My Best Books of 2024

2024 has been a fantastic year, filled with beautiful books that broadened my horizons and gave me many hours of pure bliss. It was also a very busy year — even busier than the year before — so this year, I only managed around 31 non-fiction books (and probably just as many fiction).

This was a year where I didn’t read a single maths or programming book. There are books on machine learning and sound engineering that I’m dying to read, but I’ve noticed that, at this point in my career, reading an extra book on management, business, or economics has much higher leverage in terms of the total productivity I can bring into this world. It’s hard to compete with the productivity you gain by helping others be more productive.

As usual, I threw in some of my most favorite fiction — life can’t be all about textbooks, after all.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Last year, Money Men opened my eyes to how insanely fun real-life corporate dramas can be. Honestly, sometimes reality is more tense, more absurd, and more dramatic than any fiction. Wirecard was one such case; Theranos is another.

This book covers, in great detail, the rise and fall of Theranos — a company that promised the impossible (like all good VC startups), took it too far (like most VC startups), but in the field of blood testing, which can cause health problems for people (unlike most VC startups).

The book is very well-written, with good pacing and a wide range of colorful personalities — from famous investors to infamous politicians. Highly recommended!

The Happiness Hypothesis

Every year, the list of books I want to read keeps getting larger and larger. Since there are more books I want to read than my mortal life allows, I track how often a book is recommended (by people around me and other authors I read), sort all my upcoming books based on the number of recommendations, and usually pick the book at the top of the list. The Happiness Hypothesis ranked quite high. This was before I realized it was written by the author of The Anxious Generation and The Coddling of the American Mind — two other books high on my list.

The Happiness Hypothesis belongs to a genre of books I love. If you wish to be kind to it, you could call it applied cognitive science, psychology, and sociology. If you’re an expert in any of these fields, you might refer to it as pop psychology — perhaps with a little bit of disdain.

The basic idea is to take recent learnings from the stated fields to make a point about how to approach very practical problems in life, business, or politics. The Happiness Hypothesis attempts to do that for… well, happiness.

As a non-expert on the topic, I unfortunately can’t say much about the accuracy and validity of the claims in the book (though almost everything is backed by some studies). However, I can say that I found the book to be both very instructive and enjoyable.

Will this book make you happier? Honestly, chances are, yes! Should everyone read it? Probably. Is it maybe wrong on some points? Maybe.

Other notable books in this genre that I read this year and can recommend are: Mindwise and Machine, Platform, Crowd (more business-oriented — I loved that book too!).

Built to Last and Scaling People

Good management books usually come in two types. The first group contains books written by academics and consultants. They’ve never managed anything, but by crunching through a lot of data and qualitative research, they establish a broad understanding of good and bad management patterns. The upside is that their abstracted lessons can probably be applied to most businesses; the downside is that in very specific, tough situations, they’re not of much practical help.

This is where the second group comes in: books written by actual industry leaders. These authors have a lot of experience managing in tough waters. They offer intuition and insights that can help you on the ground, with very practical problems. However, chances are, their experience is unique to a very limited sample size. Because — shocked face — you don’t have access to the talents of Pixar or the deep pockets of Google.

Built to Last belongs to the first group, and Scaling People belongs to the second. I’m not sure Built to Last needs any introduction — it’s a well-known book. The authors crunched through data on many “lasting” companies and compared them to a control group of companies in the same fields that were not innovative. Through this qualitative comparison, they derived a series of good company management patterns that are both theoretically satisfying and practical for actual company management. In last year’s list, I suggested The Advantage. If you enjoyed that, Built to Last is like The Advantage on steroids.

Scaling People, written by a former VP at Google and COO at Stripe, provides a very detailed account of how to set up the various systems needed for managing people at scale. Picking this book up, I was worried it would be useless in the context of small teams. However, I’ve already applied several techniques from the book for hiring and personal development of team members.

This year was full of very instructive books of the second type. Others I can recommend are High Output Management (another classic by the former Intel CEO) and The Hard Thing About Hard Things (by Horowitz).

How to Run a Government So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don’t Go Crazy

I loved reading this book. It’s a weird one, and I found myself more than once confronted by the confused question, “Why are you reading this again?”

