I love reading.

It’s by far my preferred relaxation activity and my favorite entertainment medium. Most mornings I spend at least thirty minutes, often more like an hour, sitting in my living room with a cup of coffee and a book. I’ll occasionally finish my day with a book, too, but that’s a bit rarer. The vast majority of the books I read are digital, with maybe a 60/40 split of those between Kindle (primarily on a Kindle Paperwhite) and Apple Books (primarily on my 11” iPad Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max). This year was skewed heavier toward Apple Books than usual. I always have one audiobook (via Audible) going at all times so I can keep reading even when in conditions where it’s difficult or impossible to read with my eyes. I also usually have one hard copy book in the mix, too. Sometimes I just want to feel those pages between my fingers, you know?

I’m not particularly precious about choosing what to read. I do maintain a backlog in the app Sofa, but I’d say I grab my next book out of there only 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time I either have something specific in mind I want to read or I’ll let the algorithmic recommendations in the Apple Books or Kindle stores put something in front of me. I tell myself I only read one book at a time, but as I’ve already described, I typically have at least one digital book, one audiobook, and one paper book all going at the same time. To not let something linger for too long, though, I try to finish reading the whole “batch” of three before starting anything new. This year I also actually managed to abandon a couple of books I wasn’t feeling. I’ve always been an inveterate “finisher” but I’m turning a new leaf (page?), apparently.

By the numbers, 2024 is a bit down from 2023. I finished 46 books (compared to 61 in 2023) across 17,335 pages (down from 21,829 in 2023). I definitely went through stretches this year when it felt like I was just taking little sips of whatever I was reading, with increasingly long times between major gulps. I tackled a handful of particularly gnarly books (e.g., Godel, Escher, Bach, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, and The Life of the Mind to just name a few) this year which are just naturally slower to get through.

I read approximately two books of non-fiction for every book of fiction, which feels like a major skew toward fiction as compared to previous years. I actually had trouble using the fiction/non-fiction categorization because a handful of books I truly enjoyed this year seemed to straddle that line (e.g., When We Cease to Understand the World, The MANIAC, and A River Runs Through It).

My favorite fiction (or fiction-adjacent) books this year were When We Cease to Understand the World, American Gods, and Children of Time.

My non-fiction reading seemed to hit a few key themes:

Personal development, self-exploration, and the philosophy of living well (On Becoming a Person, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Life of the Mind)
Systems-oriented perspective on interconnected social, economic, and ecological systems (Systems Thinking for Social Change, Complexity, The Regenerative Business)
History, power, resilience, and societal structures (Gulag, Kissinger, History of the Peloponnesian War)
Epistemology and the boundaries of knowledge and consciousness (Godel, Escher, Bach, I Am a Strange Loop, Knowing What We Know, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne)
Contemporary sociotechnical and cultural phenomena (Filterworld, Number Go Up)

I’m most proud of myself for having finished Gulag, Godel, Escher, Bach, Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Peloponnesian War, and The Life of the Mind. The book I’m most likely to re-read at some point is probably Slow Productivity and Liberalism as a Way of Life. I was most positively surprised by The Goblin Emperor.

I read a handful of authors for the first time this year, and I’m excited to read more from them: Norman Maclean, Anne Applebaum, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Katherine Addison, and Ted Chiang. A handful of old stalwarts showed up as well: Cal Newport, George Saunders, James S.A. Corey, and Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Reading in 2025

I’m committed to keeping my reading practice as simple and robust as possible. I know I read a lot, and I’m okay with that. I don’t really feel the need to read more (even though this was a “down” year compared to 2023). I think I’d continue to benefit from reading more fiction than I currently do, and I’d like to see myself dig into more classic literature. If there’s one thing I’d like to do differently in 2025, it might just be trying to be a bit more deliberate about continuing to explore specific lines of inquiry. I started that a bit this year with my Foucault, Hodot, and Montaigne reading all falling around a similar theme. I think there’s more of that to be done, particularly around topics related to AI and consciousness (and really any of the themes that showed up in 2024).

Aside from books, which make up 95% of my reading time, I do try to consume some magazines and newsletters. I used Matter as my read later service for the vast majority of the year. I saved tons of articles into it and read only a tiny percentage of them. I use NetNewsWire as my RSS reader, and I’m looking forward to leaning much more heavily on it in 2025 as I try to limit my exposure to algorithmic recommendations as much as possible. I get physical copies of The Economist, Harvard Business Review, Nautilus and Palladium. I continue to pay for and enjoy Stratechery. I’ll continue to tweak what non-book related writing I pay for in 2025 as I’m committed to directly supporting more of the authors and sources I enjoy.

You can follow me on Goodreads and see my entire 2024 reading list here.