Skip to main content

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!

********************************

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

More Posts

Inflation: The Problems It Creates and the Policies It Requires by Arthur M. Okun, Henry H. Fowler, and Milton Gilbert

This book is a transcription of a lecture series on inflation given at New York University back in 1969 by speakers Arthur Okun, Henry Fowler and Milton Gilbert. These three men, all important "experts" in their day on managing the economy, and all speaking with great confidence in the correctness of their policy prescriptions, had no idea how wrong they would be--about everything. As a result, this book indirectly teaches humility, and it once again teaches how incredibly useful it is to read books outside of the time period in which they were written. Each speaker holds forth on various orthodox economic ideas of that era: presumed trade-offs between inflation and unemployment, how to "fine-tune" the economy, and (most hilariously) the critical importance of gold as the foundation of the international monetary system.  Today, we can look back on these confidently-given speeches with rich irony, knowing that in less than a year, the 1970s would dunk on all three sp...
Read more

Merchants of Grain by Dan Norman

[Recommended for investing geeks and students of power structures. Everyone else can take a pass.] Certain industries or companies need to be "visible" and in the public eye. See, for example, story stocks like Nvidia, or branded consumer products companies (which require name recognition and habit formation in order to sell product), or any company run by a celebrity CEO. Think of this as one level of visibility. Note also: any publicly traded company--even if it has a name or a CEO nobody's ever heard of--must file financial reports and other filings. To have access to public equity markets and have your stock trade on an exchange, your company has to "come in and register" (to borrow the phrase from incompetent SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler), and this means putting a lot of information about your business out in the open. Now anybody can look at your filings, see your profitability metrics, see who your managers and directors and large shareholders are, and s...
Read more

The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann R. Wyss

Reading this famous book opens a window into the cultural and ethical milieu of early 19th century Europe. We see an idealized family facing severe challenges in an unknown and exotic part of the world, and doing so without despair or pessimism. To a modern reader, the Robinson family might resemble  The Cosby Show : the father comes across as a bit of a pedant, the children speak in complete and grammatically-correct sentences [1] , and the family solves problems in the book-chapter equivalent of a 30 minute TV segment. Other dubious elements of the story might amuse the adult reader: see for example their island's impossible array of wildlife and botany, or the family's ability to MacGyver almost anything out of anything. And yet one can easily see how this would be a wonderful and ethically nutritious story for a young person to read (or have read to him or her), as it conveys a range of non-cynical messages that are rapidly disappearing from the modern era: on not being id...
Read more