2024 was a very particular year. I was busy from the beginning of the year until May, when I defended my PhD. May – July was a blur of celebrations and traveling. Then I spent the rest of the year desperately searching for a job, and got a lot of readings done during that time.
I read 27 books this year, this quantity ties with 2021 to be the most number of books I read in a year. Roughly 17 of the 27 were fictions, I found myself drifting towards fictions as I grappled with the frustrating reality of my job search journey.
1.The unbearable lightness of being – Milan Kundera
Got this book as a gift a couple of years ago and finally decided to read it. It is beautifully written, at times I felt the plot was evolving a bit too slow, but overall it was an enjoyable read. Through this book I learned about the Prague Spring and that part of the Cold War. I also watched the movie adapted for the book and can also recommend it.
2. Money and love – Strober & Davisson
This book was written by Stanford professors who taught the class with the same name in the Business School for many years. It is about how career oriented couples could have happy relationships. I don’t really have a relationship to try some of the advice so I can’t commend on how effective the book is.
3. Faust – Goethe
Having read a few other works by Goethe, I knew I was in for a treat before I started this one, and I was not disappointed. Goethe writes beautiful poetry and with such a whimsical imagination, that I was hooked once I started reading.
4. The worlds I see – Fei Fei Li
This was a gift from my mentor who saw some parallel with my life and that of Fei Fei’s, a professor of AI at Stanford University. We are both immigrants from China and started new life in the US as teenagers. From there, Fei Fei achieved great academic success, and her journey was authentically documented in this autobiography.
5. Sink the Bismarck – C. S. Forester
This is a short novel that tried to recreate the scenes that happened on the Bismarck and the other battleships that it encountered during WW2. All the dialogues were well written and kept me flipping the pages. Even though the fate of the Bismarck is written in the title, it was still very thrilling to page through.
6. A woman of thirty – Honoré de Balzac
As I turned 30 this year, I was intrigued by the title of this Novel by Balzac and I decided to read it. This is about a young woman who during the Napoleonic era, fell for a young man who good looks and with high military standing, despite her father not being very supportive. With just a few years, she realized her father was right, her husband was bringing her a lot of unhappiness and she had a hard time coping with it.
7. Balzac – Stefan Zweig
I have been fascinated by Balzac for quite a while, also Stefan Zweig for that matter, so I was very excited to read this biography. Stefan is such a great writer, he’s able to capture the inner spirit of Balzac as he navigated the up and down of his life, and described his love life in sometimes very humorous manners, that this biography felt more like a fiction than nonfiction. I enjoyed this very much and will be reading more biographies by him.
8. Death in Venice & 7 other stories – Thomas Mann
I saw the movie “Death in Venice” sometime ago, so when I saw this book on sale on the side of the road around 110-114th street, I was curious to pick it up. Having already read a novel by him last year, I knew he could write, but I was quite disappointed in his short stories. Other than “Death in Venice”, the other stories were mostly unremarkable and I struggled to finish them.
9. Wise blood – Flannery O’Conner
Also at the book stand where I got the “Death in Venice”, there was an old lady who praised this book so much that I bought it too. She specifically praised the brilliance of the ending, which I could see why, but otherwise I didn’t understand why the protagonist acted the way he did in many situations. Perhaps I should reading it again in some years, maybe things would make more sense then. I also watched the movie made from this and I thought it was well executed.
10. Eight days in May – Volker Ullrich
I read the biography of Hitler wrote by this guy from a few years ago and really enjoyed it, so I knew I could count on his writing for WW2 related affairs. This book details the events happened immediately after the ending of WW2, most are very hard to read, including how Russian soldiers arriving in Germany and killed (& raped) whole villages. There was also detailed description of Hitler orchestrating his own death. Because of the subject of the book, most of the information was rather fragmented and didn’t flow together very well, but I don’t blame it own the author.
11. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution – Uri Levine
This was gifted to me, a book about entrepreneurship. While I decided to fold on my startup, someday I may do another one, and I think this book shares some good wisdom about how to start and scale companies. Although it is entirely focused on software so it is less applicable to hardware.
12. A gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles
I’ve had multiple people recommend this book to me, so I was curious to finally read it. Around this time of the year (mid summer) was also when I moved out of Columbia housing in Manhattan into Westchester, into a house and without a car so I couldn’t do anything or go anywhere. The plot of the novel resonated with my personal situation. The novel is brilliantly written and kept me turning the pages, it also helped me learn a bit of Russian history as the country faced revolutions.
13. M&A titans – Brett Cole
This is an interesting book that discussed some of the leading personalities in investment banking from the 70s and 80s. There are some biographical sketches of each “titan”, although those felt very dry and awkward. The more intriguing parts were about their work. Also they all work extremely long hours, so it goes to show that to become the best in any industry, hard work is inevitable.
