Book List: 2024

Since 2022, I've been fascinated with Umberto Eco's anti-library:

a few savvy visitors realized the truth: Eco's library wasn't voluminous because he had read so much; it was voluminous because he desired to read so much more.

[Your] library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as we've stocked those piles with valuable knowledge — and more of it than we can ever use.

In the same spirit, here are the 45 titles I've added to my anti-library this year. I've been curating lists in bookshop.org as an attempt to support local booksellers, but I'm sure all of these are available at your favorite reading establishment.

The 2024 Book List

• An Answer for Everything: 200 Infographics to Explain the World
• Misc
• Weird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative Company
• The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
• Mindshift: Transform Leadership, Drive Innovation, and Reshape the Future
• Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
• Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt
• New Happy: Getting Happiness Right in a World That's Got It Wrong
• The Art of Thinking Clearly
• The Engineering Executive's Primer: Impactful Technical Leadership
• Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst
• Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team
• Do the F*cking Work: Lowbrow Advice for High-Level Creativity
• Enough.: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life (Revised)
• Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow
• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
• Finite and Infinite Games
• The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature
• The Software Engineer's Guidebook
• Becoming Better Grownups: Rediscovering What Matters and Remembering How to Fly
• Fail-A-Bration
• Do Recruit: How to Find and Keep Great People.
• Right Thing, Right Now: Good Values. Good Character. Good Deeds.
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
• The Power of Wonder: The Extraordinary Emotion That Will Change the Way You Live, Learn, and Lead
• Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games
• As Told at the Explorers Club: More Than Fifty Gripping Tales of Adventure
• Do Conversation: There's No Such Thing as Small Talk
• Think Remarkable: 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference
• Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection
• Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
• Burn Book: A Tech Love Story
• Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Expanded, Updated)
• Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
• Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
• The Book of Do: A Manual for Living
• The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder
• Everything in Its Place: The Power of Mise-En-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind
• Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life
• Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-And What We Can Do about It
• The Creative ACT: A Way of Being

Be well!