My 2024 in Books: A Year of Reading

I usually don’t write reviews for books on Goodreads. I do have some notebooks, but they are harder to browse. And when I try to take notes digitally, I end up spending too much time on trivial details. I decided to jot down a few notes on the books I read in 2024.¹ I won’t really write a lot about things that can be found on Wikipedia or Goodreads unless they affect my own view of the book or there is something special that I find interesting. I just want to record the thoughts and feelings that they invoked in me and whether I would recommend or to whom I’d recommend them.

NOTE: I’ll first drop the entire list as a table of content here. The books in each section are listed in reverse chronological order. Instead of going full chronological, I decided to go through them thematically, which I believe might make it easier for me to organize my thoughts and it might also be easier to navigate it this way.

Philosophy

Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge by Robert Audi

Epistemology by Audi was such a big waste of time. I usually choose books I read using a pretty thorough process. I skipped some steps when I added this one to my list and it made me regret. It is the sloppiest and least interesting book I’ve read in recent years and it is written on one of the most interesting subjects possible. As someone said, “Audi’s remarkable ability to make even the most interesting arguments sound tedious shines through his otherwise unremarkable prose…”.

It is supposed to be an introduction to epistemology. His approach to epistemology is worse than that of someone who never studies philosophy in his life would be: “we usually know …”, “we generally have no reason to doubt”, etc. abound with no support for these claims. He skips over the most important questions and arguments, hand-waves about everything that seems important; all counter-arguments are postponed until the last chapter, which handles everything to do with skepticism. In the meantime, he has so many pages to spare on his precious theological (more like Catholic) epistemology… Then, we reach the last chapter and it turns out, this chapter is actually a “refutation” of skepticism, instead of actually engaging with the subject.

(To be clear, I don’t expect any philosophy book to be neutral about the author’s views. I just expect the author to do justice to each major view. Especially when the author has a fringe view of the field and the text is supposed to be an introduction to the field.)

I honestly don’t know who at Routledge fucked up and published this book in the “Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy” series; the other books that I read from the series are excellent (see the sections on Metaphysics by Loux and Philosophy of Language by Lycan below²).

You know how someone praises someone or something you love for completely wrong reasons and it makes you wish you were dead? This book is the best example of that genre.

Philosophy of Mathematics by Øystein Linnebo

Philosophy of Mathematics by Linnebo was a very pleasant read on one of my favorite subjects in 2024. It is a very short book (less than 190 pages) and it also doesn’t assume much of the reader, either as prerequisites or co-requisites, so to speak. However, it manages to provide a nice overview of the important ideas about the philosophy of mathematics, with enough historical background and just enough technical details when needed.

There is another reason that increased my pleasure in reading this text. As I wrote in my recent post, Boston in Used Bookstores, I recently visited Bryn Mawr Book Store and found out that hundreds of books from the personal library of the great philosopher of mathematics, Charles Parsons were donated there. One of those books was a new edition of Word & Object by Quine, edited by Dagfinn Føllesdal. Linnebo was an advisee of Føllesdal and based on the book’s acknowledgements, a mentee of Parsons. I guess this extremely distant connection still somehow made me feel some sort of kinship with him.

I certainly recommend this book if you are interested in the subject.

The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things by A. W. Moore

“Pleasantly pedantic” might be the easiest way to describe Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. In this book, Moore considers the metaphysics of ~20 philosophers. In reality, he considers something closer to meta-metaphysics, which feels more like epistemology in this case. The selection of philosophers is one of the more unique features of this book. He gives roughly equal weight to early modern, analytic, and continental philosophers. I admit, I did not read all of the sections in the continental part but this was only because their making sense stopped making sense to me after a point. I still appreciate the thoroughness of the book; it convinced me that Hegel is not the most incomprehensible philosopher. His academic descendants outdid him in contradictions.

A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science by John Losee

A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science by Losee is, indeed, a historical introduction to the philosophy of science. I found the writing to be somewhat dry and some of the discussions were a bit superficial. I also did not really enjoy the organization; it is neither exactly thematic nor chronological but some kind of a mix. I certainly think that there was a serious effort to make the subject accessible and the right person might enjoy the book; it just didn’t work for me.

Thinking About Mathematics by Stewart Shapiro

Thinking About Mathematics by Shapiro is a pleasant introduction to philosophy of mathematics. It provides a great overview of most of the major views in philosophy of mathematics. This book is slightly longer than Linnebo’s Philosophy of Mathematics (~290) so it has more space to discuss the ideas in more detail and provide some additional viewpoints. I’d recommend reading both of the texts to anyone interested in the subject.

Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction by Michael J. Loux

I enjoyed reading Metaphysics by Loux a lot. The subject is obviously interesting itself but Loux structured the content well and wrote in a very readable language.

How to Do Things With Words by J. L. Austin

How to Do Things With Words by Austin was a big disappointment for me. I see his point; I agree with him on many issues. It is just that all of these could have been described in less than 10 pages. To be clear, I don’t find any fault with Austin; this book was compiled from his lecture notes after his death. I don’t see why the editors thought it was a good idea to publish this in the book form.

Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science by Richard DeWitt

Worldviews by DeWitt was a fascinating examination of approaches to science throughout the history. It takes the web of belief idea (from Quine) and applies it to historical figures. It makes it possible to understand how Aristotle can be so wrong about certain things (like physics) without doubting his intelligence. It also provides a nice balance of the history and philosophy (and their interplay). I think the book could use more sections on evolution and biology; it is a bit too physics-centric for my taste but it does an excellent job, given its focus.

The Social Contract & Other Later Political Writings by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau was an interesting writer. He has a lot of opinions and he is not afraid to share them. His Social Contract is another example of books that philosophers publish but feel the need to say that “this was supposed to be a part of a much larger work but my dog ate the rest” or something like that. See Locke below for a similar fate.

Amid his political ideas, he also has what I consider to be some insights about AI but it is a very vague and I might be reading too much into it. I might come back to this idea if I convince myself that he really was talking about something like AI.

Read him.

Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction by William G. Lycan

Lycan’s Philosophy of Language was a great introduction to the subject for me. I’ve been reading about philosophy of language for a while but I wanted to read an introductory text to get a bird’s eye view of the subject and I ended up liking the book a lot.

Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind by Paul M. Churchland

Churchland’s Matter and Consciousness is a deceptively small volume that packs a ton of interesting ideas and discussions about the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and AI. I think Daniel Dennett recommended this book somewhere and I can see how Paul and Daniel would get along well, based on what I read from them.

Two Treatises of Government by John Locke

Locke’s Two Treatises of Government is a classic and I won’t really review it. However, I think it makes sense to compare it to Hobbes. Hobbes tries to be as methodical as possible (as I write about it below in the Leviathan section) and, in the end, even if you may not agree with all his inferences, he provides a self-consistent viewpoint. Maybe consistent is too strong but what I want to say is that his views are certainly less contradictory than Locke’s. Of course, it is hard to measure contradictions but it is not impossible to check how often an author contradicts himself and/or feels the need to make some exceptions.

Another sense in which Locke’s work (especially the Second Treatise) is unsatisfactory is that most hard questions are in the end resolved by an argument equivalent to “because god told me so”. By contrast, although, Hobbes does spend a lot of time on religious subjects as well (half the book is about religion), his political arguments are based on human behavior and politics rather than some divine BS.

Locke claims that the second treatise was supposed to be part of a much larger work. So maybe he had more satisfactory arguments in the larger work but they got lost. It seems unlikely because it is not just that there are missing arguments; there already exist arguments that are unsatisfactory in the current text. Still, this gives a reason to give Locke some more benefit of the doubt.

I found the introductory text in the Cambridge edition of this work very interesting as well. It does a lot of work to pin down the time interval and conditions under which Locke wrote it, which changes the interpretations and possible motives.

Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection by Peter Godfrey-Smith

I’ve read most books by Daniel Dennett and when I saw his praise on the back of Godfrey-Smith’s book, I had to read it. It provides an interesting view about how we can define evolution and natural selection. I can’t say that he convinced me with his definition but he makes a lot of interesting arguments and I think I will come back to this work in a few years to give it another shot.

I definitely recommend it if you like books like Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Dennett or The Selfish Gene by Dawkins.

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

I have a love-hate relationship with Hobbes and his Leviathan. I really like how he starts the book with essentially what amounts to psychology, moves on to something like sociology and anthropology, and then gets into politics. He tries to be rigorous by imitating Euclid (just like Spinoza would try decades later); apparently he was impressed by Euclid’s geometry so much that he wanted to be a mathematician but it did not work out well for him. Of course, Euclid’s case was built on deduction; Hobbes’s case is built on induction, at best, if we can say that a case was built at all. However, it still makes a very interesting reading.

Politics by Aristotle

Aristotle’s Politics is another book that I am not going to review seriously for obvious reasons… However, I think it would be fair to note that it feels significantly less structured than Aristotle’s other works (especially the Organon). To me, it seems to be the result of at least three forces: (i) He is in a way responding to Plato directly so his structure is somewhat similar to that of Plato’s Republic. (ii) Certain parts of the text are almost certainly missing. (iii) The text was probably edited heavily until it reached the form in which it survived today. Of course, it is possible that he recognized that politics is different from logic and used different approaches. If this is the case, it makes Hobbes and Spinoza’s failure to recognize this difference even more embarrassing.

The Republic of Plato (Translated/Edited by Allan Bloom)

Plato’s Republic is probably the most important book ever written. It has great insights on so many different things; he touches many things other than politics, such as epistemology, metaphysics, education, etc. However, part of the reason that it is potentially the most important book ever written is that enough people in history thought that it is. It would be interesting to imagine another timeline where instead of Plato, some unknown (that is, unknown to us in this timeline) philosopher from another Greek town was raised to the status that Plato holds in our timeline.

So far, I read Republic three times from cover to cover but I also read from it in parts many more times. I really think there is something special about the book in the sense that usually, even one reading is too many for most books. With Republic, every time I read it, it starts a new chain reaction that leads me to new questions. Perhaps the last word of the last sentence is the key. I rarely get answers from him; it is even rarer for me to accept his answers. But reading him does lead to interesting questions.

