Peter Bandettini
At any given time, I have two different books that I bring up at various times throughout the day on my kindle app on my phone or kindle device, and an audiobook at the ready to bring up during a long drive or while working out. Books provide a welcome balance to my typical workday reading of technical papers. In 2024, I managed to read 21 books and listen to 3. They include a mix of science fiction, history, science, biography, productivity, running-related, and some re-reads of those that influenced me in the past. I’ve been surprised with how much more I get out of the second or third read of an influential book. Hopefully, what I write about these might motivate you to take a look. I list them in the order that I completed them.
Jan 16: The Devil’s Cup, by Stewart Lee Allen
When I stared this, I was expecting to read about the history of coffee. This interest was piqued by my visiting a coffee plantation in Costa Rica and realizing I didn’t know where coffee first originated and when or how it spread around the world. I was curious. This book is a wild first person account of the author traveling the route that coffee first spread. He gets into some truly crazy situations. Added along the way are the highlights of how coffee spread throughout the world, how it influenced the world, and how it has evolved. Very fun read!
Jan 29: This book will make you dangerous, by Tripp Lanier.
I think I heard of this through a podcast as a fresh take on changing one’s perspective towards what matters – less outcome focused and more experience focused. One other good point brought out is that our instinctive fear of the unknown was optimized for a much more dangerous world. Now, the downsides in the equation for determining novel action are very minimal, and the upsides are overwhelmingly good. His point is that we are instinctively holding ourselves back when we don’t have to anymore.
Feb 1: Of Good and Evil, by Daniel G. Miller
Super light reading and average writing, but a fun story that is part two of the “Tree of Knowledge” trilogy about a few people who have figured out, apparently using logic and mathematics, to predict and manipulate events. This idea is a smaller scale version of “psychohistory” in Asimov’s Foundation series. A good and bad group of people both have this unique set of skills but there is one master book describing fully the method, and of course this makes an interesting story as the bad group tries for world dominance.
Feb 5: The Tree of Life, by Daniel G. Miller
Of course I had to read the concluding book, as the last one ended on a cliffhanger. Just awful writing but again, compelling. I couldn’t put it down. After I was done I felt like I just gorged myself on the mental equivalent of several boxes of Oreo cookies.
Feb 17: Brainiac, by Ken Jennings
My wife and I often play each other in Jeopardy as we follow along (she always wins), and of course Ken is a legend on this show – the Jeopardy GOAT and now the host. I wanted to read this to get an insight into what happens behind the scenes and to get a glimpse into how Ken thinks. Good book, but at times it goes over a cliff of endless trivia. It also describes an entire subculture of trivia contest fanatics which was eye opening.
March 13: The Precipice, by Toby Ord
After starting the year with light reading, I thought that reading a book on all the ways humanity might become extinct or civilization might end would be a nice change of pace. This was sobering and heartening at the same time. Sobering because it highlighted all that can go very badly, but heartening that the probabilities were low enough in the short term at least. In the very long term, we are all doomed of course. Great read that was truly perspective building and a solid attempt to put such scenarios into a statistical framework – nearly impossible, but he makes a great effort to do it.
April 24: Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, by Geoffrey West
Mind blowingly insightful, presenting a wonderful framework for appreciating the interaction of linearities and nonlinearities in everything – how literally everything should be put in this perspective for revealing insight into how systems grow and interact, and how long they last.
May 5: The boys in the boat, by Daniel James Brown
So, SO much better than the movie that came out about a year ago. The movie was good but this book was so well researched, and filled with so much gritty detail on all the big and small struggles facing the rare group of rowers from the University of Washington who went on to win gold in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Inspiring. Outstanding writing!
May 10: Slow Productivity, by Cal Newport
I really like Newport’s views and his writing. He’s a computer scientist here in DC, and seems to have figured out how to protect himself from the frantic life led by most academics who try to balance creativity, productivity, and the rest of our lives in order to accomplish great things and feel fulfilled. Essentially, we need to do fewer things and work at a natural pace. There you have it.
May 23 (Audiobook): Is this anything? by Jerry Seinfeld
I love Seinfeld’s humor and also really respect his work ethic and perspective on his craft. This is a book, narrated by Seinfeld, better listened to than read as it’s essentially a catalogue of his best jokes organized by year.
June 8: Run Strong, Stay Hungry, by Jonathan Beverly
This is a compilation of outstanding essays on and interviews of older runners (from average to former world class), filled with information on how to stay mentally fresh and physically healthy to run for fun or competition later in life. It’s truly hard to deal with slowing down and getting more brittle. I’m starting to struggle with this in my own running so this book was relevant to me. I’ve been running since 1982 and was recently experiencing an uptick in injuries, resulting in a bit of mental fatigue. I read this book right when I needed it.
June 11: Do the right thing, do it all the time, by Frank Leigh
I usually glance at these books and move on, but there was something about the simple, direct, spot-on wording and organization of the chapters in this book that caused me to eventually purchase it. It’s perhaps the best book I have ever found to give my boys to have at hand throughout their lives as they grow and become independent. Good stuff. All of it. Direct, true, and not pedantic.
June 25: Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem
My science fiction itch needed to be scratched, and this classic was just the thing I needed. It’s basically about a group of astronauts who have an outpost on a planet where they find sentient life, however the sentient life is not on the planet but rather the planet itself. Well described. It started well, but then started to wander all over the place. The author seemed to become lost in his own prose at times.
Sept 2 (Audiobook): The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin
This was a re-read but I decided to listen to the audiobook rather than read the book as I did before. I love Josh Waitzkin and everything he represents. His focus is on learning to learn. Listening to the book on a long drive gave some perspectives that I missed while reading it. Definitely worth listening to or reading. He and Cal Newport have quite a bit of overlap, as he constantly suggests that we need mental space to iterate and focus.
