Top 10 books of 2024
The books that stood out the most for me in 2024. Good or bad .
Hello nerds ! I read around 20 books last year and I made a list of my favourites . Some were so entertaining I’d finish them in days and other were so meaningful they changed my life. Hopefully you pick one up and it does the same for you !
1.The brain (NewScientist)
This is definitely one of the books that changed my outlook on life. The supercomputer that is our brain has been developing in our heads for aeons. Now scientists are beginning to figure out how it works. Much like alien technology that has crashed onto earth, scientists are back engineering our brain to try and understand how we think. This book challenged my belief in free will and set me along the wonderful and extremely interesting path of neuroscience and I strongly recommend you read it.
10/10
2. Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
The Hound of the Baskervilles and a study in scarlet
Absolutely wonderful books. If you can get past the ye olde English writing, which is similar to watching a black and white movie, then I highly recommend this book for light reading . The Sherlock Holmes stories are easy to read short novels that are perfect for reading on trains or before bed or anytime really. I loved these books so much I went to the 221 baker street museum in London like a dweeb. They are short precise stories with clever endings and I highly recommend them.
9/10
3. The gambler
This is an autobiography by the self-proclaimed best gambler ever Billy Walters. It’s a truly fascinating story that also taught me a very effective trick to cheat in golf. It tells the story of Billy Walters who grew up impoverished in southern U.S.A and went from rags to riches again and again. He would work extremely hard and make millions in a profession and then lose it all to his vices and start again. The man has lived more lifes than a village and each one he details wonderfully in this book. Does he end up in the black at the end ? Well that’s something you’ll have to find out for yourself.
9/10
4.The Ghost Ship (Kate Mosse)
Absolute piece of trash. I hate to be negative and as a writer myself (and nowhere near the level of a novelist) I know how painful it can be for someone to dislike your work. It feels like a personal insult. Well fuck you then Kate Moss this book made me go to bed angry multiple times. When I start a book I have to finish it, I don’t know why I just do, so sometimes I get stuck reading about a girl boss who fights the patriarchy on her pirate ship with some bloody 15th century knock out gas contraption made from boat sails that doesn’t kill the pirates but incapacitates them so they can sit in court and listen to her be right. Honestly piece of shit .
3 mercuries in retrograde / 10
5. The Thursday Murder Club (Richard Osman)
Wholesome murder mystery book about friends in a retirement village who begin a murder mystery club to look at cold cases and see if they can solve them. Well written with an interesting story that will keep you guessing to the end.
7/10
6. Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)
This book shook me to the core and introduced me to stoicism. It talks of how a human’s purpose is to be social . Just as how bees make honey and horses run, a human is societal. As social creatures our job is to aid each other and be virtuous . Before reading this book I thought stoicism was all about being cold headed with an even colder heart but it’s actually a beautifully philosophy on how we should love each other and life.
However beware, I think I took the teachings too literally . I recently moved city into a shared house and ended up living with a terrible alcoholic who was just out of rehab. During the first month alone he had ruined the carpet and ripped out the toilet seat . My landlord rang me and asked if he should kick him out . I channelled my inner stoic and asked the landlord to forgive him and not to put him out on the street. The alcoholic bastard then made the next 6 months of my life extremely stressful .
So yea, read this book at your own peril.
10/10
7. Money (David Mc Williams)
David Mc Williams is a fantastic Irish economist with an excellent podcast he does with john Davis that I listen to all the time. So whenever he dropped this heater I picked it up immediately. It tells the history of money and argues that it is humanities greatest invention. It describes money as a kind of social universal language technology that acts as the fuel for innovation and the spread of ideas. As we are social creatures it makes sense that money, a social technology would be our greatest invention. This book is so dense with interesting tales of past monetary icons that I didn’t come close to retaining the information and I hope I find the time to reread this and be amazed all over again . Thieves, kings , emperors and geniuses all played a hand in the magic that is money and Mc Williams details it all wonderfully.
8/10
8.Stephen Hawking’s brief answers to big questions
(Young Stephen chilling at a certain island)
Here hawking makes extremely difficult concepts easy to read. Did you know a spinning top doesn’t slow down continuously but in packets of spins? Ok maybe he doesn’t explain it that well but I am an idiot so I shouldn’t act as the litmus test . He explains fascinating concepts like his hawking radiation where he proved that black holes have a faint glow emitting from them called hawking radiation. It occurs because Tiny twin particles are spontaneously created and destroyed everywhere in the universe. One plus and one minus , whenever they spawn they immediately crash into each other and are annihilated. However whenever this phenomenon happens around the horizon of a black hole, the pull of the black hole is so strong that it absorbs the negative particle. (Due to math I can’t understand the minus particle is sucked in more than the positive) So by absorbing these minus particles the black hole is actually shrinking and thus emitting radiation.
How mind blowing is that it absorbs particles but somehow shrinks. What will these nerds come up with next ?
8/10
9.The Castle Kafka
Brain bending stuff. Definitely not light reading . I think Hermes from futurama wrote this. A bureaucrat’s dream. Very interesting and a style of writing I’ve never come across before and some of the stories he tells in the novel still stick with me today. But honestly it can be too much at times and dare I say boring. Read this book if you want a good bit of self-flagellation.
7/10
10. The light between oceans
I picked this booked up because I thought it would be happy, wholesome reading before bed. This was the saddest book I’ve ever laid eyes upon. If you want a good cry, read this book. Holy moly it tugs at the heartstrings. I think what ruined my soul the most is that there is a child affected in it . Very good but just very sad so if you want to feel strong emotions, I highly recommend it .
9/10
So there you go , that was my top ten books of 2024. Do you agree or disagree with any of my selections? If so let me know in the comments and if you enjoyed please hit the like button it means a lot to me.