Every Book I Read in 2024, Ranked

Cheers to a great year of reading

1. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (are you really surprised out of ten)

This was my second reading of The Dispossessed, and it only cemented it as my favorite book of all time. I did some research on Anarchism for the video below, but this year I plan on diving deep into the history and varieties of Anarchism, so that I will have an even greater perspective when I inevitably revisit this for a third time. Le Guin’s writing is second-to-none, concise, intimate, lively, meditative, and I can only hope that I find an author that I appreciate to a similar degree in 2025.

2. Crime & Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky (‘pah! devil take it!’ out of ten)

There’s no real way to sum up Dostoevsky’s masterpiece that is Crime & Punishment in a couple paragraphs. I wrote a three part essay, two of which I turned into videos, and I still feel like I didn’t do it justice. For now, I would just encourage you to go out and read it for yourself. It sounds intimidating, but I actually didn’t find it too challenging of a read. I am excited to dive further into Dostoevsky’s ouvre in 2025, starting with The Idiot.

3. Siddhartha - Herman Hesse (wisdom over knowledge out of ten)

Think for a second of something you know nothing about. Physics, architecture, business, the history of park benches. Now imagine that, for some reason, you felt an incessant urge to learn all there is to know about one of these topics. Well, the good news for you is that we live in an age where the amount of knowledge readily available on any of these topics is enough to fill a hundred lifetimes. The bad news for you is, you only have one.

Now let’s say you do devote your one life to studying one of these topics. At the end of your life, even if you become the world’s preeminent expert on one minuscule branch of one of them, how arrogant would you have to be to think you understand life, the universe, and everything?

It’s an easy trap to fall into: the trap of constantly acquiring knowledge yet never acquiring wisdom. As such, the wisest among us accept that we can never truly know anything.

Siddhartha is a book that can speak to you wherever you are in life. I recently brought this book to a book club where the prompt was “a character you identify with,” and the first question I got was, “which Siddhartha are you choosing?” What he meant is, Siddhartha is in a constant state of change, of growth, of learning, and of self-realization. It’s a story of life’s confounding path. “Ridiculous is this path, it loops around, it may even go in circles. May it go where it will, wherever it goes I will follow.”

4. Vita Contemplativa - Byung-Chul Han (silence breeds originality out of ten)

Don’t let the snappy 100 pages fool you; this book is packed to the brim with original ideas. Byung-Chul Han draws from his vast pool of influences including Arendt, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Proust, Deleuxe, Rilke and more to construct an argument that is both radically simple and undeniably original.

Byung-Chul Han has a way of incisively cutting to the core of the problems created by technology, consumption, and the “compulsion towards communication” in our “active, performance-driven society.” With this volume, he encourages us to reject these compulsions in favor of contemplative inactivity, which “is not a weakness or a defect, but rather an intensity.”

Reading this book changed the way I see life, learning, and purpose. It furthered my belief in slowing down to think, to breathe, to give my ideas space to flourish, and it’s yielded dividends beyond comprehension. I plan on expanding my thoughts into a more detailed analysis soon, but I will leave you with this quote for now.

Only in inactivity do we become aware of the ground on which we rest, and of the space in which we are. Life enters the contemplative mode, and swings back to its secret foundation in being. It finds itself and looks at itself. It reaches deep immanence. Only inactivity initiates us into the secret of life.

5. Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu

ICYMI, I will be doing a 2025 readalong of Tao Te Ching, which is already underway! Read the first post on verse #1: Tao Te Ching #1: What is the Tao?

6. The Sympathizer - Viet Than Nguyen (two faces out of ten)

Nguyen isn’t interested in picking sides in the Vietnam War. People on all sides, he says, perpetrated lies, hypocrisies, failures, stupidities, vile immorality, and corruption. He simply presents a story, fictionalized but rooted in truth, and makes you think for yourself.

This idea—thinking for yourself—is a central theme of the book, represented by the narrators split psychology as “a sleeper, a spy, a spook, a man of two faces … able to see any issue from both sides.”

But I think Nguyen’s message goes further than simply seeing an issue from “both sides”. There are many sides to any issue, and seeing the world through a false dichotomy not only limits your understanding of its complexity, but if vilifies, or in some cases idealizes, the “other” and distracts your attention from truth.

7. A Clash of Kings - George RR Martin (Valar Morghulis out of ten)

Every time I consider the argument that A Song of Ice and Fire is not worth reading because GRRM will never finish the series, I feel conflicted. On the one hand, yes, it will be frustrating to finish 5 or 6 books with no resolution, but on the other hand, these stories stand alone in their beauty and complexity.

