The best non-fiction books I have read this year are:
"Six Pillars of Self-Esteem" by Nathaniel Branden - Interesting insights into the concept of self-esteem and how it is influenced by the wider world
"The Code Book" by Simon Singh - An oldie but saw it recommended last year on HN and found it to be a fascinating look at the history of cryptography, written in an engaging and approachable way
"Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger" by Charles T. Munger - After Charlie's unfortunate passing, I read this again. So much life wisdom on every page
What's the best non-fiction book you read in 2024?
It turns out the Ocean is fascinating, and I learned something crazy:
"Between 1950 and 1973, world fish harvest trippled, but the amount of fish directly consumed by humans stayed the same. The rest went into fishmeal, as a supplemental food for livestock, and this became an essential ingredient for modern industrial farming".
I didn't realize that fishmeal was a primary input to modern animal agriculture. Global fish stocks collapsed not only because people ate fish, but also because of animal agriculture in general. It's fascinating how it's all connected.
Also, sea turtles cry 8 litres of tears an hour.
Needless to say, this book ended up as a permanent fixture on my bookshelf.
"Turtles cry because they’re eating.
No, really! The example that Czerski uses is a turtle eating jellyfish. Less than one percent of jellyfish is organic material and a turtle (the author uses a leatherback as an example) must eat 80% of her body weight.
Jellyfish have the same salinity as the ocean itself, so as you can imagine, this results in a TON of salt being ingested by turtles.
It’s not just jellyfish, either. Other marine substances and creatures have the same salinity as the sea. For example, algae.
To avoid ingesting all of this salt (which would kill the turtles), they expel it back out in the form of tears."
https://kookaunty.com/kook-aunty-blog/3vnblbkjnil2txo7jevy1u...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316669935_Crying_a_...
That was such an obscure fact that I had to look it up. Wow wild. Thanks for sharing.
Read it, read it now.
It's the kind of book that you once you read, you'll never forget. 4.8 stars with 23k reviews on Amazon. Similar survival story vibes as books like "Into Thin Air" or "Into the Wild" but just on another level. It follows the story of a journey to Antarctica in 1914 that goes wrong and ends up with the ship trapped in ice for many months, and follows the crews absolutely insane attempts at survival.
I am waiting for time to forget enough of it so that I can read it again.
Incredible book and story, I read it this year too and your statement resonates.
If you liked this one as an against the odds shipwreck survival story, David Grann’s The Wager is also very good.
As an Indian, I found how civilizations treat luxury (flowers) and necessity fascinating. Apparently Europe had a culture of garlands before the banquet culture. India is still predominantly garlands expect for a few highly westernised places. Muslim treatment or rather rejection of flowers in mosque but giving the world spectacle of flower gardens was very fascinating.
The book is not going to win any prize for prose or even coherence structure.
This book is not something you can read and forget. Leon and his small team travel down the entire Tigris River. They start in Turkey, go through all of Iraq, and end in the marshes.
I picked it up, thinking it would be an interesting adventure with a heavy dose of history. Instead, I got an utterly fascinating account of the river, its ecosystem, the heavy impact of pollution and water management, and the cultural impact of all these changes on the people who live alongside it.
Longer thoughts here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024/f/bwb
So far Ive asked around 1,200 readers for their 3 fav reads of the year. Here are the nonfiction results so far: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024/nonfiction
You can share yours too if you want :)
I read it for a course assignment. The book is structured as a continuous narrative of the development of astronomy throughout the Qin and Han dynasty in early China. It balances general information with mathematical details very nicely, so I feel it will appeal to both readers interested in the history or the astronomy. A pretty fun read for me, despite my purpose.
I'd be curious for a book about the ~1500s AD, roughly when the Europeans/Jesuits initially showed up, and the ~1600s (post-telescope), and how the various worldviews interacted.
While the core message isn't revolutionary (focus on what truly matters), it provided a useful framework for re-examining my priorities and look and my current state of things from different perspective. Sometimes the obvious needs to be stated well to sink in.
Great book - I only abandoned it halfway because my first child was born :)
- Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller
- How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson
- The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa by Michael Kimmelman
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- The TATAS: How a Family Built a Business and a Nation by Girish Kuber
I guessed about four but i was completely blown away by some of the details. Absolutely fascinating.
this book is a good read if you wanna know computer history , how it started and how it evolved
Great read, and not dry like many finance/investing books can be. Worth a read if you want to retire early, or even just retire normally.
If you happen to live in NZ, then Rich Enough by Mary Holm is a great read. (again about best way to manage your money, but focused on NZ)
For everyone reading this, pursuing FIRE will impact your life more than any other book. Set the ball in motion and wait. Soon you’ll have time to enjoy all these other great books.