Math, Science, and Others

Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers by Georg Cantor

Cantor’s diagonal proof (of uncountability of reals) as well as other diagonalization related ideas he had (his proof of countability of rationals, his proof that the superset of a set is always larger than the set, etc.) are among my favorite ideas in mathematics. We can argue that they paved the way to Godel’s proof of incompleteness in a sense. Given these, I was excited to read his work in his own words. Maybe I set myself up for a disappointment in this way but the work itself did not live up to my expectations.

To summarize the work, he defines cardinal and ordinal numbers, relates them to each other, and then defines arithmetic on them as well as relating some infinities to each other.

Cantor is surprisingly sloppy in his writing, even for his time. He is disorganized and he mixes his thoughts about his petty rivalries with the mathematics. He regularly uses concepts that he defines several sections later and he also uses results from the future with regularity as well. It just makes it so hard to keep track of what is happening in the work. It also becomes quite difficult to be sure that he is not making cyclical arguments, since he does not follow a linear fashion.

I found the second essay in the book better in this way and I know that Cantor can write well from his other publications as well as his letters. You can see some examples in From Kant to Hilbert Vol. 2, which collects important texts about the foundations of mathematics. This means that he is being sloppy and careless, which is not a great quality for a mathematician.

The Sense of Style Steven Pinker

In The Sense of Style, Pinker describes the classical style, as defined in Clear and Simple as the Truth by Thomas and Turner. He provides linguistic and cognitive justifications for some of the suggestions he makes; this makes the work more credible, given his scientific credentials. Pinker is also the chair of the “usage panel” of a major dictionary, which gives him insights into some considerations that dictionaries take into account, as well as the data from the usage panel. (As far as I understand, the dictionary editors ask the panel whether they agree with certain uses of words and then take the responses in their decisions about what morphemes to include in the dictionary.)

Overall, I find the book useful. Pinker also exemplifies the style he advocates well. However, it took me three attempts to finish this book. The first attempt was around 2017, when a mentor suggested it to me because of my tendency to give in to the curse of knowledge. I started it, read about 120 pages and stopped. Fast forward to Jan. 2024, since I am working on submitting a few new papers, I thought I should maybe revisit this book. I started from the beginning and got stuck on almost the same page. I think this is because of my stubbornness in not skipping pages even when I know what it is talking about. Anyway, the book was on the coffee table for 11 months but I decided to force my way through the rest of it and I’d say it paid off nicely. I am not actively incorporating any specific advice from the book, neither in this blog nor in my academic writings. But I think it probably improved my sense of style, which was probably the main goal of the book anyway.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter

I was a bit hesitant to read John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue because I like him and I was afraid that reading the book would ruin my image of him. I am glad I read it because it does have an interesting story to tell and I still like him.

To summarize what I remember, John thinks there are a few things in the history of English language that can be explained but they get explained away instead.

Some features of English are uniquely exemplified by English within the Germanic family and they are also extremely rare in the world. The only other languages that have these features seem to be Celtic languages which happen to be spoken on the same island as English. He claims that linguists don’t acknowledge the Celtic influence on English, believing that Celts died before having any significant impact. However, John cites both genetic and archaelogical evidence that show significant continuity in England in the post-conquest era in both culture and the gene pool, suggesting that Celts were slowly assimilated, instead of being killed. According to him, as they started learning English in mass, they brought the feature of their own language, creating many peculiarities of English. There was a chapter on how Old Norse changed English but I think that’s more accepted.

He spends another chapter on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which essentially says that a person’s language influences (or determines) the way they think. This chapter first refutes the hypothesis but then leaves the question of a weaker form that allows for some simple feedback loop between cultures and languages open.

Finally, he shares possibly the most controversial idea in the book about the possible Semitic influence on the Proto-Germanic language. He essentially follows Theo Vennemann in this chapter, who claims that Proto-Germanic is the odd child of the Proto-Indo-European language, and this is in part due to influence or influences of some non-Indo-European languages that changed Proto-Germanic in a significant way. Specifically, part of the claim is that, proto-Germanic was influenced by an old Semitic language, possibly Phoenician. He provides some etymological arguments in support of this claim, provides some archaeological support for Phoenician traders’ potentially settling near where Proto-Germanic speakers supposedly lived. Today, it looks like many linguists reject the possibility of any major non-Indo-European influence on Proto-Germanic, as can be observed from taking a look at the wiki page for Germanic substrate hypothesis. Even though Vennemann is the one carrying this flag, it seems like the idea that Germanic had a Semitic influence goes back to at least early 17th century, when Welsh scholar John Davies speculated on the subject. Honestly, whether the hypothesis is correct or not, it is a fun rabbit hole to go down. I hope to read more about it in the future.

