fitzgerald - A collection of sports stories where the athlete overcomes adversity with mental toughness. Fitzgerald argues that these athletes force themselves to deal with reality and do so effectively, which separates them from others who don't use this technique. Not my favorite Fitzgerald book and I found myself rushing and then not eager to pick it back up so here it lands.

Microserfs, Douglas Coupland - I liked this book for the first chapter or so which humorously covered life at the bottom of the engineering hierachy at Microsoft in the 1990s. But then the socially akward nerd gag got old and then it veered into a romance novel and I lost all interest. Great title though.