📚My Favorite Books of 2024📚
Welcome to issue #21 of Indiscrete Musings
I write about the world of Cloud Computing and Venture Capital and will most likely fall off the path from time to time. You can expect a bi-weekly to monthly update on specific sectors with Cloud Computing or uncuffed thoughts on the somewhat opaque world that is Venture Capital. I’ll be mostly wrong and sometimes right. Views my own.
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If you know me, you know I love to read. Below is a list of my favorite books this year, each paired with a quote that resonated deeply with me. These are the ones I found truly worth reading in their entirety.
One of the best habits I've embraced recently is letting go of books that don’t capture my interest—time is finite, and the joy of being engrossed in a great book far outweighs the effort of finishing one that doesn’t inspire.
I hope this list introduces you to a new title or two. If you have any recommendations, I’d love to hear them. Happy reading!
The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend by Rob Copeland (Amazon)
Once wealthy, however, people were less consumed by the hunt for the next score. They were more focused on staying rich than getting richer, and their strategy focused on steady, long-term growth and the minimization of the risk of big losses.
The Orphaned Adult: Understanding and Coping with Grief and Change after the Death of Our Parents (Amazon)
Whatever our relationship with them and however well or poorly we get along, parents project an illusion of permanence, a constancy that suggests life to be a knowable, reliable, trustworthy, and, therefore, feasible endeavor.
They Called Us Exceptional by Prachi Gupta (Amazon)
Everywhere I went, people saw me as Indian. But India was the only place in the world I felt American.
*Awareness: Conversations with Masters by Anthony De Mello (Amazon)
You want happiness? You want freedom? Here it is: Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality. It’s probably too startling
Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain by Shankar Vedantam (Amazon)
We are in a war with ourselves. Our minds are not designed to see the truth, but to show us selective slices of reality, and to prompt us toward predetermined goals. Even worse, they are designed to do all this while giving us the illusion that we are seeing reality. We can believe that we are thinking clearly, acting rationally and fighting for the truth, even as we are beguiled into seeing what is functional for our groups, our families and ourselves—and imagining it to be the truth.
How to be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins by Helena De Bres (Amazon)
This tendency to binarize twins is rife in individual families, and in myth, art, and culture across the board. Twins are such a lightning rod for binary thinking that they’re often used as avatars for other salient binaries in debates over politics and the good life, and then those cultural avatars are used to reinforce the binarization of real-life twins.
Leadership by Henry A. Kissinger (Amazon)
Any society, whatever its political system, is perpetually in transit between a past that forms its memory and a vision of the future that inspires its evolution. Along this route, leadership is indispensable: decisions must be made, trust earned, promises kept, a way forward proposed. Within human institutions – states, religions, armies, companies, schools – leadership is needed to help people reach from where they are to where they have never been and, sometimes, can scarcely imagine going.
America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything by Cristopher Rufo (Amazon)
This move from critical theory to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” was a stroke of genius. With one hand, the critical theorists invented subtle new oppressions; with the other, they administered the cure.
Who is Michael Ovitz? by Michael Ovitz (Amazon)
The other thing that would differentiate us—and it was a big one—was that we would create work for our clients, not just field offers.
Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid (Amazon)
Our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.
All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung (Amazon)
All members of a family have their own ways of defining the others. All parents have ways of saying things about their children as if they are indisputable facts, even when the children don’t believe them to be true at all. It’s why so many of us sometimes feel alone or unseen, despite the real love we have for our families and they for us.
Same As Ever by Morgan Housel (Amazon)
Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible. But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I’d take.
The Most Important Thing: Illuminated by Howard Marks (Amazon)
Investing is a popularity contest, and the most dangerous thing is to buy something at the peak of its popularity. At that point, all favorable facts and opinions are already factored into its price, and no new buyers are left to emerge
Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell
To teach us humility? Perhaps we are meant to learn that “man is too frail and proud an animal, he builds too securely on fragile foundations,” or perhaps we are meant to long for the next world instead, because everything in this world can be lost.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Best Investment Guide That Money Can Buy by Burton G. Malkiel (Amazon)
Human nature likes order; people find it hard to accept the notion of randomness. No matter what the laws of chance might tell us, we search for patterns among random events wherever they might occur—not only in the stock market but even in interpreting sporting phenomena.