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Like anything else by Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines tells a superb story about intelligence, evolution, and machines. Dyson is an excellent writer but it is hard to describe his style. Here is my best attempt. He finds an interesting cluster of ideas that are connected in subtle ways. Then, he starts taking x-ray style cross sections. Imagine that there is a very high-dimensional object and you are trying to understand what it looks like or what is inside of it. You could essentially scan each surface and do some x-ray scans to understand its structure. This is the form Dyson’s chapters take. In each chapter, you get a story. Each story is connected to others around the edges. But the story is not linear at all; you might see the “scan” of each point from different points of views several times. Yet, it all works out so well.

Essays on the Theory of Numbers by Richard Dedekind

Dedekind was one of the most important mathematicians of his time. He provided a definition of infinity that did not depend on numbers; in fact, he defined the natural numbers using his notion of infinity. The idea is that if you have an infinite set that can be described as some special kind of sequence, then we can call the first element 1, the second element 2, etc. Of course, he constructs things so that this all works out. He then uses the natural numbers to define the rational numbers, and uses the rational numbers to define the real numbers, using his famous cuts.

He is very systematic and he does a great job in terms of his exposition. One thing I did not love about the work is that there are absolutely no examples. However, I also understand the reason. Most of the work is spent on constructing the numbers, and without using numbers, there is not many examples that you can give about his subject. I did notice that there was some kind of weird ideas he had about convergence notions (I’ll probably write something short about it soon) but I think it is more about my anachronistic thinking than his mistake. He also had a pretty interesting idea about chain theory, which might also lead to a post in the future.

Possibly the weakest point in his work in terms of content is his proof that infinite sets exist. After all, if you are a realist about mathematical objects, and if you base your definition of numbers on the notion of an infinite set, you better show that there exist an infinite set. He uses the set of his thoughts as his proof of the existence of infinite sets… I found this incredible and wrote about it in Infinity in Dedekind. Fair warning: I explain his ideas as best I can but then I ask more questions than I answer in that post.

Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson

Another amazing work from Dyson. Turing’s Cathedral tells the story of computation from several directions. How did the idea start? How did it become a reality? How was it used in its early days? He also grew up among the ruins of some of the earliest computers at Princeton and IAS, which adds a personal touch to his story. I’ll copy my description of Dyson’s style from the Darwin Among the Machines section above:

He finds an interesting cluster of ideas that are connected in subtle ways. Then, he starts taking x-ray style cross sections. Imagine that there is a very high-dimensional object and you are trying to understand what it looks like or what is inside of it. You could essentially scan each surface and do some x-ray scans to understand its structure. This is the form Dyson’s chapters take. In each chapter, you get a story. Each story is connected to others around the edges. But the story is not linear at all; you might see the “scan” of each point from different points of views several times. Yet, it all works out so well.

Game Theory Evolving by Herbert Gintis

Gintis was one of the most original economists ever but I do not think that the economics community really understood what he was trying to do in his big picture research agenda. The book I have here is much simpler; Game Theory Evolving is a textbook about game theory, with a special focus on evolutionary game theory. I read this book in January 2023 so my memory is hazy but I think it does a great job of explaining and teaching game theory in simple terms, without being simplistic. I didn’t expect to learn a lot from this book; I studied the subject in greater detail before. However, I did end up learning a lot, both about the subject matter (especially some of the fun applications) and exposition. I can recommend this book to a high schooler or someone with a PhD in game theory, and anyone in between.

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

I read Gleick’s Information years ago and I liked it a lot so I have been looking forward to read his other books when I find Chaos in a bookstore. I picked it up and read it pretty much nonstop. Like Dyson, Gleick also knows how to take a complicated subject and makes it accessible to readers without cutting corners. This might be the best non-mathematical treatment of chaos theory.

I often found bifurcation stuff in some macroeconomic theory models very interesting but these are usually studied in continuous time models. Continuous time models almost always require dealing with differential equations, and I have a mild allergy for those. This is part of my reason for using discrete time models whenever I did anything dynamic (the other part is that it is often much easier to interpret a discrete time model but the analytic solution can become a nightmare quickly). However, after reading Gleick, I decided to give differential equations another chance so that I can tackle chaos theory more seriously. I’ll probably write more about my plans for 2025 pretty soon, and that should involve some mention of my plans for DEs and chaos theory.

Anyway, great book, everyone should read it.

Rational Decisions by Ken Binmore

Binmore is another one of my favorite game theorists; I learned so much from each of his works, and Rational Decisions was not an exception. Binmore starts by discussing rationality, utility, and then adds probabilities to the picture. He describes the relationship between probabilities and utilities, as well as a number of interesting problems related to decisions under uncertainty. He also provides a brief discussion of game theory. Along the way, he provides great commentary on what he finds problematic about the common (unsophisticated or maybe unreasoned?) approaches to dealing with probabilities in game theory and decision theory. The main problem as he sees is that we use small world tools in a large world and we also pretty much never talk about how we ended up with our prior beliefs. He then provides an incomplete attempt at solving some of the problems he described earlier in the book.

Here is a “problem” I had with the book: It flows very well so that you don’t want to stop and reflect and take notes. So I ended up finishing the book in a few days and it looks like I did not make enough notes about it. However, I am not complaining; I’ll probably re-read it in a few years to get more out of it. In fact, I wanted to write about one of his ideas here but we’ll see when I’ll have time to do so.