Written by Michael Barber, a public servant in charge of the delivery unit in the governments of Blair and Cameron, this book offers a no-nonsense, precise framework for how to deliver on objectives a system has decided upon. While reading this, I formalized something I think I intuitively understood before: the reason many organizations/entities fail (from nations all the way down to individuals) is not bad decisions but the inability to deliver on any decisions, good or bad.

After all, how many people do you know who have the most fantastic New Year’s resolutions but never stick to them for longer than a week? How many companies do you know where the immediate solution to current problems is obvious to everyone, yet after executive emails are sent out and town hall meetings are held, nothing improves, and things continue as they always have?

I started noticing how the most successful people around me have an uncanny ability to actually deliver on decisions. This is equally true for companies and governments. And while the quality of decisions is not unimportant (especially in competition and zero-sum games), good delivery has a feedback loop that allows for efficient correction.

Should you read this book? I’m not sure — it’s not the most fun read. But I promise the lessons in it can be useful to anyone.

Economics in One Lesson

Last year, on a beach in Turkey, I read my first work of Hegel. I decided then and there that the following year, I would read Das Kapital (maybe even in German).

I didn’t read Das Kapital; it’s a very long book, and unlike last year, I didn’t have a solo, two-week, no-electronics holiday on a beach in Turkey. But somehow, I did end up reading a bunch of books from the Austrian School, French libertarian National Deputy Bastiat, and Hayek (I am currently reading The Road to Serfdom). Marxism will have to wait another year, I guess.

Economics in One Lesson is a love letter to free market theory. Whether you lean more socialist or not, I think there are insights to be gained from it. It’s relatively short, and I found its simple explanations of the relationship between supply and demand, capital and currency to be the most straightforward I’ve encountered!

You can consume this book in two ways. Either take it at face value, assuming that his points are solely counterarguments to specific policies people put forward — to be fair those specific policies do sound stupid — or view it as the author taking these flawed policies to counter while promoting an ideology in a broader context. In that sense, the work reminds me of Why Nations Fail.

If you do assume the author is aiming for the second approach (which I personally didn’t), a very easy critique of the book is the entire field of behavioral economics.

For Profit: A History of Corporations

When a book like For Profit is recommended by a newspaper like The Economist, I assume it will be an annoying, super-biased account of all the amazing things private companies have done for us, ignoring the darker side of their history. Well, For Profit is none of that.

It is one of those rare works I dare say is balanced, though most reviews disagree with me. Starting in the Roman Republic and finishing with Facebook, For Profit marries two of my favorite things: history and business. It covers how corporations have evolved throughout history, what roles they’ve played, and most importantly, both the amazing and terrible things they’ve done, showing how both the good and the bad seem to be embedded in their nature.

It’s one of those rare cases where both Marx and Adam Smith are mentioned in the same sentence, and the book is fair to both. My only problem with it was that it was super Western-centric. When it says “the first time in the history of mankind,” it meant the first time in our very modern, very limited definition of “Western civilization.” After reading this, I know a lot about Societas Publicanorum and the Medici Bank, but I still have no idea how companies were set up in the Song Dynasty or the Bazaar ecosystem.

Sid Meier’s Memoir

When I picked up this book (because a lot of people recommended it), I was expecting a fairly dry read about video game history. Which is cool, though conceptually not super thrilling. There were two surprises.

First, this is actually a pretty decent game design book. Sprinkled throughout are casual bits of wisdom covering game design, production, management, workflows, and the journey of a creative individual.

Second, this is actually very well written. Information is not simply revealed linearly. Bits of stories are arranged for maximum emotional impact. The very experience of reading this book is interesting, very much like a game. I say this as if it is groundbreaking, but it is not. Every good novel written by professional authors has that. I just wasn’t expecting it in a Sid Meier memoir.

If you like video games or make them, chances are you will enjoy this.

