Books of 2024š
Introduction
Well, there has been a fair amount of reading in 2024, and this is my review of it. Iāve read some painfully dull books, and some that lit my brain on fire. This year, certain genres hit something deep inside me - like an internal bell that vibrates through your mind when an idea really strikes home. That bell rang many times , and that, shows.
Through these pages, I wandered through science, philosophy, history, economics, and political science. Along the way, I learned something uncomfortable: everything you read, everything you thinkā¦ itās all temporary. Books that seemed life-changing last year barely left a scratch this year (except for that newfound skepticism). The futility of reading hit me hard. I kept asking myself āwhy push yourself?ā Why this constant drive to learn and update yourself?
There were shelves on shelves of books on every conceivable subjectā¦The late owner had read them all, and many of them were full in their margins with cross-references in pencil. There pigeon-holed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments..These volumes were apparently coming in at the rate of 10 or so per weekā¦For years, apparently, he had been endeavouring to keep up with everything that was being writtenāa Sisyphean task. Over all there were brown Holland sheets, a thin coating of dust, the moths dancing in the pale September sun. There was a faint aroma of mustiness, proceeding from thousands of 17th & 18th-century books in a room that had been locked up since the ownerās death. I never saw a sight that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning.
-Sir Charles Oman, On The Writing Of History 1939
I think I have found an answer for myself. A very personal one 1
Living in this technological rocket-ride of an era, I watch thoughts slip away very easily in this vast latent space created by our growing knowledge. Thereās so much things running ephermally in our brains, and nothing to last. But hereās the thing: I believe we have an obligation - to this mind weāve been given, to push it to its fullest potential. To truly try to grasp the breadth of human experience. And for me, that happens through books.
This piece is my attempt to map that 2024ās journey. The books that rocked my world, the ideas that shifted my thinking, and the thoughts that emerged along the way. Buckle up folks, its going to be a long one.
Quantum Leaps
Body of three
2024 started with me arming myself with āThinking, Fast and Slowā, determined to approach new ideas with careful skepticism. I was going to be methodical - engage my System 2 thinking, check my cognitive biases, question everything. That was the plan, anyway. Then The Three Body Problem trilogy came along and completely demolished my carefully constructed walls of rationality.
Messed up Dimensionality of Calabi Yau Manifolds
I initially picked it up because of the upcoming show (which turned out pretty good, btw), but the concepts blindsided me. Complex intra-planet instantaneous communication through quantum particle-supercomputers? Multi-planetary system organizational problems? Alternative speculative technologies for FLT? Fresh takes on Fermi Paradox? Get outta here. I went all in, and it was a very satisfying surrender. Thereās so much to unpack in there (my first hard-science fiction in nearly half a decade), and these ideas still feel relevant to the technological and ideological possibilities of this century. As someone on reddit said
And I completely agree with it lol. This set my standard in what I would like to want going forward. Thereās multiple very lengthy philosophical detours into the state of mind going through a particular situation. I think it would overwhelm the 13 year old me, but now, itās nice.
āIt was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.ā - Ye Wenjie, The Three Body Problem
A rational me from 2023 wouldnāt venture into this area of fiction. This is so alluring, that it made me forget that rule of mine. Very simulating and fun. A good read, I would suggest.
Young people are all the same. The more books you read, the more confused you become.ā
- Cheng Lihua, The Three Body Problem
Can we talk about us?
I explored more concepts in space and consciousness. Embassytown, gave a new look into language and just inefficient and different it can be to communicate with/to some other intelligent being. It introduces a concept of linguistic engineering, and other minds of perception you know. It taught me (or rather reinvigorated my desire to understand) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Second order logic, and non-linear alien economies run on biorigging. The Sapir-Whorf idea that language shapes how we perceive reality gets a wild workout here, as the aliens literally cannot think thoughts they donāt have words for. Itās like 1984 turned spaceward. Itās like their language isnāt just how they communicate, itās the actual OS their consciousness runs on .
āWe have to establish our credentials as an explorocracy; so to survive and rule ourselves, we have to explore.ā - Avice, Embassytown
Not just a cup of sci-fi tea, Iām afraid. The ideas are so fresh , that it felt like I could keep on studying alien language hypothesis like I did with Arrival lol. I find MiĆ©villeās writing a bit daft in places, which, hilariously enough, reinforces the bookās whole point about language being an inefficient mess. Here I am struggling with human-to-human communication while reading a book about the impossibility of human-to-alien communication. Meta, right? Makes you wonder if weāll ever truly understand each other, let alone some bizarre alien intelligence operating on completely different cognitive hardware.