Binmore is one of the few economic theorists that can and do cite philosophers like Quine and Karnap in his work. Many economists don’t read books, much less books about philosophy, and I think this leads to some kind of inbreeding. Thanks to people like Binmore (and Joe Halpern, Herb Gintis, etc.), the ideas from other fields occasionally get diffused but I think it happens too slowly and this is to the disadvantage of the economic literature and the community overall. For instance, computer scientists seem to be much better at this kind of thing, which might be related to the difference in collaboration cultures in the two disciplines. I think #econtwitter helped bridge some gaps between economics and other fields for a while, since it allowed some debates to take place in public but that has been dead for a while now. I hope something else takes its place. Thank you for coming to my completely out of place Ted talk.

History

Introduction to Medieval Europe 300-1500 by Wim Blockmans and Peter Hoppenbrouwers

This was a pretty textbook-y introduction to medieval Europe. I generally don’t like textbooks that are too pedagogically oriented; ones that spoon-feed the reader and in a sense insult their intellect. Unfortunately, I’d have to put this book in that category. I’d say the exposition is not great overall, both in terms of the format and the prose. However, the original text was in Dutch and it was translated by others so I’m sure the original flows better.

Having said these, the content itself is pretty good. After reading a lot on the Roman period, I wanted to bridge the gap from the Romans to the Early Modern period with this book and I thought it covered the basics pretty well. I also liked the suggested readings at the end of the chapters but when I checked the suggestions in areas where I am more familiar with the literature, I noticed some obvious missing references. In the preface, the authors mention that they prioritize more recent books over the classics, which kinda makes sense but I think there are some books that you still include along with the more up-to-date references.

Charles Darwin: A Biography, Vol. 2 - The Power of Place by Janet Browne

Just like the first volume (see below), the writing was very engaging while managing to be quite informative. It does a great job of placing Darwin’s work in the right context. The context includes both the idiosyncrasies of Darwin’s own life and the broader circumstances that surrounded him.

The description of Darwin’s personal correspondences and relationships also enriched the narrative. The support Darwin received from first Henslow, then Lyell, Hooker, and eventually Huxley must have played a crucial part in advancing his work. Of course, having smart friends around him must have been a fertilizer of sorts for his mind and ideas, beyond just advancing the work. Also, my general impression was that his relationship with Alfred Russel Wallace was pretty ugly. However, after reading this book, my understanding is that while Darwin certainly rushed to finish his work so that he does not lose the credit for discovering natural selection completely, their relationship was quite courteous and supportive. Later on, when Wallace was in a bad financial situation, Darwin used his influence to secure some income for him.

My only complaint about the book is that it was too short…

Charles Darwin: A Biography, Vol. 1 - Voyaging by Janet Browne

This volume tells Darwin’s story from Childhood to his Beagle journey and reaching back home. I am generally not an envious person–at least I don’t think so– but I would be lying if I don’t admit that his 5 years long trip around the world did not cause some envy in me. It is true that travel is much easier today in certain ways but almost 200 years later, the world is not the same. I can’t experience what they must have felt when visiting an uninhabited island or hiked through forests that are now home for giant cities. Perhaps more importantly, our knowledge is not the same so I also can’t theorize as freely as Darwin did. In any case, reading about his journey gave me a strong wanderlust.

Before the journey, the book also covers Darwin’s family connections in some detail. I am sure it is enough to provide a base for the second volume but I’d love a bit more about the influence of Erasmus Darwin, not just on Charles but more broadly. It felt like that part could have been more detailed but I understand that the book is already quite large.

After spending five years at sea and in the jungle, he returns home and the first thing his father says is “Why, the shape of his head is quite altered.”

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Vol 2) by Edward Gibbon

See below; I did not want to review each volume separately.

The World of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown

This is a tiny little book about the late antiquity with beautiful illustrations. Brown’s main point is that there was more continuity than disruption after the fall of Roman Empire. He has several arguments: Byzantine institutions adopt many of the systems from Romans. Some Roman institutions also live in the church, especially in the West. While there were major changes at a political level, these mostly mattered for the elites and the lives of most peasants did not change drastically. Finally, beyond the continuity, he argues that the new period brought many cultural innovations that has survived to the modern period.

One of the most interesting asides was his mention of a pagan society’s survival in Harran until Muslims killed and/or forced them to convert to Islam in 11th century. Harran’s being one of the latest refuges (if not the last refuge) of pagans is curious because the world’s oldest surviving megalith structure is at Gobekli Tepe. Gobekli Tepe includes archeological findings from around 9500 BCE and provides new insights into religious lives of people before the agricultural revolution. Brown’s book was published more than 20 years before the realization of Gobekli Tepe’s importance so he could not comment on it. However, I find it interesting that our earliest and latest evidences of pagan lifestyle are from areas that are less than 53 kilometers (~33 miles) apart.