Another book this year very similar to this was Life in First Person by John Romero. I loved the initial part of the work. It’s always a beautiful thing to see how the life story of a creative individual ties into the creative work they do. The weak part of the book was the last few chapters. I was constantly waiting for a punchline that never came.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

I hate cube houses. I dislike segregated city design, where you shop in one place, have fun in another, and live in yet another. Nothing makes me lose the will to live as much as pointless traffic, and nothing feels better than having everything within walking distance. My favorite cities feel like organisms, blending together diverse concepts that no central planner would have deemed reasonable. So, reading this book, I felt understood.

What is unique about this book is that it doesn’t just tell you “this type of city design is bad.” It carefully explains the dynamics, references actual historical data, traces how we got here based on policies and incentives, and discusses how this has affected funding. It also explores how to get out of this mess (though that’s the weakest part of the book).

The Subplot: What Chine is Reading and Why it Matters

I have never read anything like this. I didn’t even know books like this existed!

I love Chinese history and poetry. On the other hand, I have an unhealthy addiction to reading fiction, and in the past few years, Chinese web novels (a massive industry you’ve probably never heard of) have supplied an endless stream of fiction. This book, somehow, brings these two completely unrelated topics together in a short, smart work.

One of the first things you notice if you read Chinese web novels is that the main characters are absolute egocentric psychopaths. Weren’t collectivist cultures about the harmony of the group over the individual? What happened to the Confucian values?

The works are typically very apolitical, even the ones set in the modern world. But at the same time, there is an endless amount of organizational corruption within the systems of power (be it in the world of business or a magical martial arts sect), and a big part of the appeal is the main character smashing through rich and powerful clans (another reality in China, due to party policies on folks’ mobility, which leads to extreme regional inequalities).

In most martial arts works, there is a demon faction, conveniently placed outside the Great Wall (typically in modern Xinjiang). The Heavenly Demon Sect worships fire (a practice associated with Zoroastrianism, not uncommon in the region). In some works, the demons are evil; in others, they are misunderstood and good. But in all, they are different from the people of the Central Plains. Is this some political metaphor for the racial tensions between the Uyghurs and the Han majority of Central China?

These questions kept popping into my head. I thought I was imagining all this — after all, maybe these are just works of fantasy. The Subplot answered these questions and so much more, within the context of current and past China.

If you have a passing interest in China, you should read this short book. It also introduced me to a series of genres I had never heard of, such as poems of migrating workers, which I’ve been enjoying a lot!

Super Supportive

Speaking of reading a lot of web novels, I usually don’t mention or suggest any of them to friends. They are absolute guilty pleasures and usually not all that good, except maybe Mother of Learning and Worm. Now I have a third in the list: Super Supportive.

The thing with web novels and indie publishing is that it has upsides and downsides. On the negative side, the quality of the writing can vary a lot. These works don’t have editors, and there aren’t years for each line to be polished to perfection. On the other hand, they can rapidly try out ideas that would be impossible within the slower, more rigid publishing workflow.

Super Supportive merges a bunch of genres. It is definitely sci-fi, but it is also about superheroes. It has high school drama, but it is mostly a good-feeling, mental-health-focused slice of life.

It’s a story of a young boy in an alternate history where an extremely advanced alien civilization made a contract with our world and ended the Cold War. This civilization has set up a super AI that can subcontract individuals and give them superpowers in exchange for their services to the interplanetary civilization.

Besides the fresh merging of all these genres, I appreciate the book’s very positive image of a supportive AI system, embedded within a metaphor that feels like “this could actually happen.”

20th Century Men

It has been a thin year for comics. Not because I haven’t read a bunch, but because none of the releases, except this one, really connected with me (I’m looking forward to next year, though!).

20th Century Men is a work very similar to The Watchmen (and that’s a good thing). It doesn’t reach the same heights (that bar is very high). The work could be a tad too poetic and abstract, depending on your usual taste. That means I loved it.

Another alternate universe during the Cold War, except this one has super soldiers and steampunk-like machinery. The story is set in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, centered around superpowers in conflict and the damage done to the local lives. The ending is beautiful and makes some of the same points as The Watchmen.

If you liked Watchmen, you’ll probably like this too!

Thanks for reading! May 2025 be as good of a book year as 2024. As usual you can follow me on various socials. More info: https://ircss.github.io/