2024 in Books & Papers

My reading list of 2024 is marked by not having had much time to read, or rather, my reading being mostly in the form of code and papers. But here’s the list.

It’s not quite in the right order, because some of these I started last year and finished this year (similarly, books I’ve started but haven’t finished aren’t on this list). I’ve tried to put a tiny review with each one, but it’s not quite intentful enough to be actual reviews.

• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
  • I always struggle a bit with this type of literary fiction style, where texture is considered more important than progression. It wasn’t bad, precisely, it just wasn’t for me.
• The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies, Marianna Mazzucato & Rosie Collington
  • Another solid win from Mazzucato. I didn’t quite like it as much as some of her previous work, but it’s well argued and serves as a great indictment of the consulting industry.
• Working, Robert Caro
  • As a fan of Caro’s work, this was a must-read. Serves as a humbling. I may actually want to revisit this book next year, because I think it was saying some things that I wasn’t in the right headspace to absorb in February when I read it.
• Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
  • Oh, such fun! Wacky in a number of ways, while addressing issues of religion, authority, faith, nationality, and power.
• The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O, Neal Stephenson & Nicole Galland
  • A wacky time travel epic. I read this, as an experiment, as a physical book and audiobook, moving forward in synchrony. Interesting experience.
• The Book of the Book, Idries Shah
  • If the thickness of this book determines the value of its content, this one should assuredly be thicker.
• The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross (reread)
  • Oh, I was traveling and needed something lightweight. I revisited this in part because I had recommended it to a friend who came back saying he found it to be poorly written. I wanted to check if it was true. It wasn’t. It’s just a high-carb, low-protein snack of a book. Lots of fun though.
• Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Marc Reisner (reread)
  • I got the audiobook version of this, one of my favorites of the last decade, and went through it while on two road trips this year – one in the American South (West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York) and one in the West (California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah). It’s amazing.
• Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, George Crile III
  • I loved the movie and ran into the book somewhere. The greater depth of the book makes even more compelling characters out of both Wilson and Avrakotos, and the others who made this bizarre tale. Quite good!
• The End of the World is Just the Beginning, Peter Zeihan
  • As always with Zeihan, this is simultaneously good analysis and mildly frustrating hyperbole. He does a good job of drawing up the various conflicts, risks, and geopolitical and trade relationships, and what futures they may lead to, but he’s also trying to sell a thrilling book which serves as a marketing mechanism for his consulting firm, and the contents reflect that. Worth a read, but keep a pile of salt handy.
• Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek
  • Somebody recommended this to me. It wasn’t great.
• The Global Brain, Howard Bloom
  • I was expecting more of a deep dive into the works of Francis Heylighen and Valentin Turchin, but instead Bloom takes their premise and various other threads and runs off in his own direction for the most part. Interesting, but less deep than I’d hoped.
• Polostan, Neal Stephenson
  • Stephenson’s first novel of a new series. Way shorter than I’m used to from him, which in this case was both a blessing and a curse – now I’m waiting for the next one. Early 20th century Soviet-American society, with a lot of references to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933-1934, the Bonus Army, and other events in history that I was vaguely aware of but had little depth in. The book led me down quite a few Wikipedia sessions, unsurprisingly. Great.

Papers

I don’t quite religiously keep track of papers I read, although they often tend to end up in Zotero. I did try to keep better track this year than usually, but not everything made it through. 2025 will maybe see an improvement on this, although it’s the 6th and I was reading a paper yesterday and I didn’t put it in Zotero, so shrug. Anyway, here’s a selection of 2024:

• A Comparison of Current Graph Database Models (Angeles 2012)
• RTED: A Robust Algorithm for the Tree Edit Distance, Pawlik & Augsten
• Revisiting the tree edit distance and its backtracing: A tutorial Benjamin Paaßen
• Simple Fast Algorithms for the Editing Distance between Trees and Related Problems, Zhang & Shasha
• Gorilla: A Fast, Scalable, In-Memory Time Series Database
• The security blind spot: Cascading Climate Impacts and Tipping Points Threaten National Security, Laybourn et al.
• Cascading climate risks: strategic recommendations for European resilience, Townend et al.
• Arctic freshwater outflow suppressed Nordic Seas overturning and oceanic heat transport during the Last Interglacial, Ezat et al.
• Constraint solving for beautiful user interfaces: how solving strategies support layout aesthetics.https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2379256.2379268 — aside from a rehashing of the linear and bicubic constraint solving methods, says nothing really new. Conclusion: Bicubic constraint solving is prettier.
• A New Layout Method for Graphical User interfaces. https://vvise.iat.sfu.ca/user/data/papers/intuilayout.pdf — looks like it’s a really slow method, based on spring dynamics.