My Reading Journey through 2024

I found myself rediscovering fiction and enjoying a lot more of it this year, although the wild pace of current events kept pulling me in to some great first person accounts of events around the world.

In August, I was in New York City for work. I wandered around the aisles of the Strand bookstore, and picked up a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. I’ve never read Murakami before and really enjoyed it, and it led me to read other Murakami books. My favorite read of the year was his personal story about running and writing and crafting a life that suits him best, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I highly recommend it.

I was terrified and inspired by the personal family story of Oct 7 in Amir Tibon’s The Gates of Gaza and loved Kristin Harmel’s novel The Book of Lost Names. And books like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Karla Cornejo Vilavencio’s The Undocumented Americans and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time and Nicole Perlroth’s This is How They Tell Me The World Ends and Edmund Rutherfurd’s New York: The Novel caused me to think about so many things in new ways.

If you are looking for a good read, or an idea for a present for the holidays, pick any of these up. I’d bet you’ll enjoy them, and learn something. Happy reading!

“I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself…

“I didn’t start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn’t become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run — simply because I wanted to. I’ve always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.”

— Haruki Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“At first, there was only a whistle. A short, loud shriek coming through our bedroom window, indicating the descent of a mortar from the skies above our house.

I didn’t wake up immediately. The noise, otherworldly but familiar, somehow blended into my dreams. Miri, my wife, was quicker to realize the danger. “Amir, wake up, a mortar!” she said, elbowing me.

In an instant, I was awake, adrenaline pumping. We both leapt out of bed, and, wearing only our underwear, frantically sprinted out of our bedroom and down the hall, towards the open doorway of our safe room.

One second, two seconds three seconds. We reached the room and shut its heavy iron door. No sooner were we enveloped in darkness than a large explosion rocked the building. We had made it just in time.

That first explosion was followed by a second, and a third, and then more and more. It was a barrage of mortars — a heavy, deadly rain falling all around us…

Nahal Oz is so close to Gaza that when a mortar is launched toward the community, you have only seven seconds to take shelter. When you’re inside the house, that means running to the safe room and shutting the door. For families with small children, the choice is clear: if there’s a mortar attack during the night of early in the morning, it’s much better for the parents to run to the children’s room than the other way around.”

— Amir Tibon in The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands

“You don’t need money or weapons or a big platform to change the world. Sometimes, something as simple as a pen and a bit of imagination can alter the course of history.”

— Kristin Harmel in The Book of Lost Names

“Tolerate genius. There are very few men of genius. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don’t destroy them. They lay golden eggs.”

— David Ogilvy in Confessions of an Advertising Man

“I think the main purpose in life is to be needed, not just to be a blank space that breathes, walks, and eats. But to live, to know that certain things depend on your being alive, and to feel that your life matters to others.”

— Zelensky in Simon Shuster’s The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook The World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky

“If I’m having an anxious day, I will send my parents take-out dinner. If I see a brown person in the kitchen at the restaurant, if my server is brown, if they are either in my opinion too young or too old or seem too tired for the job, I will leave a crazy tip — for what I am, which is a freelancer. Now. I do not have the kind of money to be leaving people crazy tips. But I remember every person who ever left my dad a really good tip when we lived off his tips, I remember every one, you don’t understand, I have been thinking of those nice Puerto Rican executive assistants for the past fifteen years… and I remember how it felt for the rest of the evening when he came home. It was like having my dad back from the dead. He would dance to no music and he’d make jokes and he’d come out of his shower looking like a teenager. I know what a good tip feels like for a poor family.”

— Karla Cornejo Villavicencio in The Undocumented Americans

“I did not deceive you, mon ami. At most, I permitted you to deceive yourself.”

— Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles

“The people who get nothing done often work a great deal harder. In the first place, they underestimate the time for any one task. They always expect that everything will go right. Yet, as every executive knows, nothing ever goes right. The unexpected always happens — the unexpected is indeed the only thing one can confidently expect.”

— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive

“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”

— Cormac McCarthy in The Road

“In the back of the bar was a shelf with an impressive lineup of bottles. And behind that was a large mirror, in which I was reflected. I stared at it for a while, and as you might expect, the me in the mirror stared back. A sudden thought hit me, that somewhere I’d taken a wrong turn in life. And the longer I stared at my image decked out in a suit and tie, this sensation only intensified. The more I stared at my image, the more it seemed less like me and more like someone I’d never seen before. But if this isn’t me in the mirror, I thought, then who is it?