"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. This is an old one, but still a classic. The first half is like a scientific detective story about the discovery and development of quantum theory itself, in Germany and Denmark, and can be read by itself as an engaging history of physics. Then Hitler rises to power, we learn how most of the characters we've met so far escape to England and the USA, and the others except Bohr become part of the German nuclear project. It then becomes an engineering management history of the Manhattan project, and a fascinating look at the challenges they overcame. The final chapter is a sobering play by play description of what happened to the people of Hiroshima, and was hardest but necessary to read.
But if you are the type of person who thinks a De La book is for you, read “Go Ahead In The Rain” by Hanif Abdurraqib
And if you like that, definitely check out “They Can’t Kill Us, Until They Kill Us”.
I wish I wasnt in a situation that this book helped a great deal; but here we are.
I liked how it connected dis-connected stories and extracts a truth or message from observing each situation
It’s a well-researched and original account of immigration at the US Southern border. It tells the story of many individuals and also whole Central/South American countries. The news media will tell you about caravans and people sneaking through Mexico but it’s hard to get a spin-free version of who is actually coming here and why.
It was enlightening and infuriating. Both political parties have lied to us for their benefit, and it made me realize I understood almost nothing about immigration before reading this. Highly recommend. Those of us who were born in the US are very lucky to not have to fight our way in.
I think I suffer from aphantasia which may be related to the impossibility of getting hook to anything by reading. I've tried mangas as well and it's a bit easier, but still find hard to really enjoy.
Of course, most of the books I tried are the ones that I had to read in school, but I also tried a few recommendations from friends and the result was the same.
It makes me a bit sad.
More economic history with Slouching towards Utopia: an economic history of the twentieth century by J. Bradford Delong. More economic ideas stuff in Value(s): building a better world for all by Mark Carney (ran the Banks of Canada and England). Also Waphsott's Keynes Hayek: the clash that defined modern economics and Samuelson Friedman: the battle over the free market.
The currency of politics: the political theory of money from Aristotle to Keynes by Sefan Eich, Money: the true story of a made-up thing by Jacob Goldstein, and The power of gold: the history of an obsession by Peter Bernstein (also his Against the Gods on risk). Show how much of a human construct "money" is, how its meaning changes in different times and places/cultures. Should be required reading by all the 'hard money' folks (gold standard, BTC).
The good life: lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness by Waldinger and Schultz (directors of the Harvard study). If there's one 'magic' thing for health and happiness it seems to be having good relationships (family, friends) in your life.
Religion: what it is, how it works, and why it matters by Christian Smith and Strange rites: new religions for a godless world by Tara Burton. While many think that religion is in decline, the non-material/supernatural things that people believe in has actually shifted. And having beliefs in a super-human entity seems to be the basis of most societies and civilizations. Related, The warfare between science and religion : the idea that wouldn't die, a series of essays; the conflict thesis bunk, both historically and presently.
The origins of Canadian and American political differences by Jason Kaufman, two seemingly-the-same neighbouring countries that have had different development paths when it comes to culture and government. (I'm Canadian.)
Speaking of government: Civil resistance: what everyone needs to know by Erica Chenoweth. Seems violence/force is generally a less effective way to affect change in society than non-violence.
The week: a history of the unnatural rhythms that made us who we are by David Henkin. Seems that while seven days has been around for a long while, making it a really 'hard' structure/schedule around it is a more recent phenomenon than you'd expect.
If you have kids, Karen Le Billon's French kids eat everything (and yours can, too) and Getting to YUM: the 7 secrets of raising eager eaters, her husband is French and she lived there for a year and found many things done better there than US/CA. See also The happiest kids in the world: how Dutch parents help their kids and themselves by doing less by Acosta and Hutchison.
Flying blind: the 737 MAX tragedy and the fall of Boeing by Peter Robison is an HN favourite. While we get a lot of engineer vs MBA comments, I think the bigger problem (associated with the MBA-types) is financialization, i.e., returns over everything else. Having non-engineers/MBAs can be 'fine' also long as trying to squeeze blood/money from a stone at the cost of everything else.
Some philosophy with Alasdair C. MacIntyre: After Virtue is a good starting point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue
On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything by Nate Silver
The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto by Jonathan Taplin
The Value of Others by Orion Taraban
Rinsed: From Cartels to Crypto: How the Tech Industry Washes Money for the World's Deadliest Crooks by Geoff White
Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan
Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter by Zoe Schiffer
Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban
AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC by Roger Ver
Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America by Charles Gasparino
The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets by Thomas R Cech
and my book of the year
Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health by Casey Means M D
RTO commute has me listening to audiobooks again, or as my kids call them “Read-A-Louds”