Fear is a great teacher, no?
Blindsight and its sequel took things to another level entirely. These books are so densely packed with references, youāll go blind trying to understand them all. Itās about space vampires, and zombies AND alien life (scientifically exist-able ones atleast). Imagine the trio!
The vampire concept alone is worth the price of admission. Watts didnāt just throw in āspace vampiresā for shock value; he built an entire scientifically plausible evolutionary history for them. These vampires have different brain structures giving them superior pattern recognition, and they survived on human blood for specific vitamins. But hereās where it gets wildāWatts actually addresses how vampires would avoid Kuru (the brain disease caused by human cannibalism) by developing resistance based on prion protein gene production. He even cites actual research papers on this stuff! Okay, now to hammer the book into your mind, consider these points.
The author created a mock scientific presentation on vampire discovery that feels disturbingly credible, complete with brain structure comparisons. The level of scientific rigor is mind-blowing, itās artistic science with a passion. This kind of meticulous world-building hits my intellectual pleasure centers in ways that should probably be illegal.
Right is the vampire brain, left is our pleb human
Between these mind-benders, I touched base with classics like Rendezvous with Rama (my first Clarke) and Fahrenheit 451 (more drama than sci-fi, if weāre being honest). Clarkeās massive alien artifact drifting through our solar system gave me that sense of cosmic awe that only old-school sci-fi can deliver. It was clinical, to see astronauts behave like from Ad Astra. And Bradburyās dystopia? Sure, itās required reading, but it hit differently now. The whole āscreens are destroying societyā thing feels less like cautionary fiction and more like a documentary these days, lol. Neither blew my mind like the others, but each one added a tiny bit of ingredients into 2k24ās cosmic soup of ideas.
Consciousness cartography
Non-Fiction Dive: The Emperorās New Mind
I went through some mind-bending territory here. Penroseās Emperorās New Mind was exactly as difficult as everyone warned me - thank god for my math and physics background or Iād have been completely lost. The time it took me to finish this book? Letās not even go there. But I stuck with it because I needed to understand whatās coming with AGI. Not just the mathematical abstractions, but the fundamental physics and hardware that might make it possible. (Shoutout to PBS spacetime for making some of the quantum concepts click!)
āthere seems to be something non-algorithmic about our conscious thinking. In particular, a conclusion from the argument in Chapter 4, particularly concerning Gƶdelās theorem, was that, at least in mathematics, conscious contemplation can sometimes enable one to ascertain the truth of a statement in a way that no algorithm could.ā
I still would like to make some comment on the nature of consciousness, as I understood from Penrose. He seesā¦computational structures in the logic of consciousness. He sees maths+uncertainty ruling the world. I would have totally agreed with him when I was 18.. but now, I have my doubts. Because I think thereās still a bunch of undiscovered mathematics left (my guess is somewhere in dynamic systems theory) , that will break down the laws of logic as we think of them now. And we will figure it out.
Penrose Tiles
Fiction as Philosophy
Echopraxia, the successor to Blindsight, is pretty fun as hell too I mean. I wouldnāt worry much about the story part of this book, but goddamn, I thought a lot about the mind. This IS all about the mind. Itās building more on evolution theory and more on future mental models for thinking and computing. Thereās this concept of distributed computing conscious minds, called the āMoksha mindā (what nice naming right?), who have transcended reality or something? Just to put myself in their minds is epic as maniacal.
āFifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there werenāt any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.ā
āĀ Peter Watts,Ā Echopraxia
Thereās something pessimistic about this paragraph, and enthralling at the same time. This teaches me more about evolution than when I discovered the Wolf/ Bunny simulations (Check it out, itās cool).
Beyond Human Cognition
The vampires I talked about earlier? Thereās an interesting insight I got from this book. And it bothers me. Here it is. There is a badass vampire named Valerie, who was originally bred to be a high level quant, and originally kept in like a human-controlled vampire prison. One of the most chilling concepts I encountered is the idea of communication without words and specifically, how Valerie might have escaped her confinement without ever directly interacting with other vampires.