I look at quotes like, “He who hurries through life hurries to his grave,” and think it would be a disservice to myself to deprive myself of this writing. The ASOIAF series is full of these meditations on power, mortality, and politics; of philosophical endeavors into the nature of evil, the value of family, of duty, of loyalty. The richness of the worldbuilding is a feat in unfettered creativity, and I feel like I want to finish the series if only to be able to browse the ASOIAF wiki without fearing spoilers.

8. On Palestine - Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappé (depressingly accurate out of ten)

Structured as a conversation between political philosopher Noam Chomsky and Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, On Palestine is instrumental for anyone looking for a truthful retelling of the history of Palestine.

The tale of Palestine, from the beginning until today, is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession. Yet the world treats it as a multi-faceted and complex story, hard to understand and even harder to solve.

It doesn’t take more than a cursory 5-minute Google search to understand that Palestinians have been brutally oppressed for the past century, but this book puts into perspective how this fact is suppressed in western media in favor of the Israeli narrative of terrorism and self-defense.

9. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (progress is lovely, isn’t it? out of ten)

It's a world where everything is easy. Where insurmountable obstacles need not be overcome. Where desire sits within arm’s reach of fulfillment. Where obedience is drilled by "brains and buttocks, never with the fists." (42)

It's a world where everyone is happy, all the time. Where solitude is abnormal and thinking is alien. Where consumption is king and waste is unseen. Where people are pacified by pleasure, conditioned conformity, and if ever unpleasant emotions arise, there is always soma, the miracle drug that fills its users with empty serenity and raises “a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.”

Brave New World, to me, is about technology, and how we use it to pacify our unpleasant emotions. Feeling down? Throw a comedy on TV. Overwhelmed? Instagram reels. Existential crisis? Distract yourself with Reddit.

By allowing soma—technology—to dominate our consciousness, we may be escaping life’s burdens, but we’re also escaping life’s beauty, its passion, its equanimity, its chaotic splendor. As John aka the savage, says, “I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

video coming soon…

10. Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche (you superfluous people out of ten)

Honestly, it would be insane to try and review this book in this format. What I will say is that even though I probably disagree with more of Nietzsche’s philosophy than I agree with, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it because it made me critically examine my preconceived notions on things like compassion, selfishness, and power.

11. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (begone! vile insect! out of ten)

You shouldn’t go into Frankenstein expecting a fun horror story. This is a philosophical meditation on what it means to be human. Frankenstein tells a story of a scientist driven mad by a pursuit of glory, who in his blindness brings to life a creature stitched together from appendages of corpses collected from a graveyard.

Ironically, in Mary Shelley’s novel, it is Dr. Frankenstein who is the true monster, while the creature is deeply human. The creature reflects our deepest desires—love, acceptance—our darkest fears—rejection, loneliness—and our most vile impulses—rage, violence.

12. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love - bell hooks (maybe overly generalized but insightful out of ten)

13. Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin (sexy times in Paris out of ten)

14. Lady Oracle - Margaret Atwood (idk why this was the first Atwood I read out of ten)

15. What We Say Goes; Conversations on US Power in a Changing World - Noam Chomsky (Wow we really are the baddies out of ten)

16. The Burnout Society - Byung-Chul Han (self-exploition out of ten)

17. The Stranger - Albert Camus (absurd out of ten)

18. Sula - Toni Morrison (more-ison in 2025 out of ten)

19. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories - Franz Kafka (absurd AND bizarre out of ten)

20. The Word for World is Forest - Ursula K Le Guin (oh boy, here I go killing again out of ten)

21. Naked - David Sedaris (I like your funny words magic man out of ten)

22. The Pearl - John Steinbeck (greedy little munchkins out of ten)

23. How to Sit - Thich Nhat Hanh (radically simple out of ten)

24. Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris

25. The Fall - Albert Camus (insufferable protagonist out of ten)

26. Discourse on Colonialism - Aime Cesaire

27. Parable of the Talents - Octavia E. Butler

28. Dune Messiah - Frank Herbert

29. Regarding the Pain of Others - Susan Sontag

30. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

31. The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett

32. Babel - RF Kuang

33. Ancient Hawaii - Herb Kawainui Kane

34. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari

35. Mastery - Robert Greene

36. Dark Matter - Blake Crouch

37. Atomic Habits - James Clear

38. The Fellowhsip of the Ring - JRR Tolkien

39. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

40. Sophie’s World - Jostein Gardner