In ten years of public reading and writing, last year was an outlier.

I wrote almost nothing public last year, and read the least since I starting tracking it in 2017. I'm chalking this up to work, fatherhood, and training.

• Work: I wrote a lot this year and all of it was private. Most of it was healthcare research (just ask me about what drives hospital readmissions or how to model efficient routing!). Almost none of it is publishable because it is hyper-specific to our company's operations and lifecycle. As much as I love generalizable takeaways, most of my work these last two years have leaned into bypassing best practices and industry generalizations to become laser-focused on the specific problems we have and avoid the problems we don't have. (That might be a blog post in itself, but I'm not sure what the useful bits might be). It's made for some very boring PR pitches this year – "We don't solve industry problems, we solve our own problems really well to get differentiated outcomes" – but it's also made for some honestly exciting internal conversations. I did however put together a few internal Q&A presentations, one of which I'll eventually publish here.
• Fatherhood: My little girl is awesome! But also, let me rattle off some cliches that I have lived the last year and a half: kids grow up fast. The days are slow but the weeks are fast. If you don't make the effort to be there for them now, they won't need you later. Kids are a lot of work, especially in the beginning, and then even so more later. You don't regret the time you spend with your kids. So I've spent a lot of time in dad mode.
• Training: I've been training for a marathon on and off for almost five years now. First I was derailed by covid in New York. Then I injured my knee running in the mountains in Colorado. Then I moved to Arizona and was knocked on my butt by an 8-month insane heat wave. Then I became a dad. Each year, I got to comfortable half marathon distances and improved my time. I was on track for under 2 hours in Arizona but then got caught in a monsoon midway through the race. This year I made training out of stroller runs and managed to squeeze out a PR with a 2:05 clock time in the Boulderthon in Colorado. Will this be the year? Probably not, but I'll keep trying.

The Best Things I Read This Year

• The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby (2022)
  I picked up this book and Scott Kupor's "Secrets of Sand Hill Road" around the same time. It was slow to start but once I got past the second chapter, I couldn't stop. I read Kupor's right afterwards and couldn't get past 30 pages – it felt skimpy in comparison. I knew very little about the business, economics, and history of venture investing and like any good history, it was filled with vibrant characters and enough context to make sense of why VC looks the way it does today. Worth a read for anyone who works at a startup or thinking of starting a business (even if it isn't VC-funded).
• Blockchain Chicken Farm and Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang (2020)
  I'm a giant near-future sci-fi geek and Wang's "Blockchain Chicken Farm" hit all the Gibsonian notes of "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Even better, it is nonfiction and grounded in the reporting of individual's stories and not in vague and hand-wavey abstractions. It was also a refreshing perspective shift on what's possible outside of a US-centric worldview, challenging how technology can be applied to problems, emphasizing that "things can be different" without judging those differences. It was simultaneously hopeful and inspiring and mournful. Still futuristic vibes even though it was published five years ago.
• Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod (2024, Special Projects Edition)
  Craig Mod is an amazing observer, documenter, reflector, and craftsman – to call him simply a writer feels like an injustice. These qualities all come to the forefront when he makes a book... and I do mean "makes". I've been loving the craft and thoughtfulness behind his carefully self-published books since I came across Koya Bound on Kickstarter. Each book leaps forward in design, binding, paper selection, and printing. He calls them artist editions, but they're just really quality, care-made books. But a nice book isn't worth much without great writing or photography to fill the pages: Mod's elegiac story of his childhood juxtaposed against the elegiac walk through forgotten-by-time towns off a pilgrimage trail in Japan is incredibly readable and oft-relatable, with each passage and photo given the same attention as the book itself. Excited to read his revised and expanded mass market version when it comes out.
• Hilda: The Night of the Trolls by Luke Pearson (2023)
  The Hilda comics have been on my recommendations long list for a while now. I picked this collection up on sale and wish I hadn't waited so long! The paneling takes excellent advantage of the oversized pages, and the story has a lot of heart. This one in particular pulled all the parent/kid strings so maybe it was a right time/right place for me, but I'm now looking forward to reading rest of the Hilda comics.

Runners Up

I read a lot of memoirs this year: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner and Stay True by Hua Hsu both made me tear up in a good way (but also in a sad way, consider yourself warned).

The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut was really, really good (thought not as great at his When We Cease to Understand the World) and probably would have been a top pick for me if I hadn't already read Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson years ago and been totally blown away by it (one of my cornerstone books and seemingly a heavy source for Labatut) or watched the AlphaGo documentary that serves as the backbone for The Maniac's extended epilogue.

I read Glossy by Marisa Meltzer about Glossier and Going Infinite by Michael Lewis about SBF/FTX back to back and they felt like similar books going in opposite directions. (I did think that Michael Lewis was a bit unfairly dragged through the mud for being too close to SBF... I think his accounting at the end of the day was much more level than many reviews would have you believe, and I read the book after the trials concluded).

