My Favourite Books of 2024

In 2024, I read some incredible books filled with enriching ideas ranging from personal productivity to public administration, quantum physics to mega infrastructure projects. 

Due to the generative AI revolution, many predict that the importance of reading and writing will diminish significantly. I strongly disagree. 

I am convinced that reading and writing will become even more essential in the future.

In a world full of ChatGPT-generated summaries, trending podcasts, YouTube videos, and online courses, Books still remain the best sources of deep knowledge. 

I hope the following list inspires you to pick up your next book. Here are my favourite reads of 2024.

11. Project Hail Mary

A lone astronaut with no memory wakes up in deep space and discovers that he is humanity’s last hope to avert extinction. Andy Weir explores interstellar travel in this delightful, humorous, mind-bending sci-fi story of survival and human ingenuity. I loved his earlier book The Martian, but this book is even better in its scope and imagination. Despite a lot of numbers and physics and nerdy stuff, the language is really accessible to even the lay person. An absorbing read!

“When stupid ideas work, they become genius ideas.”

10. Die with Zero

Some books have the power to completely re-wire your beliefs and perception about life. This is one such book that challenges conventional wisdom on work, money and what it means to live a fulfilling, enjoyable life.  Its core argument is that we are not getting any younger and we don’t know when we are dying. So we must solve for total life enjoyment in the limited time we have on this planet. 

I loved the book’s incredibly practical, useful concepts such as “time bucketing” (dividing your life into distinct time periods and planning specific experiences or goals for each) and “memory dividends”(create memories that pay emotional returns over time) to help us make better choices about how to spend our time and money.

“The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end, that’s all there is.”

9. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

It follows two creative minds’ lifelong friendship and their shared passion for video game design. Through their life, the story explores the themes of ambition, fame, love, loss, and betrayal.  Readers of this blog know that I am not much of a fiction guy, but this novel was a real enjoyable read.

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

8. Indistractable

We often think of ‘time’ as the means with which we spend our lives, but it’s actually ‘attention’. Our lives are nothing but the culmination of things we choose to pay attention to. 

But we can’t focus on things we want to because we are endlessly distracted. This book is an urgent call to action to reclaim our scattered focus. It discusses the source of our distractions and what we can do to curb them. We often blame social media and smartphones as the sources of our distraction, but the book evidently argues that the triggers for 90% of our distractions are internal.  

The book gives actionable strategies to tackle these internal triggers and restore our ability to focus. 

“Living the life we want requires not only doing the right things; it also requires we stop doing the wrong things that take us off track.”

7. Triumph of the City

Cities are the shining symbols of human civilisation. We vilify cities as hubs of squalor, crime, and pollution while romanticizing villages as bastions of virtue, tranquility, and simplicity. 

In Triumph of the City, Edward Gleaser argues that this is simply incorrect. The book is an unabashed defense of urbanism, arguing why it’s ecologically sustainable, economically desirable and inherently innovative to embrace urban living. The book packs a ton of fresh insight. I am convinced that our cities must not only accomodate migration, but foster infrastructure that actively encourages it. Also, reading about the rise, fall and resurgence of New York City in the book inspired me to add the city to my travel wishlist.

“On a planet with vast amounts of space, we choose cities.”

6. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

This year, I re-read this OG of the self-help genre. There have been innumerable books on personal productivity but few could stand the test of time. This classic endures because its ideas are timeless and universally applicable. The principles of being proactive, of beginning a project or task with the end in mind are relevant and useful, no matter the field you work in. Recently I was part of negotiations for land acquisition for a project and I found the book’s principles—  thinking win-win and seeking first to understand and then to be understood, incredibly valuable. 

If I had to give just one book to help someone advance their career, this would be it.

“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”

5. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

A short book with an ambitious scope, covering subjects ranging from the tiny atom to the expansive cosmos. It’s amazing how the author takes the most complex physics concepts and explains them in a beautiful, accessible language. Scientific writing at its very best. 

