Book Revue 2024 📖📚

In what’s becoming something of our favorite New Year tradition, we’re excited to share book reports from our readings from the prior year. We’re thrilled many of you appreciate this exercise, and it often leads to great conversations with some brilliant minds.

As we explained last year, books are our top growth hack for surviving bear markets. Now that we may be entering a bull market, books could be a great way to keep yourself grounded. Just a win-win all the way around.

Here are the books we read last year, for which we’ve written up reviews (all links are affiliate links, so make sure to forward them to everybody you know and beg them to buy several copies for good luck).

• Fiction

  • John Steinbeck, East of Eden

  • Homer, The Iliad

  • Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

  • James Michener, Alaska

  • Bill Watterson & John Kascht, The Mysteries

• Non-Fiction

  • David Denby, Great Books

  • Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation

  • Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

  • Alex Bellos, The Grapes of Math: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life

  • Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origin of Knowledge

  • Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

  • Marcus Tullius Cicero, How to Win an Argument: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Persuasion

  • Marcus Tullius Cicero, How to Think About God: An Ancient Guide for Believers and Non-Believers

  • Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?

  • Edward Tenner, The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can't Do 👎

  • Oliver Milman, The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World

  • Alexandra Damsker, Understanding DeFi: the Roles, Tools, Risks, and Rewards of Decentralized Finance

  • Harry Cliff, Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe

  • David & Susan Schwartz, The Joy of Costco: A Treasure Hunt from A to Z

  • Henry James: The Art of Fiction

Our prior year reports:

As always, we keep this post paywalled, so that we can offer it as barter… simply send us a book recommendation, and we’ll send you the post.