This past year was the fifteenth of this site and this is my eleventh reading list. This year, among other things, I also took over as the neuroradiology division chief for our large private practice (in addition to serving as associate program director for our radiology residency) and then started a new hand-crafted high-touch job board exclusively featuring true radiology private practices called Independent Radiology. It’s been busy.
- Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
- Show Your Work by Austin Kleon (referenced in this April post)
- Keep Going by Austin Kleon
- Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin (I remember being somewhat disappointed by this book when I read it as a boy. Returning to it as a grown man with children, it feels like a completely different book. Le Guin is one of my favorite writers of all time.)
- The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King (This book and its personalities had a hard time carrying its length, I remember why I dropped the series in high school.)
- Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris (skimmed large sections due to format and the fact that I’m not going to do meaningful dietary content restriction, convoluted workouts, or psychedelics. I have a full-time job and a family I want to eat with.)
- The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy (I read this to my son when it was new and selling oodles of copies, I opened it up again because my daughter is almost to that age again.)
- Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words (a free and sometimes even a little raw collection of Steve Jobs’ emails, quotes, and speeches)
- Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott (this may be the most delightful book about writing I’ve come across)
- The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (The Three-Body Problem #2)
- The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin (I remember when this came out when I was in high school, and I remember being happy the series ultimately hadn’t ended with Tehanu. But I’d literally forgotten everything about this story [it’s great].)
- Anything You Want by Derek Sivers (very short. Perhaps it’s hard to justify the cover price and sell books when they seem too short, but more nonfiction should be this short and to the point).
- The Eyes and the Impossible by Dave Eggers (this book is middle grade–and I bought it for my son–but I read it first, and I’ll freely admit to being surprised by how it came together).
- Death’s End by Cixin Liu (lots of info dumping and not always the most elegant prose given the translation but incredibly unique and inventive universe-scale science fiction)
- Tales of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle
- Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch Book 2–good!)
- Slow Productivity by Cal Newport (1: Do fewer things, 2: Work at a natural pace, and 3: Obsess over quality.)
- The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby
- A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (TLDR: All the popular ideas of settling space probably won’t work for a variety of reasons)
- Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch Book 3)
- Artificial Condition by Martha Wells (Murberbot #2, really great series, concise and enjoyable with strong efficient plotting)
- Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells (Murberbot #3)
- Exit Strategy by Martha Wells (Murberbot #4)
- Network Effect by Martha Wells (Murberbot #5)
- Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells (Murberbot #6)
- System Collapse by Martha Wells (Murberbot #7)
- The Coward by Stephen Aryan
- The Warrior by Stephen Aryan
- Loaded by Sarah Newcomb (meh)
- Hyperion by Dan Simmons (this is one of those classic sci-fi Hugo winners from the 1980s. It was pretty out there.)
- Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
- Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson
- The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway
- Translation State by Ann Leckie (I normally don’t care very much for spin-off stories set off the main story arc, especially prequels. This takes place after the Radch trilogy, covers new ground, and has some fun cameos. I enjoyed it, and the series in general continues to be an illustration–in a good way–of the fact that Science Fiction says more about the period in which it is written than about the future it envisions).
- Spelunky (Boss Fight Books) by Derek Yu (written by the creator of a popular/niche roguelike indy videogame; it’s always neat to open the hood and see how something is made, how someone approaches a novel set of problems.)
- Emperor’s End by Kyle Kirrin (Ripple System #5)
- The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (I think this is a very important book)
- Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Children of Time #3)
- The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson (I would say overall the most enjoyable of the Year of Sanderson)
- The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm by Lewis Dartnell (answer: it would honestly be very hard.)
- The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt
- The Employees by Olga Ravn (Disorienting epistolary sci-fi. I saw this on a list of 100 best sci-fi books of all time. I definitely wouldn’t go that far, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the form. I wrote a very small portion of an abandoned epistolary novel myself when I was a medical student.)
- The 4 hour Body by Tim Ferriss
- The Infernal Machine by Steven Johnson (Interesting narrative history tying together several bits of history I knew very little about: anarchism, the role of dynamite in the creation of modern terrorism, and the rise of the modern detective).
- He Who Fights with Monsters 11 by Travis Deverell
- The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building by Matt Mochary
- The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
- Outlive by Peter Attia
- The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
- Chrono Trigger (Boss Fight Books) by Michael P. Williams (One of my favorite games of all time, but this didn’t hit anywhere the same notes as Spelunky in terms of diving into the mechanics of the game from the perspective of its designers.)
- The Fragile Threads of Power by VE Schwab (a new series continuing the world of the Shades of Magic)
- A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorpe (fascinating memoir, my brief summary and some choice quotes here)
- How to Decide by Annie Duke
- Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman (I’ve read a lot LitRPG, but this series somehow brought the subgenre into the mainstream [relatively speaking]. It looked like–and is–a absolutely ludicrous entry, so I’d been ignoring Amazon’s recommendations about it for a while. But it came up in conversation with a normal human so it seemed like it was time. Seth MacFarlane is even going to make it into a TV show).
- Carl’s Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl #2)
- The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook by Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl #3)
- The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl #4)
- The Butcher’s Masquerade by Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl #5)
- The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl #6) (I thought when I started the series that it was complete at 6 books, but book 7 is coming out next year, argh)
- The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (his books are well established in the thought-leader zeitgeist and yet often misconstrued for personal gain. He may be a bit of a boor in his internet and intellectual fights, but I think his arguments themselves hold water.)
- Insight by Tasha Eurich (I bought this book in 2019 apparently. Ultimately, I’m not sure what got me to pick it up at the end of the year, but it’s a great example of the glorified single article premise padded into a book through the overuse of tedious stories format of business publishing)
Here are the prior years: