My Year in Books 2024

[DNF] means did not finish. Usually a bad sign. [R] means a re-read.

My Goodreads.

In Progress

• Barling, Julian. Brave New Workplace. I've only just started this. The content is great, but chapter 1 and 2 are surprising for their extremely poor editing.
• Barling, Julian. The Science of Leadership.
• Kahn, David. The Codebreakers. If, at ~1,000 pages, this seems overwhelming, read Singh's The Code Book instead. But if you want the deets, this is the one and only.
• Rubin, Jay. The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories.
• Watkins, Michael D. The First 90 Days.
• Wooldridge, Adrian. The Aristocracy of Talent.

The Stand Outs

• Birch, David. Identity is the New Money. If you are interested in the future of, and the intersection of, money, payments, and identity, you should be reading Birch. Follow him on LinkedIn.
• [R] Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game.
• Didion, Joan. Let Me Tell You What I Mean. You can never go wrong with Joan.
• Didion, Joan. Miami. You can never go wrong with Joan.
• [R] Gibson, William. Neuromancer. The one that started it all.
• Gutkind, Lee. You Can't Make this Stuff Up. An excellent place to start if you want to write creative non-fiction.
• [R] Harris, Sam. Free Will. Pretty sure this is an excellent book, but I'm still mostly confused.
• Orwell, George. Selected Essays. One of the masters.
• Pinker, Steven. A Sense of Style. Excellent, dense, maybe too dense for some people. Annoyingly long chapters (a pet peeve).
• [R] Vinge, Vernor. A Fire Upon the Deep. One of the best sci-fi books of all time.
• Walton, Jo. Starlings. Jo Walton is a much better short-story writer than she gives herself credit for.
• [R] Watts, Peter. Blindsight. The best modern sci-fi in recent memory.

Not Recommended

These ones did not work for me. Unlike some past "not recommended" books, these don't warrant a re-read.

• Dana, Deb. Anchored.
• [DNF] Morillo, Christina. 97 Things Every Information Security Professional Should Know. This may be mildly useful to people in the first years of their career. A lot of the articles are by people who are not practiced writers.
• [DNF] Zinsser, William. Writing to Learn. Zinsser's On Writing Well is one of the best in the genre. Writing to Learn is not.

The Rest

• Armstrong, Luanne. Slice me Some Truth. Canadian creative non-fiction.
• Cowen, Tyler. Talent.
• Frankl, Victor E. Man's Search for Meaning.
• Garvey, James. The Twenty Greatest Philosophy Books.
• Hendrix, Harville. Getting the Love you Want. Useful tools and exercises, with an excess of anecdotes (common to this genre of writing).
• Le Carré, John. The Honourable Schoolboy.
• Mill, J.S. The Subjection of Women. The OG male feminist?
• [DNF] Richo, David. How to be an Adult in Relationships. Useful tools and exercises, tediously purple prose, so much so that I could not finish it.
• Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. This will need a re-read.
• Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. The OG feminist.