I agree that it is important to acknowledge the historical continuities and the cultural importance of the period. Yet, I still find the Late Antiquity more boring than what came before and after it historically, politically, scientifically, culturally, and philosophically.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Vol 1) by Edward Gibbon

I suppose this is the most famous modern history text; according to some, it is also the best piece of prose ever written in the English language. I can certainly see where they are coming from. It is so smooth and elegant that you kinda forget you are reading a history book, which is probably a good thing because we should really treat it more like literature or historiography, given how outdated it is. My favorite thing about it was his use of footnotes. I mean, just the fact that he uses footnotes is amazing. However, his snarky comments in the footnotes make it read more like a fun lecture by a modern historian. Just read these:

After a war of about forty years, undertaken by the most stupid, maintained by the most dissolute, and terminated by the most timid of all the emperors, the far greater part of the island submitted to the Roman yoke.

[…] the authority of that ignorant Greek is very slight.

A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition, prompted him [Augustus] at the age of nineteen to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside […] He wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government.

He has numerous opinions on everything and he shares them freely. He is not always snarky though; he can be generous as well:

In their primitive state of simplicity and independence, the Germans were surveyed by the discerning eye and delineated by the masterly pencil, of Tacitus, the first of historians who applied the science of philosophy to the study of the facts.

There are many, many gems in the work. I personally enjoyed the first volume a lot more than the second, mostly because I like reading about the earlier period more. The second volume starts dealing with the religion and Constantine etc. and things take a wild turn. My favorite part in the second volume was his open admiration of Julian, the last pagan emperor, even though, he finds many occasions to criticize him as well. In fact, there is no one he does not manage to criticize. (Julian may have appeared in Vol. 3; I read most of Vol. 3 but did not finish it so I didn’t include it in the list of books for 2024).

Many historians don’t even read Gibbon anymore. It makes some sense; most economists don’t read The Wealth of Nations, which, by the way, was published in the same year as the first volume of Gibbon’s work, the Declaration of Independence, and Paine’s Common Sense.³ Economists don’t read books generally; it is not just Smith. (They also don’t write books but write “papers” that can fill 150 letter-sized pages but I shouldn’t distract myself.) With historians, I am surprised. Gibbon’s work is certainly outdated but given the beautiful prose, historical importance, and the fact that historians are generally literate people, I’d expect more of them to give it a chance.

The Romans: From Village to Empire by Mary T. Boatwright, Daniel J. Gargola, Richard J. A. Talbert

A textbook that covers a long period of the Roman history. It certainly has that textbook-y quality to it that makes me dislike it but if you can look beyond that, it was actually a pretty good refresher for me.

The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides

Thucydides starts his book by dissing Herodotus about his methodology. He tries to draw a contrast between himself and Herodotus, whom he considers as more of a storyteller rather than a historian. Instead, Thucydides, supposedly, writes something like the “objective” versions of the events. Of course, this is BS; Thucydides just lacks the self-awareness to notice the inferiority of his style. There are many reasons to doubt his story but it is especially difficult to trust the long speeches that are supposedly quoted verbatim (such as Pericles’s Funeral Oration), considering he was not even in the audience for many of them.

The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories by Herodotus

I guess we all know what The Histories of Herodotus is all about so I won’t really dive deeper into it. Needless to say, it is one of the most interesting classical books that I’ve read. One of the good habits that he has is trying to provide some sort of reference for his histories. Often, he notes his doubts about the credibility of some of his sources but he still records their testimonies. Of course, there is nothing comparable to modern standards of citation but an attempt was made and I appreciated it.

In terms of the actual content, I’ll just make a note about one of the stories he tells: Babylonian bridal auction. Here is his description of the process:

All the girls of marriageable age were assembled together in one place, and a crowd of men would form a circle around them while an auctioneer had the women stand up one by one and sold them, beginning with the most beautiful. When this young woman was sold for a large amount of gold, he would then put up for sale the second most beautiful. The women were sold for the purpose of marriage. All the wealthier Babylonian men of marriageable age would try to outbid each other for the prettiest girls. The more humble among them did not seek beauty in the women they bid for, because the homelier ones came with a monetary reward as an incentive for someone to marry them. And when the auctioneer finished selling the most beautiful of the young women, he had the most unattractive stand up, or a crippled girl, if there was any among them, and these would be offered for sale with the announcement that they would go to whoever would accept the smallest amount of gold and marry them, and the auction would continue in this way until the last woman was finally matched up with the man who agreed to accept the least for her. The gold for these arrangements came from the sale of the beautiful girls, and thus the attractive provided the dowries to help marry off the unattractive and crippled…⁴

I wish to write more about it in the future so I won’t start dissecting it here but if you move away from its repugnance, the process described here is extremely interesting in terms of mechanism design.

Fiction

A Maggot by John Fowles

It was such a weird read but in a good way. It has all the components that I like in a novel. It is a work of historical fiction (no matter what Fowles says) but it also has elements of thriller, mystery and science fiction.