As is true of most people, I imagine, I had experienced a number of turning points in my life, where I could go either left or right. And each time I chose one, right or left…And now here I was, a first person singular. If I’d chosen a different direction, most likely I wouldn’t be here. But still — who is that in the mirror?”

— Haruki Murakami in First Person Singular

“Empires are built by young men, Culum. They’re lost by old men.”

— James Clavell in Tai-Pan, the epic novel of the creation of Hong Kong

“What crossroads are you at?” At any moment, most of us are in the middle of some transition. The question helps people focus on theirs.

“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Most people know that fear plays some role in their life, but they haven’t clearly defined how fear is holding them back.

“If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?” “If we meet a year from now, what will we be celebrating?” “If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is that chapter about?” “Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?”

— David Brooks in How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt and The Home Front in World War II is a remarkable book, focusing in on life in Washington DC and how decisions were made inside the White House.

My favorite story was about FDR and Churchill’s meeting at a secret conference in Casablanca in early 1943. It was the first time that a sitting US President crossed the Atlantic, and the middle of the war, so secrecy was paramount. Yet Morocco had a lot of spies roaming around and they told the Germans that Churchill and Roosevelt were meeting in Casablanca despite all the Allied efforts to conceal that fact.

But the Allies got lucky. Because the Germans were translating every word, including the word Casablanca, by the time the news made it to Berlin Hitler was told that FDR and Churchill were meeting in… “the White House.” Casa Blanca. So the Germans did nothing to disrupt the meetings!

Better lucky than good.

“The thing is — fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.”

— William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“It felt wrong to wear on the streets of my hometown the vest and the helmet that I had donned hundreds of times in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other war zones. By the Botanical Garden where I used to go on dates in high school and planted my awkward first kiss. By the museum where I used to spend afternoons gazing at French Impressionist paintings. By the cinema where as a teenager I had watched Fellini’s movies… The city that invaders had come to take had been my home. The Russians thought it was theirs, in a country that they believed didn’t exist, part of a nation they told themselves had been invented. Kyiv seemed on its deathbed, listless, bled of its people. How dare they, I thought.”

— Yaroslav Trofimov in Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence

“I wanted to create a silent conspiracy among the underpaid, overeducated people in town.”

— Joe Coulombe in Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way & Still Beat the Big Guys

“Doesn’t private vice make a man unworthy of public office?”

And now kindly Mrs. Albion looked at Mercy with genuine astonishment.

“Well,” she laughed, “if it did, there’d be no one to govern the land.”

— Edward Rutherfurd in New York: The Novel

“Hope is a fiction. It’s a dream that tomorrow will be different, or some miracle will happen to save you. It’s not sufficient; it’s not enough to keep you alive in the ghetto, the camps. When a person is drowning, and they reach for air, it’s not hope that propels that fight. The drive to live is what pushes us toward life, but it’s stronger in some and can make the difference between life and death. Why stronger in some? It’s always love. Love is what allows us to keep our humanity and know that someone needs us to survive.”

— Estelle Laughlin in Jack Grossman’s Child of the Forest

“Most great things in life — from love to careers to investing — gain their value from two things: patience and scarcity. Patience to let something grow, and scarcity to admire what it grows into.”

— Morgan Housel in Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The history of every people is also a history of its craziness, and the more science becomes a religion, the more religion must pretend to be a science, desperate for all logical explanations.”

— Joshua Cohen in The Netanyahus: An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of A Very Famous Family

“In the United States, though, convenience was everything; it still is. We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society. There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web. We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control. And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.”

— Nicole Perlroth in This is How They Tell Me The World Ends: The Cyber-Weapons Arms Race

“I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future,” Ric told me. “If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to — they’re young.”

— Peter Attia in Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity

“Basically, CEOs have five essential choices for deploying capital — investing in existing operations, acquiring other businesses, issuing dividends, paying down debt, or repurchasing stock — and three alternatives for raising it — tapping internal cash flow, issuing debt, or raising equity. Think of these options collectively as a tool kit. Over the long term, returns for shareholders will be determined largely by the decisions a CEO makes in choosing which tools to use (and which to avoid) among these various options. Stated simply, two companies with identical operating results and different approaches to allocating capital will derive two very different long-term outcomes for shareholders.”

— William Thorndike in The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

— Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast

“In China, politics is the key to riches, not the other way around.”

— Desmond Shum in Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today’s China