2024 round-up

Every year I do a round-up of my favourite books and provide a brief update on how the website’s been doing. Here’s 2024’s.

You can also check out the round-ups for: 2023 and 2022.

Estimated time: 5 mins

Best books of 2024

Of the books I summarised this year, my favourite 3 were:

• Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. This is one of my favourite books to date. It introduced me to a new way of looking at all the cause-and-effect relationships we see in our lives. The book is full of gems that continue to shape my thinking. It won’t give you all the answers about how the world works, but it will help you ask better questions. Systems thinking has given me converted some of my “unknown unknowns” into “known unknowns”.
• Platonic by Marisa Franco. Since moving to a new country last year, making friends has been a major focus of mine. And making friends as an adult is hard. Franco goes beyond the typical “attend more meetups” advice and explains what it takes to form deep, lasting friendships. This book opened my eyes to how I’d been sabotaging opportunities for deeper connection and has undoubtedly changed my life for the better. I only wish I’d read it earlier.
• The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich. This was a distant third, though it’s still an excellent, informative and thought-provoking book. As someone who grew up in a WEIRD (Western, Education, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) country, I enjoyed learning about how psychologically peculiar we are. I also found Henrich’s theory about how people became WEIRD in the first place compelling and well-argued. But the book is rather dense and didn’t change me as much as my two picks above, so I’m more hesitant to recommend it for a general audience.

Honorable mentions go to The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef and Getting Things Done by David Allen.

I think I’ve gotten better at picking books because 2024 had very few duds. Competition for the third spot was also pretty tough.

The website

During 2024, I posted:

• 19 book summaries (down 2); and
• 14 blog posts (down 8).

Despite the fall in summaries, I think I’ve spent more time on this website than in 2023. So the quality is either increasing or I’m just getting less efficient. Probably both.

The bigger drop in blog posts doesn’t surprise me. The more I read, the less I feel like I have anything to say that can be said in a short-ish post (other than posts about books I’ve summarised). There are still some things I want to say—I have many draft notes/posts—but they take longer to work through. I also get the sense that “Everything that needs to be said has already been said”, which can feel demotivating.

In writing this post, however, I found the full quote by André Gide. It actually reads:

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again”.

So I should probably just knuckle down and work through my unoriginal ideas anyway. A website that mostly publishes book summaries really shouldn’t be too concerned with originality.

Visitors and subscribers

This Google Analytics graph shows my weekly visitor figures:

The trend was generally positive from last year up until March this year. At that point, Google released a core update to its search algorithm and my search traffic plummeted by around 90%. (It’s not a 90% drop in the graph because I have other sources of traffic.) I don’t really understand SEO so I don’t really understand what happened, but this was rather discouraging.

Despite this drop in traffic, my email sign-ups continued to growing and I kept receiving kind comments, messages and even donations from readers. These motivated me to keep producing the detailed summaries I do, instead of jotting down a few lines and calling it a day. It’s actually kind of embarrassing how excited I get when someone tells me they appreciate my summaries because I like to think I’m not that affected by extrinsic markers of approval. But clearly that’s untrue.

So a big thank you to all of you reading this, particularly those who have subscribed or supported this site in some way. Though I know it sounds cheesy and cliché, your support truly means a lot to me.

Looking ahead to 2025

Some of you may have noticed a shift over the past year away from self-improvement towards books about policy, history and understanding the world. I expect that trend to continue in 2025. I feel like I’ve hit the point of diminishing returns with books about productivity and time management, while I still have much to learn in the social sciences.

That doesn’t mean I’ll be saying goodbye to self-improvement just yet. Self-improvement is a broad genre that includes better understanding the world around us and how to live in that world. My summaries will still include books that fall under the broader scope of “self-improvement”—books on how to learn, reason, write, and get along with each other—and I plan to write some posts trying to bring together valuable things I’ve learned from different domains.

Anyway, thanks for joining me on this journey so far and I hope to see you as we head into 2025!