After the reading cliff of 2023, 2024 was a partial recovery. Seven books across five months — not great, but better. The pattern is hard to miss looking back at these lists: reading volume is almost entirely a function of whether I have a structure forcing it. Without 75 Hard running in the background, books only happen when I'm deliberate about making time for them. In 2024, I was deliberate some months and completely absent others, which explains the gaps.

What was my breakdown of genres for the year?

In reviewing the books I read this year I found I read 7 titles. They were broken down in the following broad genres:

Entertainment - 29%
Non-fiction - 29%
Computing - 0%
Biographies - 14%
Self-improvement - 14%
Business - 14%

Books I completed in 2024:

January

  • Fire Weather (Audible) – John Vaillant's account of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, which forced the evacuation of 88,000 people in a single afternoon and burned through a city built in the middle of the Canadian oil industry's heartland. Vaillant treats fire as a living force and uses the Fort McMurray disaster as the anchor for a broader examination of combustion science, the history of the fossil fuel industry, and what a hotter world means for the relationship between human civilization and fire. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of the best-reviewed nonfiction books of 2023.

February

  • Elon Musk (Kindle) – Walter Isaacson's biography, written with extensive access to Musk over roughly two years. It traces his childhood in South Africa, his early companies (Zip2, PayPal), and the overlapping bets he placed on Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity — companies that by conventional business logic had no business surviving their first few years. Isaacson is a sympathetic biographer and doesn't shy away from the contradictions: the same qualities that make Musk effective at forcing impossible timelines seem inseparable from what makes him genuinely difficult. Published the same week Musk closed his acquisition of Twitter.

June

  • The Peripheral (The Jackpot Trilogy, Book 1) (Kindle) – William Gibson's science fiction novel involving two different timelines connected by a mysterious server — one set in a near-future rural America, one set roughly 70 years further on, in a London that survived a civilizational collapse called "the Jackpot." When a woman in the earlier timeline witnesses something she shouldn't have through what she thinks is a game controller, people from her future begin reaching back to manipulate events in her present. Dense and rewarding, though Gibson doesn't make it easy.

  • Caribbean Rim (Doc Ford 25) (Kindle) – Doc Ford goes to the Bahamas ostensibly to research sharks, but really to track down a state archaeologist who disappeared with rare Spanish coins and a logbook of uncharted wreck sites belonging to Ford's old friend Carl Fitzpatrick. What follows involves sunken treasure, multiple competing factions of treasure hunters, and enough felonies to keep things moving. Takes the series out of the usual Florida coastal settings into open Caribbean water.

  • Going Infinite (Audible) – Michael Lewis spent months embedded with Sam Bankman-Fried before FTX collapsed, and the result is an unusual book — part character study, part financial history, part meditation on what it looks like when effective altruism ideology meets unlimited leverage. Lewis had unprecedented access and came away genuinely uncertain about how much of FTX's collapse was fraud versus catastrophic mismanagement. Released the same week Bankman-Fried's trial began; by the time SBF was convicted on all counts, the book's careful agnosticism about his guilt had become a liability. Worth reading precisely because Lewis is wrestling with the material rather than fitting it into a predetermined narrative.

October

  • Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Kindle) – *Patrick Lencioni's business fable about why teams fail. Structured as a leadership novel about a new CEO trying to get her executive team to function, it builds toward a framework of five interconnected dysfunctions: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. The fable format makes it go quickly and the model is genuinely useful, even if the storytelling is thin. A staple of leadership development programs for good reason. This was my first reading of the book and it'll come back next year. Stay tuned.

December

  • Revenge of the Tipping Point (Audible) – Twenty-five years after The Tipping Point, Gladwell returns to the subject of social epidemics with a darker lens. Where the original book was largely optimistic about the mechanics of contagion — little things make big differences, the right connector can change the world — this one is more interested in how those same mechanisms get weaponized. He traces the opioid crisis, Medicare fraud in Miami, suicide clusters in high-achieving high schools, and L.A.'s epidemic of bank robberies in the late 1980s. The new framework introduces "overstories" — the background environmental conditions that determine whether a contagion spreads — and superspreaders as distinct from ordinary participants. A good companion to the original; works better if you've read it.

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