Sept 3: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig
Like Josh Waitzkin (mentioned above) and many others, I was profoundly influenced by this book when I first read it in high school. I read it again in the mid 90’s. I felt I needed to read it a third time, and was happy I did. Here he follows the story of the author before and after he had electroconvulsive therapy to treat his psychiatric problems which emerged as he was developing his own branch of philosophy to address the conflict of romantic and classical perspectives through the concept of “quality.” This pursuit of a clear conception of Quality was motivated by his realization that while he was told by the school where he was teaching to teach high “quality” work, no one really knew what “quality” was. He defines “quality” as the relationship between subject and object. I look at it as a manifold where all interactions with reality are optimal – those that exist closest to this optimal manifold experience a high level of quality. The universe progresses over time along this manifold. It is impossible to directly “know” quality purely by classical or romantic approaches but is the backdrop of all that exists. It is so hard to summarize this book in a paragraph! Importantly, this book is so compelling partly because the story of his developing his thoughts is so well written. The second story of his travels with his son through the upper midwest and west as he works though his past is also compelling as he is pursuing the ghost of the person he once was and slowly rediscovering his thoughts.
Sept 28: A universe from Nothing, by Lawrence M. Kraus
A good book that helps address the question of how something could come from nothing. It gets you there but of course not all the way. It also gives so many other mind bending insights into the structure of the universe. Before time, whatever that means, fluctuations in energy manifest as matter. Kraus is both a great physicist and a great writer – a rare combination. He is also even handed – not claiming that he’s solved the problem of existence of reality. He just sets up the mystery in a way that better delineates what we know and what we don’t.
Oct 3: A boy from Bethesda, by Dennis McKay.
I have lived in Bethesda for 26 years, so this caught my eye. It’s a story, based on the childhood of the author, of a boy growing up about a mile from where I now live, adjacent to Arylawn Park. His depictions of the 50’s there and constant mention of specific streets and places was super interesting to me as I enjoy the process of fully placing myself in the past context. The story is about an unfortunate boy who sadly blunts his entire life and falls well short of his potential for happiness because of an incorrect medical prognosis when he was young. Several times, I would run over to Arylawn Park and just try to vividly imagine how things were back then.
Oct 17: The Singularity is Nearer, by Ray Kurzweil
I never read his first book predicting the singularity – where AI becomes sentient and where, perhaps, humanity is “integrated” into a silicone framework. I didn’t feel that this current book added too much fundamental insight – just an update. To a degree we are already becoming integrated with AI as our attention is increasingly on our phones and our decisions are more fully guided by – and dependent on – algorithms that we don’t understand. Already, AI can do many things considered “intelligent” much more effectively than we do. He still predicts 2029 will be the date that something profound happens, but I still think it will be a more gradual continuous, yet exponentially increasing process. We are not even close to understanding the algorithms that the brain uses, much less are able to re-create them. Indeed we might create artificial sentience but it will be very different from what we know it to be from our interactions with other humans.
Nov 1: Timescape, by Gregory Benford
A science fiction novel by a well known author. This one plays with the idea of of communicating with the past by modulating “Tachyons” which travel faster than the speed of light (so go back in time), and interestingly, according to this story, slightly influence NMR spectra of all things. It goes between 1998 and 1968, with the 1968 scientists highly confused but starting to figure out the pattern of the NMR spectra interruptions, and with the 1998 scientists increasingly desperate. The paradoxes that ensue from this are explained somewhat, but the ending is not a happy one.
Nov 8: Once a Runner, but John L. Parker
My runner friends speak of this “classic” in running lore with reverence, so I felt I should give it a read. It does a good job of getting into the head of a competitive, driven runner, and portraying the college and professional context of a runners life, including outstanding depictions of the feelings associated with workouts and races as well as the subtle rivalries that go on as the tribe of runners works out its pecking order. It mixes actual history with slightly altered history. Some depictions are extreme and just hard to believe. I could rant about them, but wanted only to emphasize that the last third of the book was truly outstanding – making the book the classic that it is. I could not put the novel down towards the end, and as a result, lost quite a bit of sleep one night.
Nov 28: How bad do you want it? by Matt Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald is perhaps the best sports/running author today. He talks quite a bit about the mental aspect of running. This book is a dive into what differentiates those who succeed vs those who don’t. At the highest levels, physical abilities are nearly equal, so the mental aspect is so much more important. It’s a good book and a collection of nice stories of success, but does not quite hit the mark. His most novel contribution is laying out the concept of mental coping mechanisms during a race and during training.
Dec 9: Rewrite, by Gregory Benford
This is not a sequel to Timescape, but rather a completely different second book by the same author of a person reliving his life, starting at 16, after he is killed in a car accident in his late 40’s, possessing the knowledge he had when he died. Interesting to see what happens. He tries to imbue some physics descriptions as he’s he’s a physicist in his day job. Fun story. Benford gets long winded a times, but overall is pretty good.
Dec 22: Revenge of the tipping point, by Malcom Gladwell
This is the followup book to Gladwell’s “tipping point” that re-examines the central theme of how ideas can spread rapidly through society. He used the analogy to an epidemic and talks about analogous “superspreaders.” He introduces the concept of the overstory setting the broader context for rapid change. It’s a good continuation but not as inspired as his original.
Dec 23 (Audiobook) : Made in America by Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson is just amazing. His books are densely packed with fascinating facts that are delivered with just enough irreverence and irony to keep you amused and engaged. This book is essentially a history of America though the lens of what is idiosyncratic about America, from the first colonists to the present day.
