2024 Reading List: Books That Shaped Me Last Year

Exploring philosophy, fiction, and self-help through the books that shaped my 2024.

Can I be honest with you? I almost didn’t read these books…

This is how it goes: I start the year super motivated and ready to get started! But then comes February, or worse, March. I dread March—there is always a vacation that disrupts my flow. By the time I notice it, it’s been a few months with no progress. “I am running behind”, I tell myself. Thankfully, I start reading again, picking up the pace. Can you relate?

These are the books I read in 2024 and why you should consider reading a few this year.

1. The Obstacle is the Way

By Ryan Holiday

This book introduced me to Stoicism, the life of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and other stoics. I reflected heavily on one idea in the book: there will always be bad times—obstacles—and there will always be people triumphing during these adversities. Why not me or you?

“The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”

While meditating on this idea, I realized that most of the good things in my life have been the hardest—the path of most resistance. Moving to the United States, barely speaking English, starting college, the death of my father, my first engineering job, new projects at work, you name it. Every one of these events has taught me something, but at the time, I just perceived them as a “burden” or a “tragedy.”

“We forget: In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given.”

Whenever something is hard, it means that it is worth your while. There has never been a better time than now to do what you want. It wasn’t easier before; it is not easier now.

“Problems are rarely as bad as we think—or rather, they are precisely as bad as we think.”

There is so much to unpack from this book and the work of the stoic philosophers that it deserves a separate post. I will figure out what I can contribute to the available content on the Internet about the topic. Perspective, perhaps?

2. Letters from a Stoic

By Seneca

This book is a translation from Latin of letters from Seneca—a Stoic philosopher—to Lucilius—possibly the governor of Sicilia at the time. Each letter encapsulates a profound lesson from the mentor, Seneca, to Lucilius, the mentee. I think the reader should consider meditating on the significance of each letter instead of fast-reading this title.

In Letter II, Lucilius struggled with wealth accumulation and questioned how much wealth was “enough.” This is fundamentally an individual answer, and I think Seneca had a great response quoting Epicurus and adding, he wrote back:

“‘A cheerful poverty,’ he says, ‘is an honourable state.’ But if it is cheerful it is not poverty at all. It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more. What difference does it make how much there is laid away in a man’s safe or in his barns, how many head of stock he grazes or how much capital he puts out at interest, if he is always after what is another’s and only counts what he has yet to get, never what he has already. You ask what is the proper limit to a person’s wealth? First, having what is essential, and second, having what is enough.”

In Letter LXXVIII, Lucilius mentioned that he was sick and worried about dying. To what Seneca responded:

“Illness has actually given many people a new lease of life; the experience of being near to death has been their preservation. You will die not because you are sick but because you are alive. That end still awaits you when you have been cured.”

You can find Richard Mott Gummere’s free translation here.

Also, see Nero and Seneca, displayed in Museo del Prado in Madrid.

3. Dune

By Frank Herbert

While the movies are breaking records, the books are 10 times better.

To be clear, I am not an avid sci-fi reader. I picked this book because of the movie, but the story is so amazing that I could not stop reading it. From catching up with the jargon of Dune’s world—the worms, the spice, the sisterhood—to imagining Paul Atreides struggling to learn how to “sandwalk,” it was captivating.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

One last thought on Frank: It is impressive how far along he was on the idea of society delegating our thinking to computers. All I could reflect on were large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

This was published in the 1960s… computer-wise we were in a very primitive state.

Highly recommended.

4. Dune Messiah

By Frank Herbert

Dune Messiah is an amazing follow-up to an already great story. It complements the story of now Emperor Paul Atreides—Muab’Dib, so-called by his followers. It shows the complexity of running an empire, betrayal, treachery, and significant incidents in the storyline that change everything.

“They are not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”

There is a major plot twist in this book, and the writer nails it at the end. Of course, I won’t spoil it for you but know that if you get to the end of the book, you’ll not be disappointed.

“Some lies are easier to believe than the truth.”

If you decide to get into Frank’s work, you must read at least Dune and Dune Messiah.

5. Effective Rust

By David Drysdale

Rust is one of this decade’s most revolutionary programming languages.

Rust promised to fix the non-trivial “footgun” in other programming languages without impacting performance: zero-cost abstraction. After launching software to production written in Rust, I can confirm that the language delivers on its promise. However, developers—myself included—can still do terrible things in Rust. As I told a former coworker, Rust does not fix bad code and/or design, but it doesn’t let you express non-trivial bugs unconsciously—that’s the bang for your buck.

In Effective Rust, David Drysdale provides guidelines to reduce the anti-patterns that the Rust community has discovered over several years, and based on the author’s experience writing Rust at Google.

“In Rust, there's an enum for just this purpose: always encode the result of an operation that might fail as a Result<T, E>.”

While this may look obvious to a seasoned Rust developer, it is surprising that new Rust writers do not consider idiomatic Rust first and, instead, fall into the trap of writing it the C or C++ “way.” This book is well-written and as great as the classic Effective C++ series.

“The balance of factors so far suggests that you should prefer generics to trait objects, but there are situations where trait objects are the right tool for the job.”

If you are interested in learning Rust, I recommend reading Effective Rust as the second book in your journey, i.e., right before you start picking bad habits or starting a big project.

More Books I Read This Year

6. Dune Children of Dune

By Frank Herbert

7. A Man’s Search for Meaning

By Viktor Frankl

8. The Manager’s Path

By Camille Fournier

9. Built From Broken

By Scott Hogan

10. The Cash Flow Quadrant

By Robert Kiyosaki

11. Computer Networks Top-Down Approach

By Jim Kurose and Keith W. Ross

What’s Next?

I think I did a great job adding new genres of books to my repertoire. I introduced sci-fi, philosophy, psychology, and technical leadership while diving deeper into engineering.

In 2025, I plan to keep the momentum with more philosophy, leadership, engineering, and sci-fi. I also plan to improve my writing skills by reading lessons from great writers, and writing—cough, this Substack cough.

The 2025 Roster

Realistically, I will not read all of these, but here is what I am considering:

• 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, and The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Gene

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

• Ego Is the Enemy, and Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

• We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan B. Peterson

• Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body by Andrew Huberman

• God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert

• Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert

• Chapterhouse: Dune by Frank Herbert

• The Silo Series by Hugh Howey

• Three-Body Problem Series by Cixin Liu

• Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

• On Writing Well by William Zinsser

• The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly

• Staff Engineer Track by Will Larson

• The Art of Leadership by Michael Lopp

• Managing Humans by Michael Lopp

• First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham

• Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

• The Running Revolution by Nicholas Romanov

What are you reading in 2025? Leave any recommendations in the comments!