The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak (Amazon)
Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.
The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald Hoffman (Amazon)
It’s all about struggles between genes. Which is to say, it’s all about fitness—the central concept of evolution by natural selection. Genes that are more adept at elbowing their way into the next generation are said to be fitter.
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler (Amazon)
Psychologists tell us that in order to learn from experience, two ingredients are necessary: frequent practice and immediate feedback.
Relentlessness: From Good to Great to Unstoppable by Tim Grover (Amazon)
The greats never stop learning. Instinct and talent without technique just makes you reckless, like a teenager driving a powerful, high-performance vehicle. Instinct is raw clay that can be shaped into a masterpiece, if you develop skills that match your talent. That can only come from learning everything there is to know about what you do.
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight (Amazon)
The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.
The Arsonists City by Hala Alyan (Amazon)
More exhausting than wealth is the appearance of wealth. The money, the money.
All About Derivatives by Michael Durbin (Amazon)
You might think there are a zillion different reasons for using derivatives, but it turns out they are mostly used for just one of two basic functions: hedging and speculation. Hedgers use derivatives to manage uncertainty, and speculators use derivatives to wager on it.
Winners Never Cheat by Jon Huntsman (Amazon)
I define those who have gained fame and fortune not so much by their achievements as by how they got there—the enormous odds they overcame, the dignity and courage they displayed in the process, the way they treated people ethically and fairly along the way.
Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg (Amazon)
The first one is that many discussions are actually three different conversations. There are practical, decision-making conversations that focus on What’s This Really About? There are emotional conversations, which ask How Do We Feel? And there are social conversations that explore Who Are We? We are often moving in and out of all three conversations as a dialogue unfolds. However, if we aren’t having the same kind of conversation as our partners, at the same moment, we’re unlikely to connect with each other.
Therapy by Stephen Grosz (Amazon)
Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.
The Price of Inequality: How Today Divided Society Endangers our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz (Amazon)
The real key to success is to make sure that there won’t ever be competition—or at least there won’t be competition for a long enough time that one can make a monopoly killing in the meanwhile. The simplest way to a sustainable monopoly is getting the government to give you one. From the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, the British granted the East India Company a monopoly on trade with India.
Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600s to Present by Fareed Zakaria (Amazon)
One sign of a revolutionary age is that politics get scrambled along new lines.
How to Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Amazon)
The psychologist Daniel Gilbert has a famous saying about this: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.”
Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns (Amazon)
Between 2020 and 2022, the top 1 percent gained twice as much in income and wealth as the remaining 99 percent of people in the world.
Brave New Worlds: How AI Will Revolutionize Education by Salman Khan (Amazon)
The most successful students will be those who use AI to help make conceptual connections for developing ideas. Students who learn to use AI ethically and productively may learn not only at an exponentially higher rate than others but also in a way that allows them to remain competitive throughout their careers. They will have a deeper understanding of the given subject matter, because they will know how to get their questions answered. Rather than atrophying, their curiosity muscle will be strengthened.
How to Tell a Story: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Storytelling for Writers and Readers by Aristotle (Amazon)
All storytelling is a kind of imitation—Just as painters represent and interpret the world around them, writers tell of people, places, and things from real life in their stories. Even the most imaginative stories reflect the world as we know it; otherwise no one would be able to relate to them.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (Amazon)
Our life is what our thoughts make it.
A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs that Made our Brains by Max Bennett (Amazon)
What separates you from an earthworm is not the unit of intelligence itself—neurons—but how these units are wired together.
Grief is for the People by Sloane Crosby (Amazon)
Denial is also the weirdest stage of grief because it so closely mimics stupidity. But it can’t be helped. I can’t be helped. I am holding these losses as an aunt might, as if they are familiar but not quite mine. As if they are books I will be allowed to return to some centralized sadness library.
