Books That I Read 2024

I’ve been reading books. It’s usually a lot better than whatever the internet is showing me. Last fall, I started a book club and it’s been a really phenomenal experience getting to have people over and talk about something other than a video game. Even though sometimes the book is about video games.

I read books on my commute to work, on my computer in the office during downtime, on my lunch break, and now I’m starting to at home too. TV & Movies & Video Games are really starting to lose their appeal to me, though I still enjoy them sometimes. I’m less interested in SEEING (I’ve seen enough) and more interested in UNDERSTANDING. I’m a slow reader so this voracious appetite has resulted in fewer completions than I’d like, but as of writing I’ve completed at least 26 books this year, plus some books that I dropped. I’m going to list them all out and give some thoughts on them.

DROPPED BOOKS

Michael Lewis - Liar’s Poker (Audiobook)

Spotify’s audiobook service has been great for when I’m driving or walking. This was one I tried out since I know Michael Lewis is well known for being able to reasonably explain the ridiculous financial institutions our country has. I’m not sure if I got a reasonable explanation of what these people do, but it certainly affirmed my low opinion of them personally. Whatever it is that they do, it should be illegal. I think I got the gist.

Hiroki Azuma - Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals

I have a recurring fascination with otaku and hikikomori. Welcome to the NHK is an EXCELLENT novel which I believe lays bare how alienation feels when you have no political frame to understand it. I have great sympathy for hikikomori, and can really understand how people get to that position. This book explains otaku as a postmodern phenomenon, and also describes how it’s a response to the americanization of Japan. It veers into some strange/unrigorous territory though, and heavily references some French (pejorative) thinkers who I think are kinda quacks, namely Alexandre Kojeve.

Galen Strawson - Things That Bother Me (Book Club)

This was the only book for my book club that I didn’t finish. I don’t think that’s a problem with me, the author states in the introduction that it’s not intended to be read front to back because it’s a collection of philosophical essays written over a long period of time which cover similar grounds. My main issue with Strawson is that he has reasonable positions, but doesn’t really make a case for what their implications are. For example, he states that if you were to suddenly, unexpectedly, painlessly die; then you are literally unharmed. I think this makes sense. However, this brings up lots of implications about, say, the death penalty. He gives precious little thought to this, which is the thing that’s actually interesting.

COMPLETED BOOKS (in rough chronological order of completion)

Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar (Audiobook)

I never read it so figured I should. It was fine but honestly left little impression. Much of what is struggled against is not as much of an issue anymore (though certainly much is). Also I feel that I already understand women’s struggles pretty well because I listen to my wife.

Vincent Bevins - If We Burn

One of the best books I read this year. It is an overview of mass protests in the 2010’s, specifically ones that actually were able to extract some concessions from the government or overthrow it entirely. Thus the USA is scarcely mentioned. However, Americans familiar with the failures of Occupy Wall Street will recognize similar patterns in the Arab Spring, Ukraine’s Euromaidan, and Brazil’s MPL movement. Bevins makes a show of not inserting his own opinions in the text, but he just lets his interviewees make his points for him: horizontal organization of mass movements simply does not work. You need to have people who are in charge, who have specific demands. Otherwise once your mass movement dislodges the current power, any opportunists who are prepared can simply take over and implement their preexisting plans. It is a call to massively rethink what an effective mass movement looks like, and in all honesty it will probably have to look like something Lenin (the GOAT) would do. This book snuffed out any last bit of sympathy I have for anarchism as a practical ideology.

Devon Price - Laziness Does Not Exist (Book Club)

A bit of a self help book but definitely has some important stuff to keep in mind. I think that most of what is said in the book can be derived if you take the title’s premise and run with it. IF laziness does not exist, then when I’m feeling “lazy” then there’s probably some bodily/mental need that I need to take care of. With that done, I can focus on what I want to.

Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski - The People’s Republic of Walmart (Audiobook)

The funny title is a mask for what this book is: an argument in favor of a centrally planned economy. The pitch is that when the USSR attempted central planning the computing power and data collection was not there yet, causing the well known shortages and economic disasters associated with 5 year plans. However, Walmart is basically running a planned economy right now in America. They provide basic necessities to millions of people and have sophisticated mechanisms for ensuring that the right amount of stuff is provided for the right cost. If we simply transfer ownership of this apparatus to democratic control, then we’d be in a pretty good spot.

Ursula K Le Guin - The Dispossessed (Book Club)

I read about half of this book in college when I was a self-professed anarchist, but I stopped reading because it started pointing out issues with anarchism. I didn’t want to hear that at the time! I think it’s awesome that Le Guin went through the effort to fully imagine what an anarchist society would look like though, and more people should be using their imagination for this sort of purpose today. A good antidote for capitalist realism.

