Books I Read in 2024



To avoid grade inflation, I use the cmart rating system:

If your life doesn’t suck, most of your experiences will score between -1 and +1. You hope to avoid -2 things altogether. +2 is an honor to bestow sparingly.

Tamara Shopsin / LaserWriter II

Rating: +2

Like the protagonist, I began my career in desktop IT support. I wanted to learn everything I could to become great at my job. I discovered the craftsmanship of Apple gear at an impressionable age, back when Macs were so uncommon that many people didn’t recognize them. So, I found LWII resonant and nostalgic.

Jim Benson / Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

Rating: -2

I read this because I wanted clarity on some vagaries in the kanban system, so that I could give it an honest try, both at work and outside it.

The book failed to answer my most important questions, like: How do I de-bikeshed the decision of whether to track something as a single larger task or multiple smaller tasks? Should an item on a kanban board track a unit of effort, or a unit of value delivered to a stakeholder?

I’ve given up on kanban for self-management. I’m back to keeping lists.

Kent Beck / Tidy First?

Rating: +1

A short, breezy book about the craft of making software. It’s $28 for a 100-page paperback, but I’d say worth it if you want to become a better software engineer.

It starts with a list of tidyings – small changes that make code easier to read, reason about, and maintain. These changes are simple enough to do while you’re in there making other changes, so they are nearly free wins.

Tidy First? then addresses the title question. Suppose you need to modify or extend the behavior of some existing code. You look at the code and it’s kind of a mess. When do you clean up (i.e. refactor) it? Before you make the behavior change, or afterward?

These didn’t exactly come from the book, but I generally agree with them:

Jud Brewer / Unwinding Anxiety

Rating: +1

Compared to most self-improvement / self-help books, the claims are incrementally more falsifiable (he’s an MD+PhD), and there is slightly less of the “download my app and become a coach” sales pitch nope, lol.

Dr. Jud claims that anxiety is a compulsive behavior, just like smoking or over-eating. We fail to recognize this because anxiety happens to occur inside the sufferer’s head, rather than as something they do in the physical world. Still, the pattern of trigger -> behavior -> reward is there, even if anxious people wouldn’t say that it’s rewarding.

If you buy this framing, then a large body of approaches and techniques for addiction recovery becomes relevant for treating chronic anxiety and panic attacks.

Huge if true? I should read this again.

Marshall B. Rosenberg / Nonviolent Communication

Rating: +1

Nonviolent Communication is a very different way to interact with people than we tend to by default (“violent communication”).

In NVC, the thing that matters most is the emotional needs of your conversation partner. NVC is the process of uncovering and empathizing with someone’s feelings and needs, ideally taking turns sharing and receiving.

NVC values facts about the outside world only to the extent that people attribute feelings to them. So, if you’re trying to work through some unresolved tension or disagreement that seems to defy resolution on its objective merits, then NVC might be great. It might not be the right tool if your goal is to build a shared understanding of reality in a way that sets feelings aside.

I grew up with the unhelpful myths that the world doesn’t care about people’s feelings, and that to some extent, feelings aren’t even ‘real’. So, I’ve had some difficulty applying NVC in earnest. But there are certainly times when I should.

If you want a flavor of NVC without reading the book, maybe flip through ANVC Cartoons, or look up some old MBR hand puppet videos.

Edmond Lau / The Effective Engineer

Rating: +1

This felt like a well-organized collection of guidance and mentorings from many different places. It’s most relevant for technologists, but there is something in here for anyone who wants to do a great job at their job.

My nagging concern is that becoming an effective individual might optimize for the wrong thing. Effective teams and organizations seem more enduring, and more able to build great things, than any one individual is. Google gets this – their engineering culture optimizes for team or project velocity, not individual developer velocity. So, when does the Vulcan proverb apply? 1

Freddie deBoer / The Cult of Smart

Rating: -1

The Cult of Smart argues that it’s bad to have a culture that valorizes intelligence, because many people are not especially smart, and they won’t do very well if our society expects above-average intelligence as a prerequisite for a successful career. So, a more humane culture (and education system) should not valorize intelligence as much as ours does. So far, so good.

Then we get to deBoer’s call to action: basically, implement the Democratic Socliaists of America policy program. Maybe, but how? Whatever you think about socialism, people have tried to champion it here for a century, and electorates aren’t that sympathetic to it right now. So, The Cult of Smart leaves me wondering how to draw the rest of the owl.

Asterisk Magazine

Rating: +1

San Francisco Bay area optimism, packaged for normies and sometimes critiqued. Great articles by some great authors.

Yes, it’s not a book, it’s a free online magazine. You can order a print subscription, though.

Dan Davies / The Unaccountability Machine

Rating: 0

The deep dive into cybernetics could not hold my attention, but the most useful concept from this book is the accountability sink.

Organizations create accountability sinks so that they can systematically disappoint people in a way that no particular member of the organization actually feels responsible (or can be held responsible) for disappointing anyone.

When you learn about this, you’ll notice accountability sinks everywhere.

JL Collins / Pathfinders

Rating: +1

(I probably should have read The Simple Path to Wealth by the same author, instead.)

JL Collins is one of several people sharing recipes for retiring in your 40s. This recipe is approximately:

This advice holds up if the US stock market continues the long-term ~8% annual returns that it’s had for the past century. The future might look like the past, or it might not!

I found Mad Fientist’s blog (and podcast) adds a lot of useful nuance about off-label uses of tax-advantaged retirement accounts toward this goal.

Burton Malkiel / A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Rating: 0

I learned a lot of interesting trivia from this book. It filled some gaps in my understanding of what the stock market even is, and how it works. It has a lot of background on how investment bubbles work, and the history of strategies for choosing stocks to invest in.

But it’s probably 10x more than you need to know, if you’re just going to invest in index funds.

Cory Doctorow / Red Team Blues

Rating: +1

Fun and fast present-day detective story with cypherpunk themes. Almost self-consciously tech-aware and “current issues”-aware.

Ursula Leguin / The Lathe of Heaven

Rating: +2

Great sci-fi. I loved this book. I also love that it’s set in Portland.

I won’t spoil, but I ended up with an alternative, real-world-plausible explanation for the core mechanism that drives the plot?

Chris Voss / Never Split the Difference

Rating: +1

An FBI hostage negotiator explains his negotiation strategies.

I didn’t seek out this book, but my partner’s stepdad basically handed it to me. I had to read it, then my partner had to read it.

I happened to read this after Nonviolent Communication. That was the correct order, because it allowed me to see this book for what it is: how to wield NVC as a tool to get what you want.

Please only use this power for good.

  1. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.” ↩︎