Photo Credits Keenahmee@Deviantart
Imagine this scenario: Valerie leaves nothing but āX+2Bā scrawled on a wall, or perhaps just a single line drawn at a specific point in a hallway. Another vampire passes by, notices this seemingly random marking, and CLICK! Through sheer intellectual superiority, it immediately grasps the entire escape plan. No conversation needed. No planning sessions. Just one symbol, and a perfectly coordinated prison break unfolds. Because logic speaks volumes before emotions does.
That, my friend, is terrifying as hell for me. This is where the true horror of Wattsāvampires lies. These arenāt the romantic, tortured souls of popular fiction (hi dracula!) Theyāre predators first, predators who hunted humans before we developed civilisation, whose minds operate on a plane so far beyond ours that their simplest communications are imperceptible to us. Like mathematical savants sharing elegant proofs that need no explanation to those who understand.
Whatās truly terrifying is the implication: What if there are patterns and communications happening around us constantly that weāre simply too limited to perceive? What if our evolutionary āsuperiorsā are exchanging complex ideas through means we canāt even recognize as communication? Like ants trying to comprehend human language, we might be fundamentally incapable of even recognizing that a conversation is taking place. Itās brilliant existential piece of tinkering Iāve read in a while.
āpeople have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tykeās liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no oneās looking.ā ā Peter Watts,Ā Echopraxia
Itās fascinating that beyond your emotions, thereās a whole lot of consciousness to be explored. While we have this moto of āYou only live onceā and do some really funny quirky thingsā¦why donāt we want to live in a different mind? Be lessā¦.human? To really put myself into the consciousness of fictional vampires itself is a mind experiment that I long to do. It helped me think a lot about the mind, and how consciousness might actually work.
Silicon economies
Sirenās Tune: The Economic Refrain of Data
From there on, we come to the big baddies of non-fictionā¦ I thinking about power and humans, spurred by a video of CGP grey on power. I fell into āWho owns the futureā, a terribly insightful book. A hard book yes, but a good one. Thereās concepts of Siren Servers, data-economies, and how current economic systems are rigged for zero-sum, winner-takes-it-all, non-linear games. Iām not going to bore you all with the details of this book. Go read my post
A point of interest for me currently is how he points out that āSiren serversā radiate risks outside the system into the broader economy. I can equate this to Nicholas Talebās concept of Fragile systems (an anthesis of anti-fragile systems) He proposes a new way of economic thinkingā¦ based on the value that individual controls. A concept of āData as laborā. Very very intriguing idea.
Democracies must be structured to resist winner-take-all politics if they are to endure. That principle applied in the network age leads to periodic confrontations between competing mirror-image big data political campaigns. It is a fascinating development to watch. ā Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future
As the seed of this ādata-based-viewā slowly transmuted me, I wanted to learn more about economies. Iām not a trained economist, but after reading the Undercover economist and Data and Goliath, I realize that thereās a co-relation?(I know, I have had 3 books teach it to me lolš). The economist, can also see a future in this myriad of connecting dots. I kinda had had a love-hate relationship with Big Data and analysis and this was cleared in how our mind perceives stats. Data mining is an art in itself. Statistics are the shovels, and the machine learning models are the smelters to get you the gold.
These āagentsā have a lot of monitors eh?
Scientific big data, like data about galaxy formation, weather, or flu outbreaks, can be gathered and mined, just like gold, provided you put in the hard work. But big data about people is different. It doesnāt sit there; it playsĀ against you. It isnāt like a view through a microscope, but more like a view of a chessboard. ā Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies
I like another quote from another book āEverybody Liesā and the author is being very optimistic lol.
The future of data analysis is bright. The next Kinsey, I strongly suspect, will be a data scientist. The next Foucault will be a data scientist. The next Freud will be a data scientist. The next Marx will be a data scientist. The next Salk might very well be a data scientist. ā Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies
This data economist thing can also see the future in data. The ideas, the thinking. I didnāt think it had as much as a hit as Dataclysm which I read in 2023, but okay, this sure has some weird insights? Not all data is created equally, In regards to the human behaviour, I got an interesting quote.
Never compare your insides to everyone elseās outsides (not by the author, but a good quote but by Anne Lammott)
And yeah,āEverybody liesā.