Leap Before You Look by Michael Wolff was a really useful monogram, and I don't say that too often. The quality of the book was meh (many case/brand images were old and so the visual records looked like they were dug up from old scans or photos) but Wolff's thoughts and observations on branding were really useful. I copied down and shared out a lot of Wolff's quips, which qualifies it as one of the better books on design and branding I've come across recently. I knew of Michael Wolff only as half of Wolff Olins, the agency that did the branding for the 2020 London Olympics), so a lot of the work here was a big surprise to me.

I also really enjoyed The Dragon's Banker by Scott Warren. It's a "operational" novel about banking, financing things, and investing, told through a thriller-like/mystery-like story about running a merchant bank in a fantasy world with a mythical dragon as your secret client looking to move generational wealth. I joked to friends that I'm trying to expand my horizons but aside from the fantasy setting, I think this is very much in the speed of The Phoenix Project (about IT) or The Rebel Allocator (about capital allocation and operations).

Like every year, I left a lot of books half-read (or didn't have a chance to finish them yet). Michael Maubussain's The Success Equation is my perennially unfinished book which is one of the biggest disappointments because it's a great book and I constantly recommend it. Dan Davies' The Unaccountability Machine was something I started, absolutely loved and recommended the heck out of, but put it down one day midway through and then life happened. I'm hoping to finish it next year. I read a chapter of Kent Beck's Tidy First each month and the chapters are short but good, but there are more chapters than months so it's still unfinished.

Do Last Year's Books Hold Up?

Yes. How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvberj and Mismatch by Katie Holmes have been absorbed into my general vocabulary of work. I'd recommend them again (and I do). I also continue to stand by my 2022 books, which was an exceptionally good year of reading.

My 24/25 Firehose

I've pruned a lot of content off my firehouse of information, and I still generally stick with newsletters, podcasts, rss feeds, and individuals as my preferred sense-making go-tos. I try to balance things that are immediately practical (tech) with things that are interesting but not relevant (fashion, manufacturing). I also try to include some folks that I disagree with to stay honest and aware of different perspectives. If someone writes on X or other social media, I'm intentionally blind to that.

So here's what in the hydrant:

• Studio D Radiodurams Newsletter by Jan Chipchase
• Commoncog by Cedric Chen
• Stratechery by Ben Thompson
• Big (Antitrust) by Matt Stoller
• Bits About Money by Patrick McKenzie
• SatPost by Trung Phan
• Capital Gains by Byrne Hobard
• Dan Luu's Blog
• Ben Khun's Blog
• Charity Major's Blog
• Irrational Exuberance by Will Larson
• Rachel by the Bay by Rachel Kroll
• DHH's Blog
• Brand New / Under Consideration Newsletter
• Monthly Dispatch by Jarret Fuller
• Die, Workwear! by Derek Guy
• Roden & Ridgeline by Craig Mod
• Vaugh Tan's blog
• Robin Sloan's newsletter
• Antipope by Charlie Stross
• Scholar's Stage by Tanner Greer
• Derek Sivers' blog
• Acquired podcast

Here's what fell off since my last update:

• Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk
• Greg Kogan's Blog
• Web3 Is Going Just Great by Molly White
• The Dieline Newsletter
• Things That Have Caught My Attention by Dan Hon
• Scope of Work (formerly The Prepared) about manufacturing and supply chains
• Orbital Operations by Warren Ellis

Print vs. Digital & On Noticing

One of the things I started tracking this year was if I read books as print or digital copies.

I have a Kindle, but I can count the number of times I used it on a single hand. (I had a Barnes and Noble Nook a decade ago and I used that a lot, but mostly because I routinely bet on the wrong horse. I also had a Creative Zen mp3 player and later a Zune instead of an iPod, had a Sega and not a Nintendo console, liked Digimon more than Pokemon, preferred Hipstamatic over Instagram, sold all my bitcoin in 2013, and have routinely rooted for the band/show/team that doesn’t become a breakout hit).

I like physical books for all the common reasons: they're a good disconnect, no distractions, easy to write in and annotate (if a book isn't marked up or dog-eared, I probably didn't like it). The tangibility of the books helps me with recollection (I can recall physically where a passage was, relative to the pages).

I like digital books because they're more portable and available in every which way. Again, it's all the obvious reasons: carry a library in your pocket, save and share annotations/highlights. They're dangerously easy to buy and start reading when inspiration hits.

(And I can't do audio books because I immediately tune them out and turn them into background noise).

