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Best and Worst Books, 2024

I read another 50 or so books in 2024, and these are the ones that stood out--the good and the not so good. Each link below will take you to my review and discussion notes.

If you'd like to support my work here, you can feel free to use this Amazon link to do your shopping, I'll be paid a modest affiliate fee at no extra cost to you.

Thank you for reading, and all the best for 2025!

See also!

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Best (5/5 stars or close):
The Odds Against Me by John Scarne
The Art of Contrary Thinking by Humphrey Bancroft Neill
The Shipping Man by Matthew McCleery
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Story of Silver by William L. Silber


Worst (1/5 stars or close):
How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter
Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautreamont (trans. Alexis Lykiard)
End Times by Peter Turchin

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Generative Energy: Restoring the Wholeness of Life by Ray Peat

A disorganized book by a highly-censored medical iconoclast. Despite its sloppiness, it will still send you down a lot of good rabbit holes. I don't recommend a labored, close reading of this book: just use it as an introduction to Ray Peat's dissident health and physiology ideas. In certain ways, we can think of Ray Peat, along with Robert Mendelsohn and Ivan Illich , as direct ancestors of the courageous COVID-era medical dissidents: doctors like Peter McCullough, Mary Talley Bowden, Pierre Kory, Kirk and Kimberly Milhoan, Paul Marik, Meryl Nass and Peter Gotszche, among others, who bravely spoke out against foolish lockdowns, hospital protocols, government mandates and the use of risky (but of course highly lucrative) therapeutics like Remdesivir--and were censored, suspended or fired for it. [1] As a general rule: in any knowledge domain you should always know who the dissident thinkers are. They are usually the ones who were right all along. [2] [A quick  affiliate link ...
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Deflation and Liberty by Jorg Guido Hulsmann

In the modern centralized monetary system, all values are inverted. Debt masquerades as money, the system imposes structural inflation and monetary debasement on everyone, and GDP "growth" is increasingly an economic illusion because of that inflation and debasement. Nearly everyone gets fooled into thinking their wages, home values and stock portfolios are "rising"--and this is yet another illusion thanks to the steady debasement of the money. In such a system, anyone living off wage income, who isn't (yet) an asset owner, gets squeezed a little tighter every year. And this is the primary reason we have a so-called K-shaped economy, where asset owners do well, while those living off their labor value don't. It all comes from steady, deliberate monetary debasement. Our author believes this is immoral, and he's right. He believes that the institution behind our monetary system (the US Federal Reserve) is immoral, and he's right. Further, he believes ...
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The Gypsies by Jan Yoors

A beautiful book about a beautiful people. Anyone tempted by the idea of escaping "civilized" society will be fascinated by the Rom people, as they get to pick and choose from the trappings of modernity in ways the rest of us simply cannot. The author, a Belgian, left his own society when he was just twelve and lived with a Rom clan for some ten years--astoundingly, with his parents' consent! This book is one of the rare first person accounts of a notoriously misunderstood culture. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] The Gypsies [1]  live by their wits, by their remarkable resourcefulness, by barter, and at times by petty theft. What they don't do is sit in traffic to drive to a job filing TPS reports all...
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