Solving DP problems
The mindless machinery of economics, as Taleb often points out, is something that really clicks when you start to understand how deeply entrenched it is in our systems. We have to solve the āData-Powerā (DP) problem. Add to that the āBig Data guysā (Bruce Schneier, anyone?), and it becomes clear that weāre living in an information-centric age of power. The real drivers of influence today are no longer just wealth or muscleāitās all about who controls the data, the algorithms, and the narratives that shape our world. Weāre talking about power being exerted on an entirely different plane now.
But then, I contrast all of this with what I read in Our Oriental Heritage at the end of the year, and something starts to feel almost nostalgic. In ancient times, power was simpler to hold. It came down to money, manpower, and territory. It was about who had the most soldiers, the most resources, or the best trade routes. Power was direct, tangible. Fast forward to today, and the landscape is so much more complex. The āattack surfaceā is vast: information flows everywhere, and manipulation can be done with a keystroke. To navigate that, youād think that the people in charge would need some kind of superhuman intelligence. Maybe an IQ of 140 is the new baseline. The sheer scope of whatās at play now demands a different kind of intellect.
But then again, the thought creeps in: What if weāre just one misstep away from disaster? Sure, weāve reached new heights of complexity and power, but we could easily spiral into chaos. One wrong move with nuclear tech, one too many unchecked artificial intelligentsia, and boom ,weāre back to the stone age.
Destruction by Thomas Cole
Still, looking back at this period, letās say around 2024 , I think Iāll remember it as a time of economic awakening for me. Things are shifting fast. The human work structure is undergoing a massive transformation. Programs with greater intellect are beginning to reorganize the human effort pyramid. I donāt even know what work is going to be like in 20 years2 And with that, huge economic shifts are on the horizon. The future of this age of silicon intelligence is fascinatingāand terrifying. Itās like watching the groundwork for a new economic reality being laid before our eyes. Fun stuff!
Civilization in the rear view
Germs and Steel
Fed up with the modern distopian analysis are we? Letās get into some lore. Iāve had this bit of retrospection kindled recently, and it all started with diving into ideas about power and history. Guns, Germs, and Steelāa book that sat on my shelf for way too longāfinally made its way into my hands, and damn, it didnāt disappoint. Sure, the sections on cultures were a bit dry (I get it, itās a lot of detail), but the sheer scale of history, the endless patterns, the hundreds of incidents that have shaped us, honestly, itās overwhelming. Itās wild how much is out there, just waiting for you to unpack.
āAll human societies contain inventive people. Itās just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments.ā ā Jared Diamond, Guns,Germs and Steel
I was exploring our very old DJ Peach Cobbler and his ideas on the Aztecs and Spanish Inquisition, and it started a whole lot of history tour for me. I didnāt know where I was headed, but it took me on a full-blown history tour, and suddenly Iām knee-deep in genocidal cultures and figuring out why Australia is basically life on hard mode. Like, did you know that the Fertile Crescent didnāt stay fertile? Itās crazy to think about how civilizations rise and fall, and how places we once thought would stay rich with resources are now barren. There are so many of these little nuggets of history that you stumble upon that make you rethink everything.
The Meeting of CortƩs and Moctezuma Painting
āOne way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.ā
Presents from the Past
Next, I picked up Our Oriental Heritage, a classic (albeit outdated) on non-Western history. Itās part of a series Iāve been meaning to start for a while, and it took me two months to get through. Honestly, Iām glad I stuck with it, because this thing opened up whole mental doorways. It was like, the more I learned, the more I realized how little I knew. Itās sobering, you know? You see the rise and fall of civilizations, all these grand ideas and empires that are now just dust, and it makes you wonder about the vanity of our own accomplishments. We think weāve figured it all out, but in the grand scheme of history, weāre just another blip.
And then, Durant, in all his wisdom, dedicates 200 pages of this behemoth to India, the country I was born in. That hit different. Living in India, Iāve only ever seen the country from the āinsideāāthe endless chaos, the crowd-driven noise, the overwhelming population, the dysfunction. Iāve given up on a lot of it, honestly. You get used to it. Rarely can I take a perspective of India from outside, because you know, my entire thought process has been INSIDE the country I am being born in. . Itās like seeing your own reflection from a different angle for the first time. Itās kind of mesmerizing, actually, to see how the very culture Iāve lived in shaped so much of the West.