“We are made up of the same atoms and the same light signals as are exchanged between pine trees in the mountains and stars in the galaxies.”

4. How the World Really Works

Big history meets big science. I love when books crystallise our complex world and distill its core ideas to help us comprehend it better. 

This underrated gem from Vaclav Smil talks about the big drivers of the world—  focusing on energy, food, and material consumption as the pillars of our existence. This is the most insight-packed book, each page brimming with ideas and my multicolored highlights. After reading it, you will come away with an expanded perspective on the world. 

“Energy is the only truly universal currency, and nothing (from galactic rotations to ephemeral insect lives) can take place without its transformations.

3. Dark Matter

A fascinating cross-over of science fiction, suspense, and philosophy. The book makes us ponder upon themes of love, fate, destiny, alternate realities and paths not taken in a life of infinite possibilities. Apple made a TV series based on the book, but I skipped it because the book was so good. If you are looking for an unputdownable thriller as your next read, look no further than ‘Dark Matter’. 

“Imagine you’re a fish, swimming in a pond. You can move forward and back, side to side, but never up out of the water. If someone were standing beside the pond, watching you, you’d have no idea they were there. To you, that little pond is an entire universe. Now imagine that someone reaches down and lifts you out of the pond. You see that what you thought was the entire world is only a small pool. You see other ponds. Trees. The sky above. You realize you’re a part of a much larger and more mysterious reality than you had ever dreamed of.”

2. How Big Things Get Done

The track record of mega infrastructure projects across the world is brutal, marked by abandoned projects, extended timelines, cost overruns, and an irate public throwing governments out of power.  The book’s premise is simple: What can we learn from the successes and failures of those projects? Are there any similar patterns and red flags? Bent Flyvbjerg brings all his experience handling big projects and distills his insights into this remarkable work. 

I especially loved reading about the diverse real world examples in the book, ranging from stellar successes to absolute disasters. It’s clear to me that those who do not read about project failures are condemned to repeat it. 

It is a must read for people handling big projects— CEOs, senior govt. officials, political executives and the like. This 500 rupee book has the potential to save billions. 

“Big is best built from small. Bake one small cake. Bake another. And another. Then stack them. Decoration aside, that’s all there really is to even the most towering wedding cake. As with wedding cakes, so with solar and wind farms, server farms, batteries, container shipping, pipelines, roads. They’re all profoundly modular, built with a basic building block. They can scale up like crazy, getting better, faster, bigger, and cheaper as they do. The small cake is the Lego brick—the basic building block—of the wedding cake. The solar panel is the Lego of the solar farm. The server is the Lego of the server farm. This potent little idea has been applied to software, subways, hardware, hotels, office buildings, schools, factories, hospitals, rockets, satellites, cars, and app stores. Its applicability is limited only by imagination.”

1. Accelerating India’s Development

For far too long, books on India’s public policies and governance suffer from one critical handicap: they are inconsiderate of the real-life constraints imposed on the politicians (and bureaucrats.) In newspaper Op-eds, we often see authors argue that India must spend more on health or education or defense or whatever is the author’s pet peeve. 

But Karthik eloquently argues that spending on a sector by itself will not lead to better outcomes. A far better lever is to improve the state capacity that will have a ripple effect on every aspect of government work. Karthik’s unique ability to merge academic rigor with practical reality is the stand out feature of this book. From health to human resources, education to expenditure management, this book is a tour de force on every sector critical to India’s growth.

I especially liked Karthik’s solutions towards capacity building of existing government officers and in hiring new ones, with a practicum based framework. I am confident that if any state government implements it, even on a pilot basis, the cost savings and the improvement in employee skills will be tremendous. 

This book is an essential read for politicians, bureaucrats, civil service aspirants and every citizen eager to understand and contribute to make India a better-governed nation.  

“Government work is God’s work”

That’s my 2024 reading list! What were your favourite reads this year?