Favorite books of 2024

Like last year, I spent a fair amount of the year reading code and technical books. Every year I have this struggle. There is a lot going on in machine learning and engineering and I need to stay on top of it.

Yet, I also need to read fiction because if I only read tech books, they take away my creative energy rather than grant it, as fiction does. Fiction allows me to understand other points of view, transports me to universes of inner lives and dialogues of people who are so very different from me. Fiction empowers and gives hope. I consider reading fiction critical to a well-balanced and open mind.

So, what do? This year, I managed a pretty good balance of fiction and arts books to technical non-fiction by picking up a fiction book every time I finished a tech book. Hopefully this will continue in 2025.

Here were my favorite reads:

• Cathedral of the Sea by Ildefonso Falcones - One of the biggest recent creative impacts of my life was a trip I took to Barcelona in 2023. After that trip, inspired by the general vibe of the city and a visit to the Picasso museum there, I finished both Viberary and my embeddings text.

  After I came back, I started reading a lot about Barcelona, Spain, and the people who lived there. I read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Grape, Olive, Pig, the selected writings and art of Joan Miro, and Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar.

  Early this year, a friend gifted me Cathedral of the Sea, which is a sprawling historical epic about the construction of Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona. While reading it, I realized I had visited the cathedral, and was profoundly impacted by both the story and the history of the church. Reading this book led me to writing the keynote I gave at PyCon Italia in May, so in addition to being an enormously juicy historical read, it also leaked into my real life in an incredible way.

• A second complementary book was Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot, which I strongly, strongly recommend to anyone looking to understand the complexity of human choices (also taking place mostly in Spain/southern France.) When Picasso met and courted Gilot, he had already been divorced a handful of times, had baggage, was a notorious womanizer and notoriously difficult as a human being while also being the greatest artist of his generation.

  Knowing all of this, Gilot decided to enter a relationship with him. This book is a testament to all of the consequences of living with history while at the same time trying to remain human. Gilot herself was a very, very talented artist, and the book chronicles what it’s like to become a mother, an artist, live with the consequences of a relationship with someone who is unforgiving and removed from the world, all with a wry sense of humor.

  Françoise Gilot, Étude bleue

• Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez - I was struck to the bone by this book. I thought about it for many weeks after I read it and even had several dreams about it. It’s hard to explain because there is a lot going on, but at its core, the book is about Argentina’s historical memory of repression, about the relationships and contracts we have as parents to children and children to parents, about the limitations of friendship, all cloaked with the horror of the occult.

  There is a secret organization, the Order, that practice the occult and try to ask of supernatural forces the things that people always want from the supernatural: money, success, and most of all, immortality. The means by which Darkness grants this to them are horrifyingly cruel, though, and almost no one survives them. Into the order is born a child, Gaspar, to a Medium of the order, Juan. The book is about how Juan navigates his powers as a medium, tries to protect Gaspar, and then, in turn, how Gaspar protects himself.

  The book is sprawling, covering Buenos Aires, London, Africa, the Argentinan hinterlands, all the places of the earth where human ambition stretches and is shrouded in tension, mystery, magic, and some summoning scenes that I can’t get out of my head. The tension the author builds throughout the book is incredible and masterful, almost as powerful as the Order itself.

• The Rattle Bag edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes - In an age of LLM-generated poetry and machine learning curation (even coming from yours truly sometimes), it’s refreshing to have real people who love poetry curate it and show you what you need to read to touch grass. Seamus Haney, Ireland’s poet Nobel Laureate and Ted Hughes carefully curate a collection of poems that you need to read straight through to feel their effects. Or open a random page and read one whenever you want to feel human.

• The Tombs of Atuan - My only regret is that I came to Ursula K. LeGuin so late in life, and this might be my favorite of all of her books I’ve read so far. A girl is picked to be a priestess in a decaying shrine to an old religion. What will she do when she realizes everything she has trained for is a sham? What powers does she have? I cannot emphasize how much power, meaning, and empathy is packed into this, which is supposed to be a YA book. Aside from everything else that had struck me, in the new afterward to the book, was the following quote.. “The word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, skill, gift, art the mastery of a craft…and there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others.” I’ll be thinking about this quote for a long time.

• The C Programming Language - I’ve finally gotten to the point in my career where I can appreciate the elegance of this book. I took the summer to learn C and went through a course where the author (Dr. Chuck!) read through this book page by page.

  Everything that is good about technical writing and solid programming flows from this book, and while I don’t recommend it for beginning developers, there perhaps is a time in your career when it’ll be ready for you (and you for it), too.