This past year I read more books than any year prior, and I'm stoked. As a bit of background, my early 20’s were a serious dry-spell of leisure reading. For some reason, after school I just couldn’t get into a book no matter how much I tried. It probably had something to do with being sucked into other hobbies and a general shortage of time to do it all, but also was just pure laziness. There were of course odd times where I read, but they were never sustained periods, rather just short bursts of interest in a single book.
But this year I moved to London, a place where everyone reads. On the tube. In parks. By the Thames. And before I moved a good friend of mine, and avid reader, gifted me The Splendid and the Vile, an expansion of the diaries of Winston Churchill and the people of London during the infamous Blitz of WW2. Having just arrived in London, reading this book consumed me. I would read a chapter that described an area in the city that was devastated by bombs in 1941 only to find myself walking through that very borough a few weeks later, where I’d slip into a daydream about the horrors and triumphs of the war. This never-felt immersion brought me a new kind of joy and kicked-off a year of very humble re-discovery of reading. For the record, I’m still not very good at it (reading and synthesizing an entire book worth of information), but I have gotten much better at identifying books I actually want to read, and doing so to completion. I also want to emphasize the freeing realization I had that books don’t all need to be finished. Even if everyone else frenzied over a book, it still might just not click with me and that’s okay. There’s no shortage of good books, so if something doesn’t feel like a good use of my time, I move on.
So, here's the list of what I read this year, with some notes where I felt I had something to say:
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The Splendid and the Vile
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The Creative Act
Didn’t personally care for this. A lot of it felt obvious felt like “water is wet” statements. -
Killers of the Flower Moon
Knew the movie was coming so I wanted to read this. Loved the book, still haven’t seen the film. -
Pieces of the Action
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Guns, Germs, and Steel
This is a dense read that progressively got less interesting to me, as it was occasionally very niche information. Nonetheless I learned a ton reading this. -
Why We're Polarized
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Easy Money
I was hoping for a good anti-crypto book to help me challenge my own biases, and this was too easy to see through. Author hates crypto and it’s obvious, so it wasn’t really compelling, even when the facts were rightly stated.
I thought I'd also mention that before this year, the last fiction novel I read was Ender's Game in high school. For some reason, I completely convinced myself that in order to be smarter, I'd have to relentlessly study business, science, and technology books, which now I see as only partly true. Fiction didn't interest me because I preferred real things and their real consequences, not made up stories which had no tangible impact on the world around me. Oh, how I was wrong. Reading fiction brought necessary balance to my quest to learn through reading, by helping me escape the sometimes depressing and overwhelming reality of the world. But fiction, in a way, is all about reality because it always stems from human themes. A topic for another time, though. In short, fiction is cool— don't fade fiction.
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When We Cease to Understand the World
The best book I read this year, and I look forward to re-reading it. -
Lolita
As I progressed through books, I wanted to explore both more fiction and the classics, which brought me to Lolita, which I loved despite its controversial nature. -
The Road
Arguably harder to read than Lolita because it’s just a relentless, Sisyphean struggle with no joy or comedy. But still, of course, great reading. RIP Cormac McCarthy, 1933 - 2023. -
The Witcher Series
I found this particular good reading when real life got too real.-
Last Wish
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Sword of Destiny
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Blood of Elves
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Time of Contempt
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Baptism of Fire
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The Three Body Problem