I don’t want to go into the details of the events narrated but while reading it, I remembered scenes from other novels that I like such as An Instance of the Fingerpost and some works by Pamuk that I couldn’t exactly pin down. Also, I said ’narrated’ but most of the book actually consists of letters and reports of certain investigations; the narrative style also adds to the flavor. However, I am not sure if I enjoyed reading the essay by Fowles at the end. And I did not appreciate the first paragraph of its Wikipedia page including a speculative spoiler but that’s not the book’s fault.

If you like historical fiction and you like mystery, you’d most likely enjoy reading this book.

The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells

As the title suggests, this book is about a man who is invisible. Like most books by Wells, I thought the idea was original, especially for its time, but the development of the story and the overall execution left something to be desired.

It is fun to think about all the things one could do if one were invisible. And the book does a good job of showing that just being invisible is not that great without some further abilities. If you wear clothes, you are extremely visible since you are essentially a man without a head; everyone will be looking at you. Even if you walk around naked though, you can’t walk while it is snowing or raining, and you can’t walk on snow or mud, etc. One can imagine a more careful analysis of how one could devise a plan to make the best of this ability but that’s not what we get in this book.

Despite the flaws, I’d still recommend it as a light reading.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

The Plot Against America is about a plot against America which involves FDR losing one of the four elections that he won and US taking a completely different attitude in WW2. I unintentionally read this right before the election and I guess I could not have picked a better time as the reactions to Trump’s candidacy and Israel’s self-defense were pretty close to the reactions to some events in the book.

It was interesting to read about the experiences of Jewish families around 1930-40’s, like Roth’s own family. Of course, as the major events in the book are related to their Jewishness, I am not sure how much of that reflects the real sentiments at the time.

This is the first book by Roth that I read and I can certainly see the appeal. I am not sure it’s for me. There is nothing wrong with the book; it is just not that historical, not that mysterious, and not that speculative.

I’ll just say worth a try.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary was a surprise winner. My girlfriend has been obsessed about this book for several years now. She read it and listened to it several times. I generally like science fiction but I generally hate it whenever I read science fiction. I guess I like the idea of science fiction but very few executions satisfy my thirst so I stopped reading them, with some notable exceptions (e.g. Neal Stephenson). Partly because of these and partly to avoid talking about the book while I am still in the middle, I did not want to reveal it to her that I was reading this book. So, I never read it with the dust jacket (which I usually don’t do anyway) and I tried to hide its spine when I was reading it. However, I got sloppy on the last day and left it on the coffee table facing the wrong direction. Bad move.

Anyway, it was pretty good. There were obviously several parts where I could not ignore the impossibility of the described science and engineering. I remember writing some notes about how unreasonable certain parts were. (Don’t worry, I won’t bother with typing them up here.) However, now that enough time passed and my memory became vague, I find the remaining memories quite pleasant. I do remember not liking the main character (Grace?) at all and wishing he would just die already but I did like Smoky a lot, I can imagine hanging out with him in space for years.

This made me realize there are still some novels being written that might be worth reading. I am not sure if I’d take a chance on another such book for a few years but once in a while, it might just work out fine.

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

The Difference Engine is another book that combines the elements of my favorite genres: Science-fiction, historical-fiction, and speculative-fiction (I guess the last two makes it alternate history but no matter). What separates this book from many other books with the similar claims is that it also involves some characters that I absolutely love from real life: Lovelace and Babbage, and more abstractly, the theory of computation.

I haven’t really written about it here yet but I am pretty much obsessed with the history of computation; all the way back from Ramon Llull to Pascal and Leibniz, to Boole, Babbage, Lovelace, down to Turing, Godel and von Neumann. So there was so much for me to love in this book.

On the other hand, as Wikipedia puts it, “It is widely regarded as a book that helped establish the genre conventions of steampunk.” I do not like steampunk and cyberpunk stuff. For instance, I love anything and everything that I read from Neil Stephenson but my least favorites so far have been The Diamond Age and Snow Crash. I loved the big-picture story in both of those, just like I liked it in The Difference Engine. However, I just can’t get myself to like steampunk or cyberpunk.

In the end, it was still worth reading it but I wish it was more in the spirit of the Baroque Cycle, for example.

H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick O’Brian

H.M.S. Surprise is the third book by O’Brian that I read, which is probably true of most people since this is the third book of his famous Aubrey-Maturin series.

I don’t really have much to say about this book specifically; it was just a fun ride. You’ll see that I, in fact, read the first two books this year as well. I’ll write there more about how I felt more generally about the series. I thought this was a nice example of the genre but it is a bit harder to define the genre. 19th century naval battle fiction with the side of spy thriller and rom-com?

If you liked the first two books in the series, you’ll probably like this one too.

Post Captain by Patrick O’Brian

I read somewhere that O’Brian’s favorite author was Jane Austen and that this book is his attempt to show his respect for her. It certainly was different from the first book. Most of the action happens on land, far from the sea. Most of the events don’t involve guns or fights of any sort. They do involve heartbreaks and adult men being teenagers, though. I also read that the book does a lot for character development, and I can see that they did develop their characters.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Probably the second worst work of fiction that I read this year. It would be the worst book I read in this decade by far if it wasn’t for the spectacularly awful Night Train, which I managed to read this year. “Superficial while trying to be deep and pretentious” is the best I can say about Siddhartha.