14. East of Eden – John Steinbeck
I borrowed this book from a friend’s shelf, I didn’t really know what to expect, but the book took me on a very fun and wild ride. Steinbeck is a great story teller and explained the dynamics between the characters really well. Having lived in the Bay Area for sometime, the backdrop of the story also sounds familiar, although the novel took place probably a couple of hundred years before modern times. I couldn’t put the book down once I started it, and I also watched the movie afterwards which was also well made.
15. The United States of Europe – T. R. Reid
I randomly found this book on a shelf, this book was written in 2004 so it’s 20 years old, a lot of information is no longer relevant, but it was still interest to read. For example, The author praised Nokia being a global telephone giant, but for anyone who has been around in the past couple of decades know how irrelevant they are now. It is crazy to think that within a span of just 20 years, the modern technology landscape changed so much.
16. The importance of being Ernest – Oscar Wilde
This is a short and very clever book. Easy to read and engaging. There was not a lot of character development yet the book still got me invested in the plot. I will definitely be reading more books by him.
17. A little life – Hanya Yanagihara
This is a gift from a friend from a few years ago. I was intimidated by the volume (800 pages) and didn’t finally have the courage to read it until now. I am really glad I did, because this is such a deeply emotional book and reading it made me access some of my inner emotions and traumas too. Although be warned this is a very sad novel and I cried multiple times reading it.
18. The invisible collection – Stefan Zweig
This is a collection of short stories by Stefan Zweig, and in my opinion I think they are of much higher quality than those of Thomas Mann. This is the second book I read by him this year and I am genuinely impressed, I will be reading more of him in the future. Also, I think if he didn’t commit suicide when he was still in his writing prime, I believe he would have won a Nobel Prize. Sadly as a Jew during WW2, even when he was able to live safely in seclusion in Brazil, the psychological toll was too much for him to bear.
19. The sun also rises – Earnest Hemingway
This is one of the most famous books by Hemingway, but I don’t really get the point of it. Sure, I enjoyed reading about the protagonist enjoying his life in Paris then watching bullfights in Spain, but I kept waiting for something more profound to happen and it never did.
20. Capitalism XXL – Geert Noels
I got this book when attending a Columbia Business School event some months ago. There are some similarities between this and book #15 from this list, both compares and contrasts the policies and economics of the US vs. Europe. This one is a lot more academic with lots of charts, and it is a lot more recent. Capitalism has grown out of proportion but sadly I’m not sure how anyone could make it right.
21. The custom of the country – Edith Wharton
This is a novel about socialite climbing through the social ranks in US and then in Paris by strategically associating herself with rich and noble men. She is completely selfish, does not care about her husband or child and only aims to reach for better materialistic life for herself. While the character is not likable at all, the storytelling was so charming that I couldn’t stop reading.
22. Slaughterhouse five – Kurt Vonnegut
This is supposed to be one of the greatest novels written in the 20th century but I don’t really see why. The whole thing is like a dream, the protagonist time travels to different periods of his life every few pages, and the story was not profound either. Surely there is the WW2 motif, but overall I don’t really get the point.
23. Zoo station – Christiane F.
I first watched a movie and a series based on this autobiography a few years ago, reading the book gave a lot more depth to it. This book is about a teenage drug addict in Berlin in the 70s , how she got into drugs, and prostitution from there, and then tried to get clean but failed many times. It is heartbreaking to read the series of events. I binge read this and finished in 2 days.
24. Genius – Harold Bloom
Prof. Bloom compiled a list of 100 authors he recommends and gave a several page introduction/ review for each of them. This is a big book, I didn’t read everything, because parts of it, especially when he analyzed poets I just simply couldn’t follow. But I did get quite a few good book recommendations from him, several books on this list come from this book.
25. Lady Chatterley’s lover – D.H. Lawrence
I got this book recommended to me by someone who seated next to me on an airplane at the beginning of the year. I thought this book touches on some interesting theme regarding love and fidelity. If a woman is no longer happy and satisfied in a marriage, should she seek others? The husband in this book lost his sexual abilities during the war, and the wife, Lady Chatterley, reluctantly takes on a lover who is the caretaker of their estate. Despite this guy comes from a lower class, they found love and solace with each other.
26. Revolutionary Russia – Orlando Figes
I first learned of Prof. Figes from a podcast hosted by Columbia Prof. Jeffrey Sachs a few months ago. Prof. Figes is a renowned scholar of Russia, and this book shows how knowledgeable he is. It was disheartening to learn that for roughly 100 years, possibly even longer, the Russian people endured tremendous hardship, with multiple revolutions, Stalin’s dictatorship, the cold war, etc. This book also gave me some insights into the historical backdrop of book #12. With the Russia – Ukrainian war still going strong, it is sad to see that the Russian people can’t seem to get a break.
27. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
This is a great novel about how the protagonist lost everything she had, in the end her life, for her out of marriage love affairs. Similar themes are shared with books #21 and #25 here, but unlike those that had good endings with extramarital affairs, this one ended tragically. It was painful to keep reading and watch her kept sinking deeper. On Christmas Day I watched a Ballet performance based on this at the Berlin Staatsoper, which helped me visualize the story.
The Logical Offering 