The Best Books I Read in 2024

Eight books, and they have almost nothing in common on the shelf. Health. Leadership. Hospice nursing. Meditation. Artificial intelligence. Workplace psychology. Persuasion. The state of the world.

That happened by accident. I kept following whatever question the last book left open, and this is where twelve months of that lands you.

So here’s what I noticed only in December, which is when I notice everything. Every one of the eight is asking about time. Attia asks how much of it you get. Sinek asks who you spend it with. Vlahos asks what the end of it looks like. Dispenza asks what your mind does to it. Kurzweil asks how much the world has left before it changes shape. Lencioni asks which hours to spend at work. Cialdini asks about the two seconds before the ask. And Harari asks what to learn when nothing stays still long enough to be worth learning.

Eight books, one question, asked eight different ways.

Outlive by Peter Attia and Bill Gifford

Attia’s frame is that medicine waits. It sits still until one of four things shows up, and he calls them the Four Horsemen. Heart disease. Cancer. Neurodegenerative disease. Metabolic dysfunction.

So all four build quietly for decades before anybody diagnoses them, which means the leverage sits in the decades rather than the diagnosis. He calls that Medicine 3.0.

So what does he actually prescribe? The unglamorous basics. Strength training. Zone 2 cardio. Sleep. Done consistently for years instead of intensely for six weeks.

And the number that reorganised my thinking is VO2 max. Attia points at cardiorespiratory fitness as one of the strongest predictors of how long you live. And the gap between the bottom group and the top one is wider than the gap smoking makes. That is a startling sentence and it is sitting in the research he cites.

And his Centenarian Decathlon is the practical version. Write down the ten physical things you want to be able to do at eighty. Lifting a grandchild. Getting off the floor unaided. Carrying your own bag up a flight of stairs. Then train backwards from those.

That’s the first question. How much time is there, and what shape are you in when you get to the end of it.

Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek

And the title is literal. In the Marine Corps the most junior eat first and the most senior eat last, and nobody writes it down anywhere.

And Sinek builds the whole book outward from that. A leader’s job is a Circle of Safety, so that people feel safe from each other and not merely from the competition.

So what happens when the circle breaks? The energy that was going into the work turns inward. Every hour spent watching your back is an hour the mission does not get. And I have worked in both kinds of team. The difference shows up in a stand-up inside a week.

And he also gets biological about it, with four chemicals doing the work. Endorphins and dopamine for getting things done. Serotonin and oxytocin for the people you do them with. And the first pair can be produced alone, which is exactly why a company can run hot on individual achievement for years while the trust quietly drains.

Now, the science gets stretched thinner than a working scientist would like. Take the framing and hold the chemistry loosely.

That’s the second question. Who is inside the circle when the time gets spent.

The In-Between by Hadley Vlahos, R.N.

Vlahos is a hospice nurse, and this is a book of the patients she sat with at the end. It is written plainly, by somebody who was actually in the room, which is a qualification almost nobody writing about death has.

So what surprised me most? How often peace showed up where I expected fear.

And she also describes something I keep thinking about. Many of her patients, living very different lives, reported the same kinds of moments in their final hours. Vlahos reports it and declines to explain it, which is the correct move and a much rarer one than it should be in a genre that can rarely resist telling you what it all meant.

So why is this on a list next to a book about VO2 max? Because Attia’s book is about extending the number and this one is about what the number is for. Reading them in the same year was accidental. Reading them close together was the most useful accident of my year.

That’s the third question. What the last of the time actually looks like from inside it.

Becoming Supernatural by Joe Dispenza

Dispenza’s core claim is that a thought is a physical event, and that rehearsing a mental state repeatedly changes the body’s chemistry before anything happens in the world outside.

And I read this one with the skepticism it asks for. Some of the science gets stretched a long way past what the underlying studies will actually carry, and I would rather put that plainly here than pretend I failed to notice it while I was reading.

But the practice underneath survives the theory. Sitting still. Rehearsing a state deliberately, rather than taking whatever state the day hands you and calling it your personality.

So why keep it on the list at all? Because it got me sitting down every morning, and a book that changes what you do at six a.m. has earned something, whatever you make of chapter nine.

That’s the fourth question. What your mind is doing to the time while the time passes.

The Singularity Is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil

And nearly twenty years after the first book, Kurzweil updates the timeline and holds his ground. Human-level AI by 2029. The singularity by 2045.

And the useful part is the shape of his argument rather than the dates. Exponential curves feel flat for a long time and then stop feeling flat all at once, and human intuition is stubbornly linear. We forecast from where we are, in a straight line, which is the one method guaranteed to be wrong about a curve.

Now, I work in this field. So I read the specific predictions the way you read a weather forecast for a date eleven months out, for the direction rather than the number.

So does he get things right? He has been making these calls for decades and his hit rate is higher than his critics enjoy admitting. It is also nowhere near as high as the book implies.

That’s the fifth question. How much of the world’s time is left before the ground moves.

The 6 Types of Working Genius by Patrick Lencioni

So Lencioni splits work into three stages and puts two geniuses in each. Ideation gets Wonder and Invention. Activation gets Discernment and Galvanizing. Implementation gets Enablement and Tenacity.

And the model’s claim is that you have two of the six that genuinely energise you. Two more you can do competently. And two that drain you no matter how good at them you happen to be.

So why does that matter more than a personality test? Because it explains a specific thing rather than a general one. Most workplace misery comes from somebody parked for years in the two that drain them, being told the whole time that they are underperforming.

But told as a fable, the way his books usually are, and it took me an evening. It also gave me a name for something I had noticed for a decade and never once said out loud, which is that some tasks cost me nothing and others cost me the rest of the day.

That’s the sixth question. Which hours of the working time to spend, and on what.

Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini

Cialdini’s follow-up to Influence makes an argument that sounds small and is not. The moment that decides whether persuasion works often happens before the message is delivered.

And he calls it the privileged moment. Whatever the listener’s attention is resting on, immediately beforehand, tilts how everything after it lands.

And the examples are what sold me, because they are so ordinary. One question asked right before a pitch. A single word in the sentence preceding the ask. The image on the wall behind you.

So how does that change anything practically? It moves the work earlier. I had spent years polishing the pitch itself and treating the twenty seconds before it as logistics. And Cialdini’s whole case is that the twenty seconds were doing more work than the pitch was.

That’s the seventh question. What happens in the seconds before the time that matters.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

And I closed the year on Harari, and this is his most present-tense book. Less deep history, less distant future, and more of a reckoning with fake news, automation, and institutions moving slower than the thing they are meant to govern.

And the lesson that stayed longest is about what to teach a child now. Harari’s answer is that a fixed body of knowledge is a poor bet. The specific facts and skills may well have expired by the time the child needs them.

So what does he suggest instead? Mental flexibility, and the emotional capacity to keep reinventing yourself into your forties and fifties. That is a much harder ask than it sounds, and no school system I know of is built for it.

So reading that in a year I spent building on AI platforms was uncomfortable in a useful way. And by the way, it is the book on this list I would most want to reread in five years, purely to see how much of it survives.

That’s the eighth question. What to do with the time when the ground keeps moving.

And here’s where the frame gives out. Eight books do not really form a chain. I assembled the time pattern in December, from a year of reading that was much closer to wandering, and any eight books read by one person in one year will share a preoccupation because the person did.

So was the wandering a problem? I have decided it was the point.

That’s my 2024 list, the broadest and least predictable one yet.

A narrow year will make you an expert. A wide one will show you which question you were asking all along.