Books I read in 2024
This is my sixth annual books round-up, and unfortunately it's also the third consecutive decline in the number of books read. It's been a busy year - Yee Aun and I got married and hosted a few singles mixers (let me know if you want to join a future one!), I got Lasik, we traveled a bit and spent good time with good people, and professional, I grinded with the Anjuna to launch our new product Anjuna Northstar. All worthwhile, and yet I'm still hoping to reverse the trend in 2025 and make more time to read good books.
A couple personal highlights from the list below -
Who Killed Jerusalem? was certainly one of the books of all time, but it was also promoted by a great puzzle hunt (archive). Our team of puzzle friends very narrowly missed out on the cash prizes. I wholeheartedly endorse the practice of book promotion via puzzle hunt.
Pick, Click, Flick! is a (literal) textbook in interaction design written by Professor Brad A. Myers - it's worth the read, and I am proud to have made it to the acknowledgements section, having contributed a tiny bit of help by transcribing the guest lectures when I took his class at CMU. This one deserves a blog post of its own.
And Cyber for Builders by Ross Haleliuk is the book I wish I had read before joining a cybersecurity company. It's an excellent introduction into the business side of the cybersecurity industry and its unique challenges - worth reading for anyone early in cybersecurity or thinking about entering. Also check out his blog, Venture in Security, for more.
In 2024, I read 23 books.
In the list below, books marked with an exclamation mark (!) are the ones I enjoyed especially.
- The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida - Shehan Karunatilaka
- Who Killed Jerusalem? - George Albert Brown
(!)Flowers For Algernon - Daniel Keyes(!)Monetizing Innovation - Madhavan Ramanujam and Georg Tacke(!)Cyber for Builders - Ross Haleliuk- There There - Tommy Orange
- Less - Andrew Sean Greer
- Thicker Than Water - Kerry Washington
- The Sorrows of Others - Ada Zhang
(!)Babel - R.F. Kuang- Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
- Study for Obedience - Sarah Bernstein
- Chain-gang All-stars - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
- The Memory Police - Yoko Ogawa
- The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk - Jaroslav Hašek
- Zero to One - Peter Thiel
- Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng
- Pick, Click, Flick! - Brad A. Myers
- Cat Pictures Please - Naomi Kritzer
- Same Bed Different Dreams - Ed Park
- The Kamogawa Food Detectives - Jesse Kirkwood
- The City & The City - China Miéville
- Power - Jeffrey Pfeffer
As always, thanks for the book recommendations. This includes Yee Aun, the SF Public Library, and the Commoncog community (well worth the subscription, by the way) - and probably more that I've forgotten.