I do admit that it is a good representation of the ideas from Continental Philosophy. That’s not a good thing at all, however– at least not for me. I am kinda surprised it was such a horrible read for me since it was recommended several times by several people that I like. I guess our frequencies changed over time but I could not believe they could change so much.

I could allow myself to go on and on about how stupid I find it to be but there is no point in going through with it. It just makes me think about literary traditions and languages, and people who manage to break free from the cycle. German philosophy between Leibniz and Frege may have some worth, in the sense that showing how stupid some of Kant’s arguments can be useful in improving other theories, but that’s about it. However, I do wonder what made Leibniz and Frege different, and how they managed to stand out. It is not just philosophy either; there are certainly great German writers (Zweig, Mann) but there is also something heavily Hesse-like in other German writers as well.

It’s just curious to think about how Hesse would write if he grew up speaking French or English or any other language, and interacting primarily with that language’s literary and philosophical traditions. I’m sure some of them would make him a greater writer in my view. And I don’t mean this in the sense of Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that language determines our minds, etc. That might have some weak impact but I am more interested in the traditions that languages allows you to absorb, especially early in one’s life.

Anyway, I do not recommend this to anyone.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

This was another pleasant surprise. It is about a bored, bed-bound detective investigating a crime that was committed centuries before his time. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I love murder mystery. Although it is hard to call this a work of historical fiction, there are elements of historical fiction as well, by the nature of the work. It just worked out for me.

As the detective has to critically read through the primary sources and the histories of the past events, it also turns into a light reading in historiography. I generally like the meta level of anything more than the thing itself, and as historiography is to some extent a history of the history, I find it enjoyable and I would recommend this book to others with similar preferences.

The Magus by John Fowles

A friend⁵ recommended this book to me many years ago and it has been on my to-be-read list for so long but I somehow didn’t get around to it until this year.

It was a pretty interesting read and it allowed me to think about some other works in a different way. The book tells the story of a man who takes a job as an English teacher on a remote Greek island, who somehow gets involved with some inhabitants but as usual, things are not how they seem.

I am just going to list some books that I thought about when reading this one: De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, La Cena de le Ceneri and De L’infinito Universo et Mondi by Giardano Bruno. Among more modern ones, Dickens’s Great Expectations, Pamuk’s The Black Book and The White Castle, Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49. There are some more books I am thinking about but if I mention them, I might spoil something about the theme of this book for the cognoscenti. However, I think it is safe to note that the author was probably influenced by Zweig to some extent by I don’t have any proof of it, other than some intuition.

Anyway, it’s a great novel; read it. However, don’t go overboard looking for some deep insights about life, as some people seem to do.

Master & Commander by Patrick O’Brian

This is the first book of O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, which tells the story of a captain of the navy (Aubrey) and a medical doctor of some sorts (Maturin) who start travelling the world together on Aubrey’s ship(s) in early 19th century.

I always enjoyed reading naval books; maybe it is an artifact of growing up near the sea and living far from it for decades. I think the friendship between Aubrey and Maturin was complicated enough to be interesting. There were other pieces of the storyline that adds to the thriller aspect of it. I do not know the naval terms and frankly, I don’t think it matters too much. I am planning to read a few books about ships though.

Another thing I liked about the book is that the timeline, the relationship and the travels resemble those of Darwin and the captain of Beagle, FitzRoy.

I am glad I gave this book (and the series) a shot.

Carry On, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse

I heard so much about Wodehouse that I had to give it a try. The problem is he has maybe over a hundred books with different collections, editions, etc. I am not one of those people who can just pick up something and start reading so I digged in a little and it looked like Carry On, Jeeves might be a good starting point to one particular story line in his works. However, it is not a novel; it is a collection of short stories, which I usually don’t enjoy. I’m saying all of these to say that I did not love the book but I don’t know if it was because of the medium or the material itself. I’ll probably read a few more of his books in the future.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

I read this right after a visit to New Orleans. In fact, I bought my copy in New Orleans because it was written there and started reading it on the flight back. So it was nice to read about something and remember that I walked on the same street a few hours ago. It is hard to say much about the rest of the book as I lack the context in which it was written. I am not even sure if I find the ending dark or happy. In the end, you could say that she controls her life… but at what cost?

Anyway, it was an interesting read. And it is another reminder of the great bookshops in New Orleans! I remember visiting four of them in an afternoon, just walking around in the French Quarter.

Night Train by Martin Amis

This is supposedly a parody of the “American crime fiction” but whatever the intention might be, it is by far the worst piece of literature I have been subjected to in the recent years. The only reason I gave a shot to this book was that I really like Kingsley Amis’s works so I thought I would give a shot to his son as well. That did not work out this time. Maybe he has other books that I’d enjoy if I gave him another shot but I honestly don’t see myself doing that anytime soon; there are already enough authors that I consistently enjoy and I don’t feel like I need to take any unnecessary risks, given how limited one’s time is. I am okay with missing out on some that I would have liked if it saves me the trouble of reading through dozens that I do not like.

Do not read if you like yourself.