People love writing about the best books of the year. But if you only read a dozen books a year, how credible can that list possibly be? How much is it just a reflection of “I picked up 12 books that I saw people talking about on social media, read them, and now I, too, like them!” It’s a signaling exercise unless you have some reason to believe that there’s some independent thought that went into selecting which books to read and to evaluating what makes a “good” book.
As a result, I’ll front-load why I am a credible recommender and my list of top books is worth reading: In 2024 I read 53 books, my lowest annual total of the past decade. I read across genres — history, politics, biographies, sci-fi, fiction, self-development, philosophy, religion, business, memoirs, science and tech, sociology, classics, and more. You can check out my Goodreads to see more. (Side note: a lot of people don’t use the Goodreads rating scale properly; 2 stars is “okay”, 3 stars is “good”, 4 is “great”, 5 is “exceptional”. There’s more granularity on the upside than the downside, as there should be.)
I also don’t think most people should have a strict number count on their “best books of the year”. Some years you only read 5 books that merit mentioning and sharing, while in others you could hit 10 or more. The point should be to highlight what you read in a year that was truly exceptional—books that challenged you, changed the way your saw the world, or left a mark on your experience that you’ll remember for years to come.
With all that out of the way, here are the best books I read in 2024.
The 7 Rules of Power (Jeffrey Pfeffer) — If there’s one book you read from this list, or one book you read in 2025, make it this one. Reading it will fundamentally change your understanding of power, politics, business, and the way the world seems to be changing in front of our eyes. I started this as an audiobook but it was so good I had to buy the written version so I could highlight it like a madman. Pfeffer is amoral about his conclusions: as he states, his job is to describe power as it actually works, not as we wished it worked. It’s both upsetting and illuminating, and it’s an essential read.
The Nvidia Way (Tae Kim) — nVidia is the foundational company of the AI era, yet there’s been shockingly little written about it despite it having been around for over 30 years. It was anything but inevitable that nVidia would survive, let alone succeed — the 3d graphics wars of the 1990s were brutal — and it has consistently been able to not only see what’s coming next, but to rapidly shift its focus to capitalize on it. The book does a great job of documenting the company’s failures and successes, and, through in-depth interviews with company insiders, details the unique company culture and management practices that make it all possible. I suspect we’ll see many more books written about the company and its CEO and cofounder, Jensen Huang, in the coming years, but this is a great place to start.
Ultra-Processed People (Chris van Tulleken) — I spent the last 5 years of my career building consumer health companies spanning primary care, preventive care, functional medicine, and nutrition. While this book is a bit hyperbolic at times — I don’t think food companies are evil as much as they’re responding to the incentives at play — it provides the best summation of the current state of nutrition in the developed western world. You could write a whole additional book about the domestic government policies that have led to this state of affairs — everything from the food pyramid (and related lobbying) to corn, beef, and soy subsidies, food tariffs, energy policy, and zoning (seriously) — but this is a great place to start if all you want to know is “what should I stop eating because it’s killing me, and what should I eat instead?” (You could also read my summary of the research on the matter. But this book is still worth reading in full.)
Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing (Randall Stross) — This book is less important for what it says directly than what you learn through the experience of reading it. It’s written in the middle of Jobs’ career, after his first stint at Apple, documenting the first few years of building NeXT. Obviously, we know how the story ends: NeXT struggles and is bought by Apple; Jobs returns to the struggling company as CEO; and he goes on the greatest 15-year run in consumer tech history, launching the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. But that’s only known from where we sit in 2024: when this book was written, it was entirely possible Jobs was just a really good hype man. The critical lesson for the reader is that the arc of every story is defined by its frame — when the author chooses to begin and end it. Most contemporary narratives view Jobs’ time at NeXT as a necessary period of challenge and growth that, while it wasn’t directly successful, taught Jobs valuable lessons that led to his later success. So, knowing this, how would you change the story you tell yourself about your own life? And how does this change your internal narrative towards any setbacks, challenges, or “failures”?
To Be A Man: A Guide to True Masculine Power (Robert Masters) — I’ve been meditating on the question of what “enlightened” masculinity looks like for years now and this is one of the few books that starts to describe it. (Another one is David Deida’s “Way of the Superior Man”, though I think “To Be A Man” is far better.) It’s about power and vulnerability, anger and tenderness, strength and accountability — and it puts the onus on men to own their actions. I’m a big fan of taking ownership for one’s actions and decisions, so the acceptance that, yes, masculinity brings with it certain kinds of power, and with that power comes responsibility to take actions that you can be proud of and that lift up those around you, is refreshing and inspiring. (Especially in contrast to the first book in this list. By no means is that meant to detract from either book; there’s just a difference between how to behave if you want to exploit human social dynamics to amass power and how to behave if you aspire to spiritual growth.)
The Big Leap (Gay Hendricks) — There’s a great idea at the core of this book: to what extent do we hold ourselves back from success? Unfortunately it’s conveyed through hackneyed storytelling and bland prose. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s an important message to internalize and it’s well worth the time to do some self-interrogation on the topic. After reading and reflecting I came up with some deeply meaningful insights on my own behavior. So while it’s not a great work of literature, if I judge it by its impact on my life it’s absolutely a must-read.
Unfortunately I didn’t read any fiction this year that made a lasting impression — probably because I barely read much fiction this year at all. I’ll rectify that in 2025. (If asked to come up with something off-the-cuff for that, the first thing that comes to mind is “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong which I read a couple of years ago and I keep coming back to. Or: “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu. The titular short story is heartbreaking.)
If you have any you’d strongly recommend — fiction or otherwise — let me know!