Anyway, I read a lot of articles, websites, and RSS feeds, but turns out I read very few actual books digitally. I've made an improvement on that this year because I've had to travel a lot (and packing with a little kid in tow doesn't leave much room for more than a slim paperback). I've noticed that most of the books I read digital are either page turners or technical books. For example, I read a lot of science fiction digitally (most scifi novels I've read have been digital?), and I also read long, dense, and technical books digitally as well (Kill it With Fire, The Secret Life of Programs, and Accelerate come to mind). I also read business biographies (Super Pumped, No Filter, Glossy, Bad Blood, The Nvidea Way, etc) almost exclusively digitally.

All of these books tend to be "scannable" – easy to flip through, highlight important concepts, and more or less speed-read. They tend to support instant gratification (little effort to buy and read) or are extremely useful for highlighting and sharing those highlights out to a colleague (technical books).

The books that I tend to read on paper tend to be slower, more intentional books. The sort that I might start and stop, pause to think about (and not be distracted by an app or alert). Memoirs, more literary works, philosophical texts, history books, things I know I'll want to reread (or at least revisit), triggering memories from a bookshelf. Art books and artists' books (ala Craig Mod's Special Projects editions or unique print runs, zines, limited editions) make that cut too.

To tie all this together, I've been working on "noticing" as the first step to changing. In this case, noticing that I read certain kinds of books digitally, and certain kinds in print. Noticing this has been unintentionally useful – I'm not getting off the fence towards ebooks or print, but it has helped me notice that I sometimes buy books in mismatched mediums, and never get around to reading them. As a result, I changed by book acquisition habits for 2025 and I've already ended up reading more as a result.

Children's Books

I read a lot of children's books this year but I did't document them. I guess any book that I can read in under 5 minutes, or where circumstances are "me reading it to someone else" don't make the cut in my accounting of a year in reading?

It's a shame because I've come across some wildly hilarious and inventive children's books, much more than I have in adult books. These books are visually innovative, push narrative into interesting places, and are really just plain enjoyable. I've also noticed a lot of darkness in children's book's humor... or at least the ones I've read.

Here's some that come to mind:

• The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt
• The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson
• I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen
• A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni
• Everyone Poops by Taro Gomi
• Triangle by Mac Barnett
• The Lorax by Dr. Suess
• They All Saw a Cat by Brendan Wenzel
• I Thought I Saw An Alligator by Julia Nichols
• Astrophysics for Babies by Chris Ferrie
• Acorn Was a Little Wild by Jen Arena
• What You Do Matters by Kobi Yamada
• Knight Owl by Christopher Denise
• Namaste is a Greeting by Suma Subramaniam
• Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin

I also read a lot of bad children's books. Books that were boring, too complicated, too on-the-nose, too pedantic, or books that were confusing (for example, why do you have "Barn Owl" as "B" in your alphabet book? That's way too specific. It's "O" for "Owl"). Every bad book inspires me to sit down and write better books – books that have humor that works on multiple levels (for adults and for kids), books that are fun to look at and easy to read, books that make more sense, books that are endlessly re-readable with new things to notice in the art each time (because you'll read some of your kid's favorite books at least 200 times). Maybe that will be a side project this year.

And Now, the Complete List

(In chronological order)

• Stages of Rot by Linnea Sterte (2023)(Print)
• Gratnin by Ronald Wimberly (2023)(P)
• My Body by Emily Ratajkowski (2021)(P)
• Cribsheet by Emily Oster (2020)(P)
• Stay True by Hua Hsu (2022)(P)
• The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut (2023)(P)
• The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of a New Future by Sebastian Mallaby (2022)(Digital)
• Surf Shacks, Volume 2 by Matt Titone (2020)(P)
• Harsh Prospect by Will Tempest (2024)(P)
• Same As Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel (2023)(P)
• Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher (2024)(P)
• Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss's Glossier by Maria Meltzer (2023)(D)
• Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis (2023)(D)
• Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod (2023)(P)
• Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars by Patrick Lencioni (2006)(D)
• The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Naylor (2024)(P)
• Leap Before You Look: The Heart and Soul of Branding by Michael Wolff (2024)(P)
• Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (2021)(P)
• The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M Cipolla (2011)(P)
• Blockchain Chicken Farm & Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiowei Wang (2020)(P)
• The Dragon's Banker by Scott Warren (2019)(D)
• In Training by Stephen Voss (2016)(P)
• Hilda: Night of the Trolls by Luke Pearson (2018-2021)(P)

By the Numbers

• 23 books total
• 4 graphic novels, 1 photo book (22%)
• 3 novels (13%)
• 5 memoirs (22%)
• 4 books published in 2024 (17%)
• 7 books published in 2023 (30%)
• 1 book published before 2010
• 5 digital books (22%), 18 print books (78%)
• 8 books from the non-default perspective (35%)

... and that's a wrap.