Reading in 2024
I read 15 books last year. Eight on my Kobo e-reader and the rest were deadtree format. Nine of them were fiction. Six were non-fiction.
There were many great books this year, making it difficult to select just a top three. As such, I’ve included a selection of runners-up.
Fiction in 2024
- A Line to Kill - Anthony Horowitz - “I’m surrounded by silence but at the same time I’m drowning in words and it hardly ever leaves me, that sense of disconnection.”
- The Midnight Library - Matt Haig - “The only way to learn is to live.”
- This is How You Lose The Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - “Listen to me. I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you.”
- Children of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky - “Advance science as far as you like, the human mind continued to place itself at the centre of the universe.”
- The Penderwicks on Gardam Street - Jeanne Birdsall - “Tra-la the joy of tulips blooming, Ha-ha the thrill of bumblebees zooming. I’m alive and I dance, I’m alive though death is always looming.”
- The Secret History - Donna Tartt - “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
- Children of Memory - Adrian Tchaikovsky - “She’s learning that getting a proper education doesn’t answer questions, it just teaches you to ask them.”
- When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro - “She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.”
- A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin - “Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.”
Non-Fiction in 2024
- The Art of Learning - Josh Waitzkin - “Musicians, actors, athletes, philosophers, scientists, writers understand that brilliant creations are often born of small errors.”
- Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI - Ethan Mollick - “The cost of getting to know AI—really getting to know AI—is at least three sleepless nights.”
- The Playful Game Design Process - Richard Lemarchand - “Where idealism meets experience, wisdom is born.”
- Teach Like a Pirate - Dave Burgess - “Light yourself on fire with enthusiasm and people will come from miles around just to watch you burn!”
- We Can Do Better: Ideas for Changing Society - David Camfield - “If people could collectively take control of the productive forces that capitalism has developed and use them to meet their needs, they could build a cooperative commonwealth.”
- True Love - Thich Nhat Hanh - “Thinking prevents us from touching life deeply. I think, therefore I am really not there.”
Top Three Books of 2024
This is How You Lose The Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
You ask if I’ve been lonely. I hardly know how to answer. I have observed friendship as one observes high holy days: breathtakingly short, whirlwinds of intimate endeavour, frenzied carousing, the sharing of food, of wine, of honey. Compressed, always, and gone as soon as they come. It is often my duty to fall in love convincingly, and certainly I’ve received no complaints. But that is work, and there are better things of which to write.
Burn before reading. A co-written epistolary novella that blends espionage, time travel, poetry, and romance. Lent to me by a student. It left me wanting more, but any longer and the letter writing conceit may have worn thin.
The Playful Game Design Process - Richard Lemarchand
Imagination and design are closely connected. The dreams we dream at night and by day can lead to the greatest accomplishments in art and literature, science and technology, industry and entertainment. But until we make decisions and act upon them, we are not designing, only speculating.
A non-technical handbook on producing video games with a focus on curiosity, flexibility, generosity, humility, and respect. It has already had a profound impact on how I run the Game Studio courses in the Red River College Polytech Game Development program.
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI - Ethan Mollick
You should try inviting AI to help you in everything you do, barring legal or ethical barriers. As you experiment, you may find that AI help can be satisfying, or frustrating, or useless, or unnerving. But you aren’t just doing this for help alone; familiarizing yourself with AI’s capabilities allows you to better understand how it can assist you — or threaten you and your job.
Ethan Mollick, Professor of Management at U-Penn’s Wharton School, encourages us to experiment widely with Ai to explore the limitations and possibilities of this evolving technology.
Ai can mean many things. This book focuses on Ai chat systems built on Large Language Machine-Learning Models, which generate text by re-purposing patterns found in their vast training data. These models have been trained on an enormous volume of text — drawn from books, articles, and the public internet — shaping the model’s ability to mimic human responses.
If you haven’t spent time playing around with generative Ai, I’d recommend Claude for text-based chats and Pi for voice conversations.
Runners-Up
- Birdsall’s Penderwicks series continues to captivate the girls. Read these to your kids!
- Tchaikovsky entire Children of Time series is a must-read for sci-fi lovers.
- Le Guin’s masterpiece A Wizard of Earthsea might seem full of fantasy tropes, until you realize she create those tropes with this book.
- All teacher’s (regardless of grade level) should read Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning and Burgess’ Teach Like a Pirate.
- Camfield’s We Can Do Better is an accessible introduction to Marxist reconstructed historical materialism. From the Sara Farris quote on the cover: “For anyone who wants to understand the complex forces that shape our society and change them.”