Samuel Delaney - Babel-17 (Book Club)

This was the one book this year that I picked for book club, everything else was chosen by another member. This was a science fiction adventure with a ton of imagination and quite a bit more queer than I was expecting from a book written in the mid-60’s. Basically the people who pilot spaceships in this universe are freaky ahh body mod guys and girls, and I loved the straightedge character who gets thrown into this underworld and ends up getting a little body mod of his own. Babel-17 is a language that basically gives you superpowers if you are able to comprehend it, and the sections where the protagonist is thinking in Babel-17 are really well crafted. We watched the movie Arrival as a pairing. Fun!

Yukio Mishima - The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (Book Club)

This dude is a great specimen to put in a jar and observe. It’s hard to understand his viewpoints given that he’s a right wing freak, but he’s at least an interesting right wing freak. Not a book for the faint of heart though, given that there’s incest vibes, very explicit kitten murder, and implied human murder.

Natasha Schull - Addiction By Design

A very detailed investigation of machine gambling (especially video slots), interesting in its own right but also implicitly for how this 2012 book prefigured a lot of the ways social media/tech companies get people addicted to their products.

Cal Newport - Digital Minimalism

If there’s a single book that I would recommend that everyone here read, it's this one. An excellent argument in favor of getting offline and focusing on things that are actually important to you. If you want a kick in that direction then tap in.

Adam Frank, Evan Thompson, Marcelo Gleiser - The Blind Spot

Read this on the glowing recommendation from Michael Pollan. It’s a collaboration between a philosopher and two physicists, arguing for a realignment in how we think about science in light of discoveries like quantum mechanics. The titular Blind Spot is the false idea that science gives us a “more correct” view of the world than the one that we directly percieve. The authors argue that science is ALWAYS derived from our observations of the world, and that it cannot have a more privileged position since human experience ALWAYS comes first. We cannot see outside ourselves (a “god’s eye view”) because we are always within ourselves. We cannot begin to understand the seeming paradoxes of quantum mechanics (such as measurement causing a quantum state to collapse) unless we remove this blind spot in our thinking.

Tom O’Neill - Chaos

An extremely thorough investigation about the circumstances surrounding the Charles Manson murders. O’Neill does not argue the basic facts of what actually happened on the nights of those murders, but questions the official “helter skelter” narrative laid out by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, who gets an extremely unflattering treatment in this book. O’Neill does a good job of not asserting too much that he doesn’t have concrete evidence for, and a superb job of poking holes in the accepted narrative. One comes away feeling like we may never know what Manson was really up to and what connections to higher powers he may or may not have had.

Valerie Solanas - The SCUM Manifesto

Not sure why I felt the need to read this one. An extremely angry feminist text that jokingly-but-not-really argues for the abolition of men. Good if you want to taste the rage that women must feel on a semi regular basis in a patriarchal society. Not good if you want coherent and rational arguments.

Arthur Schopenhauer - The Wisdom of Life & Counsels and Maxims (Book Club)

This dude is reddit as hell. He really does not like other people and just wants to sit in his room reading books all day. Have at it bro. Seems like he wrote this for money since his longer philosophical texts didn’t sell well in his lifetime.

Yanis Varoufakis - Technofeudalism (Audiobook)

This book states that Capitalism is in the process of being replaced by a new system of Technofeudalism, where the highest profits are not made by producing goods and services but by owning digital platforms by which rent can be extracted. The best example here is Amazon, which by controlling the largest online digital marketplace is able to just sit there and get money from anyone who wants to sell products online. I think the book overstates its case a bit and I’m not sure if capitalism is being “replaced”, but it does remind me of arguments made in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, where he posits that large corporations are a bit feudal in the sense that there are plenty of office jobs that don’t necessarily create value, counter to what capitalist economics says should happen.

Adania Shibli - Minor Detail

A short but powerful book split in two parts. First the true story of a rape and murder committed by israeli soldiers against a palestinian girl in 1949, and then the story of a present day scholar who is moved by the story and visits the site of the event. A good example of showing the brutality of a wider phenomenon by focusing in on particular stories, and it does a great job of mentally bringing the reader into the region.

Katherine Kinzler - How You Say It (Book Club)

I was intrigued by the premise of the book but was quite disappointed with it, an opinion which most of the book clubbers shared. The central claim is that accents can color people's judgements of each other, but most of the scientific findings are so common sense to be uninteresting, and sometimes the chapters even seem to give contradictory arguments. The biggest example I can remember is that in one chapter it says that anyone can learn any language regardless of birth parents, but also that children prefer the language of their birth parents. So which is it?

Dan Sinykin - Big Fiction

A book about the effects of conglomeration in the American publishing industry. The story here is the same as any other of monopolization, so the real treat is the literary criticism of novels in the 20th century. Sinykin has some great readings of the books that frame them as authors struggling against the pressures that the publishing industry has placed on them.

Olufemi O Taiwo - Elite Capture

I’m gonna be honest, I barely remember any of the arguments that this book made. So probably not recommended.

TJ Klune - The House in the Cerulean Sea (Book Club)

A very cute and harmless book about an annoyingly passive guy (who I imagined as looking like humpty dumpty) falling in love with a remote orphanage and its magical inhabitants. Just kind of pure light entertainment that you shouldn’t think too hard about.

Chris Hedges - War is a Force that Gives us Meaning

Written by a seasoned war correspondent, it’s a warning about the seductions of war. It was especially timely, published in 2002 after 9/11 and before the invasion of Iraq. As the title implies, humans do not only seek happiness but meaning. Obviously, no one goes to war for happiness. Anyone who’s read anything about, say, WWI knows that war is hell and is probably not desirable except as a last resort. But it is not a totally pacifist text, and the ambiguities and nuance of war are shown. Probably a shocking read for literally anyone, regardless of what you think about war in general. For example, I see on twitter sometimes leftists celebrating when Israelis are bombed, and honestly that sort of behavior is pretty disgusting in an objective sense. We always need to be careful about how we feel about war, even when it’s justified.

Elle Reeve - Black Pill

Elle Reeve was the journalist for Vice who famously covered the unite the right rally in Charlottesville. This book is a long view of the alt right movement, now that its most extreme elements have pretty much fizzled out. It traces out its beginnings in the chan boards, eventual funding from more established neo nazi groups, Charlottesville, and finally January 6. Luckily these guys were pretty incompetent and obviously insane so they weren’t able to muster anything greater than Charlottesville, eventually getting supplanted by QAnon, who the alt right don’t like much. A good breakdown of the whole movement, and she gets a lot of access to many of the most important figures, such as Richard Spencer, Chris Cantwell, and Fred Brennan.

Gene Wolfe - The Shadow of the Torturer

Was unfortunately quite disappointed with this one despite its high stature among fantasy fans. It felt like the protagonist was basically just wandering around the whole book. The setting was interesting, of a cold earth in the far far future where the sun burns less brightly, and has been abandoned by spacefaring people. I didn’t find the language to be fun, which I think is what most people like about it. I’m not gonna read any further in the series.

Gabrielle Zevin - Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow (Book Club)

The first chapter of this book is pretty cringe, but everything afterwards is good. It’s the fictional story of two middle school friends who eventually start a video game company together. The storytelling is very natural and fluid, and despite there being some major blows to the characters along the way, it’s ultimately a “nice story”. I felt like something was missing though. Although the characters suffered tragedies, I feel like they never failed. They remark near the end that they were very lucky to get to the positions that they’re in, and I agree. Being able to run a video game company, I always felt removed from them. And is this the best life that is available to an American today? You get to make your little toys for other people to play with? I felt a bit empty from it.

Benjamin Labatut - When We Cease To Understand The World & The MANIAC

Lumping these books together because they are very similar in style and content. They’re fucking awesome. Generally, these novels are connected stories about the various scientists and mathematicians (Godel, Einstein, Von Neumann, Heisenberg, Ehrenfest, Bohr) who in the early 20th century blew apart everything we understand, and then created computers who can understand more than we ever could. Most of these scientists lost their minds in dramatic ways, and it’s all real. Incredible stories, and I feel like we do a huge disservice when we teach these thinkers’ concepts/advancements to students but not their biographies. I’m gonna be chewing on the contents of these books for a long time. So very highly recommended.

Brandon Sanderson - The Emperor’s Soul (Book Club)

A short and focused fantasy book about a forger trying to escape from her prison cell. She is only being kept alive because she’s the only person who can revive the emperor by making a forgery of his soul. The story is constantly engaging and the magic system is interesting, but it felt like there wasn’t a ton of depth. I feel like it was held back by its short length and it makes me intrigued to read Sanderson’s longer works.

TLDR:

Larfen Book of the Year Awards

Best Fiction: The novels of Benjamin Labatut

Runner-up: The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin

Best Nonfiction: If We Burn by Vincent Bevins

Runner-up: The Blind Spot by Thompson, Frank, Gleiser

The Book That You Should Read If Nothing Else: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport