2024 Reading List

I read 15 books in 2024. Half as many as last year’s 30. That’s not too surprising, this year was a big year for us: we bought a house and moved, put down our beloved dog, Emma 😢, and welcomed our second child, Aiden, to the world, making us a family of 4. (And that was all in a 2 month time span 😲). So ya, leisure time was down quite a bit.

One positive change I made to my reading habits was putting a book in each bathroom to pick up while on the loo. It’s only a handful of minutes of reading time, so it takes months to finish a book, but it’s good for those non-fiction books that I wouldn’t necessarily sit down to read, and have self-contained units/chapters (as opposed to a narrative that builds on itself), like Creative Block. And having multiple books in play can lead to cross talk, which is a nice side benefit. (Hat tip to Austin Kleon for inspiring me to do this).

I only read 3 fiction books this year, but one of them was 1,000+ pages (more on that one below). In non-fiction, Art/Design/Creativity books continue to dominate (of course).

Faves

In no particular order, here are a few favorites from this year.

• More is More by Molly Baz. This is a cook book, so not a book you sit down and read (usually), but what I like about it beyond just the recipes (which are great) is the philosophy behind the book: it’s all about bold flavors, i.e. more is more. If you’re going to use an ingredient, then really use that ingredient. Make sure you can taste it in the dish. Don’t be shy with the salt. Add sauces to take dishes to the next level. I already like cooking that way, but it also made me realize I have that philosophy in my design work and other creative endeavors, and I shouldn’t shy away from that.
• Exhalation by Ted Chiang: This was a great collection of sci-fi short stories. Most of them are philosophical in nature and musings on the human condition, using sci-fi as a vehicle for the ideas. Highly recommended, even if you don’t normally read sci-fi.
• My Effin Life by Geddy Lee: This is the autobiography of the Rush frontman, Geddy Lee. I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. It was also, at times, heavier and sadder than I was expecting (for example, both of his parents are holocaust survivors and he writes about their experiences). I’m a huge Rush fan, and listened to them a ton in high school and college, and it took me back to those days. But I lost touch with them in my 20s, not long after their 30th anniversary R30 tour (which I saw at the Hollywood Bowl 🤘), and reading about the couple of tours they did after that, and specifically the R40 tour (their 40th anniversary tour (!!!)), made me really disappointed that I didn’t get a chance to see them one last time. They were never the cool kids or the hip band to like, but they were incredible musicians and performers and with their longevity achieved a kind of cult cool-because-they’re-uncool status. Neil Peart (drummer) passed in early 2020, and he’s irreplaceable, so their touring days are over.
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace: This was my second time reading this book, and it took me 4 months (the first time took me at least a year, probably more, because I had to put it down in the middle because it was making my head spin). It was much better the second time. Going into it knowing the “plot” (such as it can be called) and players and how it’s structured made it much easier to read and to pick up on more of what was going on. I appreciated it a lot more. Some things that stood out this time:
  • It’s funny. A lot funnier than I remember it being the first time. I think that’s because the book is so dense and hard to follow the first time you read it that the humor flies right by (it’s more of a WTF-is-happening?! feeling).
  • The narration is this very unique style where it’s narrated in third person (most of the time; some of it is first-person), and the narrator knows the person’s thoughts and it’s written in their voice (i.e. using their jargon, verbal tics, etc.), so the narrator is omnipotent, but then there will be footnotes where the narrator says, “They probably meant this-other-thing instead,” as if it were a mistake or an editor typing [sic], which is interesting since if the narrator is omnipotent then how would they not know what was meant? I decided to ask ChatGPT about this decision, and it suggested it was done to add to the theme of people being isolated from and unknown to others, and even from oneself, and that sometimes we don’t know our own internal state or needs or wants and have a disconnect between our internal states and external states. So even for an omnipotent being there’s no objective truth or way of knowing what exactly is meant. Such as one of the characters, Hal, thinking and feeling one thing but then characters around him wondering why he looks amused at something that’s objectively not amusing (and Hal being confused at how his face is giving that impression when internally he doesn’t feel that way at all [all of which is also quite funny]).
  • The copious amount of footnotes are, of course, one of the most famous things about the book. (There are 388 of them. Some of the footnotes have footnotes). Re-reading it I was definitely trying to understand what purpose DFW had in mind by using this narrative device. Many of the footnotes contain crucial plot details. Some of the footnotes are entire chapters. Some footnotes could have just been part of the main text (IMO). Some of the footnotes are so trivial as to be worthless. So why add this layer of complexity and annoying page turning? (I had to read it with 2 bookmarks, btw, to keep track of where in the footnotes I was for easy reference back and forth). I went back to my trusty friend ChatGPT, who posited that the diversions and tangents and fractured, non-linear organization of the book is to create an environment and commentary on the distractions of the modern world and how hard it is to focus and have uninterrupted thought and make sense of what’s going on around you. The book came out in 1996, so pre-cell phones and the web was just a baby, and at that time DFW was reacting primarily to TV and commercials. It also reminds me of reading about the writing of the book (probably in the memoir, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself) about how he (David Foster Wallace) would have to isolate himself at home for days or weeks at a time to work on the book. Like get rid of his TV, cover the windows, not leave, etc. etc. Otherwise he would get distracted. (He was also a TV addict). So this stuff ran deep for DFW. But was also prescient for our modern world.
  • And that’s another thing: how in the world did he write this?! It’s so dense and complex, and written in so many different styles, and espouses on so many different themes and ideas (example: there’s a whole chapter about video phones and why they were a fun novelty at first but ultimately didn’t replace phone calls because people didn’t want to have to make sure their hair and face looked good just to answer the phone so they got masks of their faces looking their best to put on when receiving video calls and then ultimately people just went back to voice only [all of which is pretty funny and accurate in terms of human behavior and psychology but wrong in terms of how the technology actually played out]), that it just makes me wonder what kept him going. It took him almost 10 years to write. Like even just the sheer volume of the amount of writing he had to do. Much less the actual ideas and concept of the book. How did he know it would hang together? How did he not abandon it several times over? (IIRC he did put it down and pick it up many times over the years). Anyway, I find it incredible this novel came into being at all. It’s a knotty, dense read, but worth it if you can get through (and I can now say only gets better with subsequent reads).

The List

As always, you can view the full list and follow along with my current list in Notion.

• Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Art of Color by Kelly Grovier
• More is More by Molly Baz🍴
• Oranges by John McPhee
• Show Your Work by Austin Kleon 👍
• The Hidden Factor: Mark and gesture in visual design by Steven Skaggs 👍
• Exhalation by Ted Chiang 👍
• Psychonauts: Drugs and the making of the modern mind by Mike Jay 💊
• The Innovation Delusion: How our obsession with the New has disrupted the work that matters most by Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell
• Interviewing Users: How to uncover compelling insights by Steve Portigal 👍
• What an Owl Knows: The science of the worlds most enigmatic birds by Jennifer Ackerman 🦉
• Cruciverbalism by Stanley Newman ✏️
• My Effin Life by Geddy Lee 🎸
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace 🎾
• How to Measure Anything by Douglas W. Hubbard