Languishing by Corey Keyes (Amazon)
Adversity and negativity are natural—suffering exists!—but we can live in a way that mitigates the problems caused by avoidance or repression of negative experiences. We must learn to respond to adversity and negative emotions based on personal values.
The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis by Richard Rohr (Amazon)
Sanctify yourself and you will sanctify society.
Aristotle’s Way by Edith Hall (Amazon)
Aristotle believed that if you train yourself to be good by working on your virtues and controlling your vices, you will discover that a happy state of mind comes from habitually doing the right thingHonor: A Novel by Elif Shafak (Amazon)
Mothers don’t go to heaven when they die. They get special permission from God to stay around a bit longer and watch over their children, no matter what has passed between them in their brief mortal lives.
Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories by Amiyah Ghosh (Amazon)
East India Company, from 1772 to 1850, established extensive opium supply chains … creating the world’s first drug cartel.’52 This system was, therefore, on its own terms, one of the most successful commercial ventures in human history, producing immense profits for the British Empire for well over a hundred years. The opium trade was thus an essential element of an emerging capitalist system that was then spreading rapidly across the globe. Yet, far from being a free market, this system was firmly founded on colonialism and race; in that sense it was an instance of what Cedric J. Robinson called ‘racial capitalism’.
Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy (Amazon)
Our nation’s tendency to treat substance use as a crime rather than a medical condition is more than a century old, and that history is steeped in racism as a tool for generating wealth.
Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Operation Ever by Joseph Cox (Amazon)
These companies were just as valuable as some of the funding rounds that Silicon Valley startups received. They pulled in tens of millions of dollars of revenue and took buyouts from investors. The industry had its own high rollers, disruptors, up-and-comers, and rock-bottom failures. Some made enough money to get by, while others skyrocketed to global popularity.
Why War by Richard Overy (Amazon)
Belief as a driver of war is not a general characteristic of all warfare past or present, but religious faith or supernatural beliefs or political ideology can clearly explain the decision for war in a variety of different contexts across thousands of years of human history.
The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People by Paul Seabright (Amazon)
In the end a deep puzzle remains. Narratives may be compelling in the sense that we love to hear them and tell them, and we plunder their content for inspiration of all kinds. But do we really let them distort the way we believe the world to be—and if so, why? The current state of research leaves the question wide open. What’s clear is that narratives count among our favorite tools of persuasion, and that our fascination with them goes back a very long tim
The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power our Lives by Ernest Cheyder (Amazon)
The United States is expected to produce just 3 percent of the world’s annual lithium needs by 2030, even though it holds about 24 percent of the world’s lithium reserves.
Forest of Noise: Poems by Mosab Abu Toha (Amazon)
Ramadan 2024 Around that dinner table, missing are the chairs where my mother, my father, and my little sister used to sit with us on Fridays, and where my siblings and their kids used to drink tea at sunset when they visited. No one is here anymore. Not even the sunset. In the kitchen, the table is missing. In the house, the kitchen is missing. In the house, the house is missing. Only rubble stays, waiting for a sunrise.
A Man for All Markets by Edward Thorpe (Amazon)
Understanding and dealing correctly with the trade-off between risk and return is a fundamental, but poorly understood, challenge faced by all gamblers and investors.
Troubled by Rob Henderson (Amazon)
I made a few hundred bucks that summer. I started to understand that there were reliable connections between good choices and good outcomes and bad choices and bad outcomes. It had taken a long time for me to internalize these connections because outcomes were so often delayed.
The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson (Amazon)
It wasn’t the fucking of the banking system. It wasn’t an “exogenous shock to consumption savings preferences.” It was inequality. Inequality that would grow and grow, and get worse and get worse until it dominated and killed the economy that contained it. It wasn’t temporary, it was terminal. It was the end of the economy. It was cancer. And I knew what that meant. It meant I had to buy green Eurodollars.
Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar (Amazon)
Can you imagine having that kind of faith?” Cyrus asked. “To be that certain of something you’ve never seen? I’m not that certain of anything. I’m not that certain of gravity.” “That certainty is what put worms in their brains, Cyrus. The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.