āThere is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the presentā ā Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
Iām already deep into making notes about this book, dissecting all the ideas, and honestly, itās a fun dive into history. Durantās a pleasure to read, even if sometimes heās too idealistic or outdated. But you canāt deny the insight he offers about the human condition. History has an axe to grind with the modern, cosmopolitan individualāwe think weāre above it all, but are we really? As much as we try to separate ourselves from the past, itās always there, lurking in the present.
Fiction transmutation
I think Iāve become more emotional over the years, and I canāt lie, itās been a bit of a revelation. Thereās been a steady rise in my appreciation for artistic works. Itās funny because, back in the day, only the grand, the sweeping stuff really awed me. I had my fiction phase earlier, but nowā¦now, I get it. This year was something else. Slaughterhouse-Five hit me in a way I didnāt expect. Itās such simple writing, yet it lands. I knew Kurt Vonnegut from that āStructure of Storiesā video, but that was about it. So, I was mildly surprised when I found out it was a science fiction book. I was like, āOkay, sure, Iāll go along with thisā, and suddenly Iām deep into the absurdity of a soldier-turned-optometrist, his wife, and the bizarre journey that unfolds. It was the kind of weird I wasnāt prepared for.
Honestly, it brought up some of the thoughts I had in this post about war. Itās the way Vonnegut breaks down a scene so dispassionately that even someone like me, the āget-on-with-it-guyā, found myself thinking twice about certain moments. And the bombing of Dresden? He describes it in reverse, and let me tell you, itās the most beautiful anti-war statement Iāve ever read. It just sticks:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasnāt in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed. ā Kurt Vonnengurt, Slaughterhouse-Five
The way this scene unfoldedāit wasnāt just a moment in the book. It formed an image, one that hit me just as much as that haunting scene in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Itās the same feeling: everything doesnāt really matter in the end. It shook me from my comfortable ivory tower of rationality, got me thinking in ways I hadnāt in a long time. I didnāt realize, until the very end, when I read a quote on a youtube video, that actually, the entire science fiction story might be made up. It was this dude in particularā¦that made me rethink twice about the book. 
Okay, okayā¦ enough about Slaughterhouse-Five before I lose you, because I know you probably wonāt read the book anyway. But seriously, it had an effect.
Thoughts From My Ivory Tower of Rationality
So thatās my tryst with books in 2024. Wild ride, right? Looking back at all this intellectual chaos, I realize something kinda funny ā I started the year trying to be this super-rational thinker with but ended up getting my mind completely blown by space vampires and ancient civilizations. Talk about a plot twist.
Learning to think about old physics for a new mind and trying to get a vision of reality, itās fun. Itās strange. I still want to explore IIT (Integrated Information Theory) and think about the problem of Hard Consciousness (I know what Iām doing here lol) As I look back on this mental journey, I canāt help but think that consciousness operates like some strange attractorāunpredictable but patterned, drawing us toward questions that we canāt quite express yet. What if, like ants trying to solve calculus, weāre missing entire dimensions of understanding? Only timeā¦will tell.
Durantās civilizations rise and fall with a rhythm we can barely perceive. Yet in this punity and vanity of our accomplishments, thereās something beautiful about the attempt. Each book is another probe into the dark, another way to push against the boundaries of what this human mind can grasp. This year, I started with the intention of being rational, but Iāve ended up somewhere far more intriguing. Iāve grown emotionally in ways that wouldāve embarrassed my former, āthink-it-outā self. Iāve let vampires lead me into space, and aliens tie to the problem of loneliness in space. Iāve let the backwards bombing of Dresden hit me where I live. Iāve looked at my own culture from the outside and felt both estranged and enlightened.
So as we approach the end of the 21st centuryās first quarter, I no longer see myself as someone chasing after knowledge like a finish line. Instead, Iām sketching the rough outlines of a larger map, one full of intellectual āhere be dragonsā warnings, where the unknown isnāt a threat but an invitation. Itās a journey that began with a search for definitive answers, but now I realize the importance of remaining open to the ever-evolving nature of truth, and so Iām not turning back. My brain feels like itās expanding into a new dimension, embracing different ways of thinking. The books Iāve encountered have not only filled my mind but also expanded its capacity to question and explore. Maybe thatās what this year of reading was about: not knowing everything, but learning how to stand in the dark and still push forward. That feels like progress. Hereās to more dragons, more questions, and more minds set on fire.